“Whose Self-Control Is Equal to All Emergencies”
Relaxing after a couple of tough exams on a cold and rainy February night in 2011, George Desdunes and his fraternity buddy drank straight Jameson Irish Whiskey out of plastic cups. Before they knew it, Desdunes and Kyle Morton had polished off the better part of a bottle in half an hour. For most, downing nine ounces of the eighty-proof liquor that fast would be quite a feat. By Morton’s accounting, it amounted to the equivalent of six or seven mixed drinks apiece, enough to bring their blood-alcohol level to twice the legal limit for driving. Desdunes and Morton were just warming up. In Morton’s bedroom, the brothers from Cornell University were “pre-gaming,” a routine practice on an ordinary Thursday night at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house. At 10:30 p.m., Morton, a junior from Scarsdale, New York, headed downstairs for the night’s main event, a beer-pong tournament, a test of alcohol tolerance and hand-eye coordination that would last until the early hours of the next morning. Desdunes skipped beer pong that evening because he had better plans. The nineteen-year-old sophomore, who had a fake ID, was getting ready to hit a bar or two in Collegetown, the nighttime haven for Cornell students in Ithaca, New York. He hoped to meet up with his girlfriend, an outdoorsy young woman who had just graduated in January 2011 and was preparing for a career on Wall Street.
“What are you up to tonight?” Desdunes texted her at 11:00 p.m.
“Dunbar’s,” she replied, naming a dive bar featuring a $6 “Group Therapy” drink special—a pitcher of beer and a carafe of shots of vodka, triple sec, and lime.
Desdunes said he’d probably hit Dino’s, another local hangout. Or maybe Level B, a basement dance club and bar known for its $18 “fishbowl,” a half bottle of vodka, or sixteen shots. They’d meet up later. Now, before he headed out, all Desdunes needed was a few more drinks—a second round of pre-gaming. About 11:30 p.m., Desdunes hauled a jug of Captain Morgan into another bedroom, where he and three other SAE brothers mixed rum-and-Pepsis strong enough to knock out a sailor on shore leave. Each plastic cup had two or three shots of liquor. Within half an hour, the brothers knocked back three apiece. They averaged seven drinks per guy, one of them figured.
Desdunes and his Cornell fraternity brothers worked hard and played hard, as college students liked to say—and, by play, they meant drink. On the first floor, the bar and the library sat side by side in their ivy-covered mansion of a frat house. Built in 1915, the SAE chapter house at Cornell had been dubbed “Hillcrest,” evoking the grandeur of an English country home with its Tudor-style architecture and view of nearby Cayuga Lake. It was a sprawling residence, able to house ninety men. Among its illustrious members had been Eamon McEneaney, Cornell class of 1977, considered the greatest lacrosse player of his generation, later becoming a senior vice president at Wall Street’s Cantor Fitzgerald. He died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, while saving the lives of sixty-three people. More recently, two members had been elected to the Ithaca City Council while undergraduates, and still others belonged to the prestigious Quill and Dagger secret honor society. Nominating the chapter for an award the year before, Travis Apgar, the associate dean overseeing Greek life at Cornell, had called Sigma Alpha Epsilon “an example of what a fraternity and its members can and should be.”
The current crop of SAE members, including future financiers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, liked to think they were cut from the same cloth. They vied for top grades and summer internships with the same gusto they had for beer pong. Regardless of the damage to their livers and brain cells, many were fine physical specimens and world-class varsity athletes, demonstrating the competitive drive that would also be prized on Wall Street. Eric Barnum, the chapter’s “Eminent Archon,” or president, played varsity golf; Connor Pardell rode on the polo team; Max Haskin played varsity tennis; and E. J. Williams was a wide receiver on the football team.
Lean and muscular, with a wide, open smile, Desdunes was a natural fit in the chapter. A graduate of Berkeley Carroll, a private school in Brooklyn, he had been on the varsity soccer and swim teams. In one way, though, he was unusual among the brothers and their country-club sports. An African American in a historically white fraternity, he was the child of a single mother, a Haitian immigrant who worked as a hospital aide. Now, he hoped SAE’s prestige, along with an Ivy League degree, would ensure his success. With dreams of being a doctor, he was taking the notoriously demanding science and math courses of the pre-med track.
For all his ambition, Desdunes slept with a jug of Jose Cuervo tequila on his dresser. Even at a hard-partying chapter, he stood out. His roommate, Matthew Picket, noticed that Desdunes would drink heavily three or four times a week. By heavily, he didn’t mean five drinks in a sitting—as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines binge drinking. Picket meant the kind of bender that ended with the loss of consciousness and, in some cases, dignity. Desdunes had been known to tip over while seated at a bar. “He probably drinks more than he should, but he’s usually OK to get home on his own,” Picket remembered later. “He would be someone that you would check on in a bar, for example. If he was keeled over, you wanted to make sure he was OK.” One time, Desdunes urinated by accident on the door of another brother’s room; another time, on a Sony PlayStation 3 system. “I almost expected to hear that George would be in the ER from drinking too much,” Picket said. “If you continue habits like that, your luck has to run out.”
If his fraternity brothers were alarmed, they didn’t do much about it. Maybe it was a matter of glass houses. Who didn’t have trouble remembering the previous night? “I mean, I did almost the same thing,” said Picket, who later listed single-malt scotch as an interest on his LinkedIn profile. As much as vodka made a screwdriver, drinking defined the Cornell SAE house. That night and into the next morning, pledges—provisional members seeking full acceptance—were on call as “sober drivers.” Like chauffeurs tending high-rollers at a casino, they served at the pleasure of older members who could call on newbies for rides at any hour. In 2006, Cornell disciplined the chapter after discovering a written pledge guide that suggested the role alcohol played in a freshman’s SAE initiation. Among other things, new members were expected to clean vomit out of cars. Along with their driving duties, they could also be called on as janitors for those who couldn’t hold their liquor. Pledges were full-service alcohol enablers, pressed into service by the fraternity.
Members knew firsthand the dangers of bingeing on alcohol. In September, an underage woman who had been drinking at SAE was hospitalized. The campus police had pulled over a car and found her moaning in the back seat, her dress pulled down over one shoulder. The Cornell judicial board sentenced SAE to six weeks of social probation to “educate the chapter of the dangers associated with over-intoxication.” After the chapter was busted, Barnum, its president, had promised SAE’s general counsel that every member would sign a statement agreeing to abide by the fraternity’s policies about drinking. In exchange, the national organization dropped its $100-per-member fine for supplying the alcohol to the underage woman who was hospitalized. Five months later, as Desdunes prepared for Collegetown, much of what the men were doing that night violated SAE’s “risk-management” policies, as well as Cornell rules and New York State law. They were playing drinking games, providing alcohol to minors, offering alcohol from a “common source” with no controls, and serving the already drunk. SAE spelled out its expectations in a manual called “Minerva’s Shield,” named after SAE’s patron Roman goddess of wisdom. The manual suggested a deeper meaning to its rules; they existed “so may you through wisdom learn to subdue the baser passions and instincts of your nature.”
But if the men had read Minerva’s Shield and agreed to honor it, they certainly didn’t show it. The familiar tropes of fraternity drinking culture persisted, which meant that their private behavior continued to show little resemblance to their public pronouncements. It was a bit like Casablanca; if word got out, all would be shocked, shocked to find out there was underage drinking at SAE. But even a casual visitor would have noticed the first-floor bar and the beer-pong table. SAE brothers were also supposed to be on the lookout for dangerous drinking, referring members to counseling and acting, in the words of the fraternity, as their “brother’s keeper.”
Instead, the chapter seemed to revel in Desdunes’s drinking. Members shared stories about his exploits and challenged him to a beer-chugging contest. One day, perhaps, Desdunes’s tolerance for alcohol could become inspiration for the next pledge class, kids still in high school who didn’t remember John Belushi in Animal House or Will Ferrell in Old School. It was all summed up in Desdunes’s nickname, one of those signposts of frat culture like beer funnels and hangovers. One pledge was known as “Tuna Tunnel,” slang for vagina, because the brothers considered him timid. Another was known as “Cornhole Compressor,” a reference to anal sex, a preoccupation of frat life. Desdunes’s nickname reflected one of his pastimes. The brothers called him “Blackout George.”
AT AMERICAN COLLEGES, particularly elite ones, the drinking and buffoonery of fraternity men can seem mystifying. Why would such ambitious students choose to pursue minors in humiliation, vomit, and semi-consciousness? Each time a chapter house gets busted for underage drinking or worse, a national fraternity will say its chapter has strayed from its values of character and leadership. The explanation rings hollow for good reason. The two seemingly irreconcilable strands—debauchery and ambition—have for two centuries been the key ingredients of Greek life. Even if the guys wanted to be sober—and most don’t—disentangling high times and high ideals would require a reimagining of one of America’s oldest subcultures. Drinking is so deeply associated with fraternities that many can’t conceive of chapter houses without alcohol.
Consider the precursor of the Cornell SAE house and the American fraternity: Phi Beta Kappa. In December 1776, high-minded men at William and Mary, the first public university in America, founded the literary and academic society. Its initials stood for its motto, “Love of learning is the guide of life.” It’s worth noting, too, that its founders met in a bar, a famous one, the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia. Phi Beta Kappa, of course, developed into an honorary scholarship organization, the epitome of academic achievement.
By the nineteenth century, however, the impulse behind Phi Beta Kappa turned into something that looked more like the modern fraternity. In 1825, students at Union College in Schenectady, New York, were tired of studying theology and the dusty Latin and Greek manuscripts of early nineteenth-century universities. They wanted to become movers and shakers, not preachers and monks. This feeling led some Phi Beta Kappans to band together to form what is considered the first “social fraternity,” the Kappa Alpha Society. Members of social fraternities rebelled by reading American literature and poetry. They also sought the friendship and loyalty of their peers, so they could start successful businesses and law firms. Animating hidebound institutions with a kind of adolescent energy, Greek-letter organizations became a linchpin of what Roger L. Geiger, the Pennsylvania State University historian of higher education, called the “collegiate revolution” and its focus on extracurricular activities and the liberal arts. Colleges promoted the social skills and knowledge necessary for entrée into the upper middle class. In that way, fraternities helped create the American-style college experience.
At the same time, these societies immediately attracted men whose heavy drinking overshadowed their other accomplishments. Fraternity members, like college students across the country, were chafing at what they considered tyrannical rules governing their behavior. College presidents imposed curfews and fought against gambling and liquor. Students even rioted. These conflicts with college administrations intensified fraternities’ secrecy and they became places where men could indulge in their favorite vices. Drinking became central to the identity of the fraternity man. Late nineteenth-century accounts of Yale’s fraternity-dominated social life expressed admiration for the “well-known drinking bout” and the “the noble and hearty” souls who enjoy “a little of the fiery flavor of sin.” At Ohio’s Miami University, future US president Benjamin Harrison led the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and complained of the “drinking and spreeing” of two of the fraternity’s most popular men, including his own roommate. In 1851, these two horrified the community when they arrived drunk at a meeting of the Young Men’s Temperance Society. Phi Delta Theta kicked them out, but other fraternities quickly welcomed them.
SAE’s birth in 1856 reflected this mix of high ideals and low behavior. Its founder, Noble Leslie DeVotie, was a Phi Beta Kappa–style scholar. Pale and with brooding gray eyes, weighing only 120 pounds, he was the University of Alabama’s valedictorian and a scholar of French and English literature. After attending Princeton Theological Seminary, he became a minister like his father. But DeVotie’s fellow founders were mediocre students and troublemakers. The University of Alabama’s president, Landon Garland, hated fraternities and did all he could to stamp them out. He once told trustees that they “tended only toward evil” and promoted the drinking, fighting, and vandalism that was scandalizing the college’s hometown of Tuscaloosa. Even the symbols DeVotie chose for SAE reflected a duality: Minerva, the Roman name for Athena, the goddess of wisdom, represented its respect for the intellect; its other symbol, the lion, reflected an untamed spirit.
Today, SAE undergraduates like to tell a story about DeVotie that speaks volumes about fraternity culture. It begins with the historical record. On February 12, 1861, a stormy day with choppy seas, DeVotie, a Confederate chaplain, prepared to board a steamer at Fort Morgan, which guarded Mobile, Alabama. On the dock, he lost his step and fell in the ocean, hitting his head. The current swept him out to sea, leaving behind a shawl, his hat, a handkerchief, and letters he was mailing for some soldiers. His body, still wrapped in a Confederate sash, washed ashore three days later. He was twenty-three years old and, according to SAE, the first Alabamian to die in the Civil War. The elders of SAE celebrate DeVotie’s short life as a model for the fraternity’s long history of military service. But some undergraduates suspect another tradition played a role in DeVotie’s death. They have no evidence from the historical record. And their conclusion says more about them than DeVotie. They like to say he was drunk.
I first heard this interpretation from Andrew Cowie, an Indiana University sophomore who attended the SAE leadership cruise. The next month, I visited Cowie on the campus, which is famous for its fraternity life. Cowie led me into the basement of his new $4.5-million house, where portraits of DeVotie and the seven other founders hung on the walls of the room reserved for both parties and official business, such as initiations. On that Sunday morning, my shoes stuck to the floor and I could smell a sour odor, no doubt from a party the night before. Cowie, who grew up in Nashville, was Hollywood’s image of a fraternity man, a six-foot-four former center on his high school basketball team with a deep voice and a taste for seersucker shirts. Soon to become president, Cowie had been helping lead his chapter’s revival since it had been shut down for underage drinking in 2002. (At one party, the police found seventy-seven cases of beer, a keg, and eighteen 1.75-liter bottles of rum.) Cowie, the grandson of an SAE chapter president from Louisiana State University, appreciated the resonance of a fraternity’s founder dying in a freak drinking accident. “I don’t know what it says about us and our history,” Cowie told me with a chuckle.
SAE brothers also tell an apocryphal story about one of their most famous members, Eliot Ness, the famed prohibition agent, and his nemesis, the gangster Al Capone. As legend has it, Paddy Murphy, Capone’s lieutenant and a member of SAE, refused Capone’s command to shoot Ness because he saw the lawman’s SAE badge. Capone shot Murphy instead. Every year, members of SAE throw raucous parties and hold a mock Irish wake in honor of the fictional Paddy Murphy. It’s a chance to celebrate Ness in true fraternity fashion—with a drink.
A few months after meeting Cowie, I traveled to SAE’s headquarters on the campus of Northwestern University, where I discovered a historical contradiction at the heart of the fraternity: its headquarters would not be located in Evanston, Illinois—and it might not even exist—were it not for the temperance movement, America’s famous fight against alcohol.
One of the movement’s fiercest advocates, William C. Levere, had excelled at oratory as a boy. His precocious speeches on the evils of alcohol drew national attention. At age fourteen, he moved from his native Connecticut to Evanston at the urging of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In 1894, Levere entered Northwestern, where, predictably, he attacked fraternities. But then SAE tapped a close friend of Levere’s, the most popular man in the freshman class, to start a Northwestern chapter. His friend insisted Levere join, too, and for reasons never fully explained, he became a diehard fraternity man.
After college, Levere became SAE’s first “Eminent Supreme Recorder,” or executive director. He was among the men who built the fraternity into a powerhouse after it nearly died out following the Civil War. Levere also penned a three-volume, 1,500-page history of SAE, which glossed over the fraternity’s drinking. It must have taken some doing. In 1908, as Levere was researching his tome, David Starr Jordan, another teetotaler and Stanford University’s first president, was cracking down on “beer busts” on fraternity row, where partially undressed men staggered from house to house, vomiting and urinating. When Stanford banned beer busts that spring, hundreds of undergraduates protested. The demonstration began at the SAE house. Men bearing band instruments joined in as if they were headed to a football game. “Beer! Booze!” they chanted.
SAE’s headquarters—named after Levere—struck me as the embodiment of its central contradiction. Completed in 1930 at the equivalent of $6 million today, the Levere Memorial Temple looks like a Gothic cathedral. Inside, rows of priceless Tiffany stained-glass windows bathe a sanctuary with light. The most prominent window rises high above the altar: a white-robed Jesus Christ, arms outstretched to two Civil War soldiers, one in Confederate gray, another in Union blue, each leaning on a rifle. “Pax Vobiscum” (Peace be with you), reads the Latin inscription.
The basement feels earthier. It features a wood-paneled dining hall with oddly kitschy murals of college life painted by the German artist Johannes Waller, a favorite of an SAE president who grew up in Germany. In the murals, students and professors are portrayed as gnomes, complete with white beards and long, pointy noses. In one mural, the gnomes appear to be singing while holding huge steins of beer. Nearby, one fellow with a bright red nose, hands on his head, eyes closed, has passed out next to a huge barrel. By his feet are an overturned mug and a puddle of beer. In the sanctuary that greets most visitors, SAE proclaims heavenly ideals, but the basement reveals a less noble reality. It would be hard to find a place that more perfectly expresses the two sides of the American college fraternity.
IN THE MODERN era, drinking fueled the reemergence of fraternities on college campuses after their decline in the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. The more conservative Reagan era was tailor-made for fraternities’ nostalgic traditions. President Reagan also inadvertently bolstered Greek life by backing a law that required states to raise the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one to remain eligible for federal highway funding. On campus, the change made it harder for college students to drink, as dorm parties could no longer feature beer kegs. With the status of private groups, fraternities seized the opportunity to fill the alcohol void. It helped that in the 1960s, colleges lost their legal status as organizations that could act in loco parentis—as if they were parents. As adults, students now had constitutional rights to assemble, as well as due process in terms of discipline. This shift made fraternities tough adversaries for administrators. Sororities still prohibited alcohol in their chapter houses, and unlike fraternities, most had house mothers to enforce the rules. But fraternities rejected that kind of adult oversight, and the men gladly hosted underage women to drink at their parties. Simon Bronner, a Pennsylvania State University professor who wrote a book about campus culture, observed that as “colleges cracked down on drinking in dorms, many Greek houses became underage drinking clubs.”
A consortium of fraternities that studied Greek drinking noted that the 1980s marked a turning point:
Kegs, party balls, beer trucks with a dozen taps along the sides, kegerators, 55-gallon drums with a mixture of liquor and Kool-Aid, ad infinitum. “Tradition” became a common theme for parties, ranging from “tiger breakfast” to “heaven and hell,” with variations. Most of us in the Greek movement would agree that there was a corresponding loss of what makes a men’s or women’s fraternity or sorority special or unique. Values, ideals, the Ritual… became secondary. Parties and alcohol became the primary focus.
Both inspiring and reflecting this culture, the movie Animal House, which came out in 1978, became a touchstone for a generation of frat guys.
Today, one fact is undeniable: fraternity men are the heaviest drinkers on college campuses. Sorority women are not far behind. From the 1990s through 2007, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health conducted a study that became the gold standard for research on university drinking. Its leading researcher, Henry Wechsler, popularized the term “binge drinking,” which he defined as downing five or more drinks in a row for men, four for women. From 1992 through 2007, his landmark College Alcohol Study surveyed more than 17,000 students at 140 four-year colleges. The questionnaire asked students how many had engaged in binge drinking within the previous two weeks. Eighty-six percent of men who lived in fraternities and 80 percent of sorority residents reported binge drinking, compared with 45 percent of men not living in fraternities and 36 percent of women. The study also looked at “frequent binge drinkers,” those who had binged at least three times in the previous two weeks. Two in five members of Greek organizations were “frequent binge drinkers,” compared with one in five non-Greek students. “They are the leaders of the drinking culture,” Wechsler told me. “They are the highest consumers of alcohol. Of all the associations, the traits associated with drinking, fraternity membership and, particularly, fraternity residence, are the strongest.” Countless other studies have since affirmed the portrait of the hard-drinking fraternity man.
Still, fraternities routinely deny this fact. The website of the Interfraternity Council at the University of Colorado at Boulder was typical, calling the link between Greek chapters and binge drinking “a myth” and adding that “the stereotypical party atmosphere is not a reality, and certainly not the norm.” Wechsler, the drinking expert, finds those attitudes frustrating because his research shows that fraternities can change only after they acknowledge the truth. In his view, colleges and fraternities can, in fact, choose to crack down on drinking and save lives.
Such a strategy requires adults to challenge fraternities’ cherished tradition of combining adolescent self-government and alcohol. Phi Delta Theta, where President Harrison had fought drinking in the nineteenth century, tried that approach and turned around its safety record. In the 1990s and 2000, three of its members had died because of alcohol: one member had been too drunk to leave his house during a fire, another died in bed after being forced to drink in an initiation ritual, and a third died driving drunk on his motorcycle. The fraternity had been paying out millions of dollars a year in insurance claims. In 2000, Phi Delta Theta banned alcohol in its chapter houses. In the fifteen years since, its claims payments plunged more than 90 percent. The average amount an undergraduate paid for insurance coverage fell by half, to $80 a year. SAE brothers have had to pay as much as $340. Phi Delta Theta has had no alcohol-related deaths and fewer accidents, even as membership surged to 12,000 from 8,000. “We’ve been able to articulate a message to students,” Bob Biggs, its chief executive, told me. “If you want a drinking club experience, go somewhere else.” Biggs is the first to admit that the fraternity hasn’t eliminated dangerous or underage drinking at its chapters. But Phi Delta Theta has reduced it, or at least its worst consequences. At conventions in both 2011 and 2013, SAE leadership proposed following Phi Delta Theta’s lead and banning alcohol at SAE houses. In each case, the measure fell short of the three-fourths vote required to change the fraternity’s laws.
The disciplinary records of SAE chapters show why its national office wanted to reduce drinking. At its University of California at San Diego chapter, from 2010 through 2014, the university documented minors drinking themselves unconscious and into detox and the arrests of students for disorderly conduct and for lying to the police about alcohol. In July 2014, one member even posted on social media that the chapter had a goat and party guests could “feed him beers” for their amusement. Then there was the University of Arizona chapter, known for its “Jungle Party,” featuring a 65,000-gallon pool, fake waterfall, and tree house—a “wonderful combination of hydration, inebriation and sartorial minimalism,” in the words of Playboy magazine when it named the University of Arizona one of the country’s top party schools. At the pool party—and many other gatherings—the university repeatedly cited SAE for minors in possession of alcohol, drunkenness, and hospitalizations for alcohol poisoning. In September 2012, a young woman had played a drinking game at an SAE event where she had tracked her shots by drawing lines on her arm—twenty-four in all. She vomited in a garbage can and passed out.
Over the last five years, more than 130 chapters have been disciplined, nearly always because of behavior related to drinking. That’s a remarkable figure, considering that the number of chapters and provisional outposts, called colonies, peaked at 245 in 2014. There’s no way to compare SAE with other fraternities. SAE keeps a running tally of infractions on its website because a legal settlement over an alcohol-poisoning death now requires it to do so; other fraternities have no such requirement. But a yearlong investigation of hundreds of fraternity incidents suggests SAE may, in fact, be representative. In a compelling 2014 Atlantic cover story, the journalist Caitlin Flanagan found drinking at the heart of accidents that included, with alarming regularity, falls from windows and porches of fraternity houses. In an unforgettable episode, at the Alpha Tau Omega house in 2011, one drunk guest fell off a deck while filming a cell-phone video of another, who was presumably even more drunk. He had been trying to launch a bottle rocket out of his anus.
In terms of killing people through drink, however, SAE surpassed all others. Alcohol abuse has led to the death of SAE members and their guests in a heartbreaking list of ways: a drunk member killed a party guest after the car he was driving careened off a road (December 2014, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia); a guest froze to death under a bridge after drinking at an SAE party (January 2012, University of Idaho); a freshman pledge died of alcohol poisoning from drinking margaritas, a dozen beers, and Jack Daniels (March 2009, University of Kansas).
At times, SAE men seem inured to the mayhem, the injuries, and the body count. The excuses pile up. It wasn’t an official event; he drank before the party or somewhere else. Then, it happens again. In November 2012, Jack Culolias, a nineteen-year-old freshman pledge at Arizona State University, disappeared after a sorority mixer at a local bar called Cadillac Ranch. He had last been seen so drunk he was urinating on the patio outside the bar. Sixteen days later, searchers found him drowned in the Salt River, his blood alcohol three times the legal limit. Six months later, another SAE member was hospitalized after downing about twenty tequila shots during a drinking contest at an off-campus party. He had turned blue. Even then, Robert Valenza, who was the SAE chapter president before Arizona State shut down the fraternity, told me the chapter shouldn’t be blamed for drinking. “People will find alcohol. People will be underage,” he said. “It’s just part of the college experience.”
The victims of fraternity behavior are usually less understanding—and some hire lawyers. Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, as Greek membership boomed, it also became easier to sue. The doctrine of comparative negligence let plaintiffs recover damages even if they were partly to blame. This shift opened the door to lawsuits stemming from drinking at a fraternity party. National fraternities have since faced hundreds of lawsuits alleging negligent supervision, and they have paid out multimillion-dollar settlements. Many more agreements—such as the one SAE reached with the family of Culolias, the Arizona State student—are private. Most local chapters have few assets to protect. But the litigation threatened generations of wealth overseen by the national fraternity organizations, which own or operate some $3 billion worth of real estate and generate at least $170 million in annual revenue. Just as significant, insurers dropped coverage of fraternities, and premiums soared. In 1986, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners ranked fraternities as the sixth-worst risk, behind hazardous-waste disposal companies and asbestos contractors. The risk of fraternity life is so great that only a handful of insurers cover college-age men living together in chapter houses.
The national fraternities came up with a strategy to distance themselves from undergraduates. Fraternities and their insurers crafted plans that limited coverage of members for underage drinking, hazing, and sexual assault. Fraternity alumni leaders argued that they didn’t want to provide insurance that, in effect, subsidized bad behavior. Yet this move meant the alumni leaders were asking undergraduates to pay for insurance policies that didn’t protect them when they most needed coverage. The national fraternity organizations also sought to shift blame from themselves to the undergraduate men, whose families would be forced to pay for legal defense and settlements or judgments through homeowners’ insurance policies. James Ewbank, a lawyer who has represented at least ten national fraternities, told attendees at a July 2012 conference that they should “share the fun.” Peter Lake, a professor at Stetson University College of Law in Tampa, Florida, who specializes in higher-education law, said fraternities have developed “a curious business model.” Lake observed: “You’re establishing a national brand and franchising. And then when your core customers are in a pinch, you’re turning away.”
This lack of insurance coverage can also threaten fraternity guests. In February 2007, Lee John Mynhardt, a senior at Elon University in North Carolina, was kissing a young woman in a locked bathroom at a Lambda Chi Alpha keg party. This apparently angered a student waiting for the bathroom, who banged on the door. Mynhardt, a six-foot-tall rugby player, stepped out of the bathroom. Two drunk men—one a fraternity member, another a guest from a different college—seized Mynhardt in a full-nelson wrestling move, with hands behind his neck, carried him through the kitchen, and dumped him outside. Mynhardt’s neck broke. He became a quadriplegic, unable to move from the chest down, with medical expenses that could exceed $10,000 a month.
Mynhardt sued, and Lambda Chi Alpha convinced a judge it had no duty to supervise the chapter. The fraternity’s insurer—Lloyd’s of London—successfully argued the fraternity men weren’t covered because they had violated the fraternity’s “risk-management” policies. Mynhardt reached settlements with six students who were covered under their parents’ homeowners’ insurance, collecting less than $2 million, one-tenth of what his lawsuit had been seeking. Mynhardt moved to a house in Charlotte, near Carolinas Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized. He had one full-time, live-in aide and another who tended to him part-time. He needed help moving to his wheelchair, showering, and getting dressed. In 2012, he enrolled in Charlotte Law School. Because he couldn’t use his fingers, he took notes with a stylus attached to his palm and a touch-pad computer. “As soon as there’s an incident, national fraternities start distancing themselves,” Mynhardt told David Glovin, my colleague at Bloomberg News. “It’s irresponsible.” Even then, Mynhardt wasn’t ready to condemn Greek life. “I believe a lot of positive things can come out of fraternities. But if they’re not run correctly, things are going to get out of control.”
Teenagers probably don’t examine the legal contracts they sign when they are invited to join a fraternity. But new members agree to follow complicated “risk-management” policies; if they don’t, they will void their insurance coverage. Take, for example, SAE’s Minerva’s Shield, the program named after SAE’s patron goddess of wisdom. This contract, which is typical of those at many fraternities, prohibits “open parties,” which means chapters must establish guest lists. The contract also excludes insurance coverage if chapters offer “common source” containers such as kegs, or punches, or liquor of 100 proof or higher. Members are forbidden from playing drinking games or serving a visibly intoxicated guest or, of course, anyone under age twenty-one.
The last requirement for coverage is the ultimate challenge: how to avoid underage drinking when as many as three-fourths of fraternity members and potential guests are underage. To comply with these rules, members have two choices. They can hire a “third-party” establishment such as a bar or banquet hall with a cash bar and a staff responsible for checking IDs. Or they can try “bring your own bottle,” or BYOB, which is more complicated than it sounds. The fraternity must establish a guest list with the birth dates of every member. Those of legal age receive an “event-specific” wristband. Then, legal-age drinkers are allowed to bring in six beers, wine coolers, or malt beverages, which must be deposited at a central distribution center. There, guests must be issued a punch card with six holes corresponding to the drinks they brought, so that each guest’s consumption can be tracked through the night.
This setup looks nothing like actual drinking at fraternities. George Desdunes and other members of SAE certainly didn’t handle alcohol that way at Cornell on the night of February 24, 2011, and into the early hours of the next morning.
AROUND MIDNIGHT, Desdunes caught a “sober ride” to Dino’s in Collegetown. By then, between the Jameson’s whiskey and the rum-and-Pepsis, Desdunes had already had quite a few drinks. On his late-night excursion, Desdunes was the picture of millennial cool in his Cheap Monday designer jeans, gray canvas Vans, and a dark green hoodie. He wore a stud in his right ear and a pink rubber wristband that read: “Preserve the boobies.” The wristband promoted breast cancer research, neatly combining a fraternity man’s concern for the greater good and his focus on the female anatomy. At Dino’s, Desdunes didn’t order anything to drink.
At 12:24 a.m., Desdunes’s roommate, Matthew Picket, texted him that he was locking his bedroom door and would leave the key in Desdunes’s mailbox. Picket wanted to protect himself from a risk all the older fraternity members faced that night: a mock kidnapping. At most chapters, full-fledged members hazed pledges, but at Cornell, the tradition was reversed: Pledges kidnapped full members and quizzed them on their fraternity knowledge, then forced them to drink or do calisthenics if they answered incorrectly. The full members had been chastising freshmen because they hadn’t pulled off a kidnapping lately. In fact, the freshmen had recently been summoned to a late-night “lineup,” where pledges wearing jackets and ties were berated for failing to measure up. “Come capture us,” they were taunted at a lineup. “We’re waiting for you to do it.” In theory, at least, the older brothers could tell the pledges they didn’t want to be captured if, for example, they had a big test the next day. Or they could simply stay inside and lock their doors, which is what Picket told Desdunes he was doing that night.
Meanwhile, Desdunes texted his girlfriend, and they arranged to meet at Collegetown Pizza at 1:00 a.m. after the bars closed. She had been out with friends since 8:00 p.m.—first at Dino’s and then at the Royal Palm Tavern, another dive bar, where undergraduates carved their names on wooden booths and tables. She had enjoyed three or four drinks herself. When she met Desdunes, he didn’t seem at all drunk to her. Around 1:00 a.m., the two walked a half mile back to her apartment, where they listened to music and had sex. Afterward, Desdunes had to decide whether to call for a ride from the sober drivers. If he did, he might be kidnapped. If he were kidnapped, Desdunes worried that he’d be in no shape for a job interview the next morning. He was looking for a finance-related campus position. By coincidence, his girlfriend herself would be the interviewer. Although she recently graduated, she still had a plum campus position at an undergraduate-run student agency. Desdunes asked her for advice about how he should prepare and what he should wear. In the end, he decided to risk calling for a ride on that cold, windy, and icy night.
Around 2:15 a.m., several pledges pulled up in a Honda Pilot SUV, jumped out of the car, and grabbed Desdunes. He resisted, but the pledges overcame him, holding him on the ground and then binding his wrists and ankles with zip ties and duct tape. The kidnapping had begun. One of the pledges would later describe Desdunes’s struggle as half-hearted, a kind of “mock” resistance. It wasn’t like an earlier foiled kidnapping, when an upperclassman had fought back fiercely; he had punched a pledge in the face, breaking his nose. For whatever reason—fatigue, resignation, a tendency to be a team player—Desdunes didn’t go that far. The driver asked Desdunes about the girl he had been with, while the pledges took Desdunes to a freshman dorm, a townhouse in the northern part of the campus. Because his feet were tied, he hopped into the front door. Before the main event, he exchanged texts with his girlfriend:
“I got kidnapped,” Desdunes wrote. “Knew I should’ve walked. See you tomorrow.”
“HaHaHa wow so not surprising, well uh enjoy,” she replied.
“I’ll try but I doubt it. Still have to prep for that interview.”
“Yea, hopefully the person interviewing you will be understanding.”
“Yeah, I really hope she is, Heard she has a nice body.”
“Well thank you, hope your kidnapping doesn’t take to long! See you tomorrow.”
Then, the pledges took Desdunes’s phone, removing his last avenue for escape; under fraternity rules, a kidnapped member would be released if he called a brother and said, “Phi Alpha,” the SAE motto. Desdunes found himself on a couch, next to another fraternity brother, Gregory Wyler, a twenty-year-old sophomore. Wyler had asked for a ride to his girlfriend’s apartment and, like Desdunes, found himself tied-up and blindfolded with a black ski mask.
Everyone knew the drill. The questions would keep coming. When the members botched them, they had to drink vodka. Or do sit-ups and crunches. Or eat or drink something mysterious, maybe disgusting. They had to name the members of the pledge class. They had to recite a poem. They had to sing “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent, which wasn’t easy while drinking: “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes / How do you measure, measure a year?” Wyler and Desdunes sang together. It no doubt helped that they were both musical; Wyler, an accomplished jazz trombonist; Desdunes, a trumpet player in high school who had taken music lessons since he was five. But the men missed plenty of questions, so they had to drink a lot of liquor. Desdunes and Wyler would open their mouths and hope for the best. Wyler wasn’t sure exactly what he was eating, maybe pixie sticks, chocolate powder, strawberry syrup, and pieces of a sandwich. At one point, he felt the sticky, gooey feeling of dishwashing soap on his pants. And there was vodka, cup after cup of vodka. Wyler figured he drank four or five cups—maybe with a shot in each. Then he asked for a pail, so he could vomit. Afterward, the pledges told Wyler to drink two more vodka shots and eat hot sauce. Wyler heaved again. He told his interrogators the eight or nine drinks were enough. He was done.
Wyler felt foggy, and after his blindfold was removed, he saw Desdunes was still being given cups of vodka to drink. One pledge figured Desdunes drank six or seven shots. Finally, Desdunes said he couldn’t drink anymore. He stood up from the couch, around which pledges had formed a semicircle.
“We were kidnapped the wrong way,” Desdunes said, once on his feet. It wasn’t clear what he meant because he was slurring his words. It seemed like he expected more questions about the history of SAE. Then, it looked like he passed out—while standing.
“George, George, are you all right?” Wyler asked. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” he heard Desdunes say. Wyler figured he’d be fine. It was now after 3:30 a.m. Desdunes had trouble walking and could barely speak. Arms around his shoulders, several members guided Desdunes, hands still bound, back to the Honda Pilot. They lifted Desdunes into the back seat, where one pledge could hear him mumbling. Around 4:00 a.m., pledges took Desdunes into the SAE house through the back door. The door of Desdunes’s room, of course, had been locked by his roommate. So the pledge brothers carried Desdunes into the library, laying him on the leather couch. They made sure he was on his side. It was the least they could do. No one wanted a brother to choke on his own vomit.
AT 6:45 A.M., on Friday, February 25, George Ramstead arrived at Hillcrest, as he did most days, to clean up the sour smell of the morning after. In the dining hall, Ramstead, who worked for a custodial service, found the remains of the beer-pong tournament: a dining room littered with plastic cups, broken furniture, cans of Keystone beer. At first, Ramstead didn’t take much notice of the young man lying on the couch in the library. It wasn’t unusual at the SAE house, a frat boy sleeping it off, unable to make it back to his room, or maybe a friend crashing there after a long night. Around 7:45 a.m., Ramstead, rounding up all the garbage, took a closer look at the student on the couch. He could tell something was wrong. Desdunes was on his back, one arm hanging off the side, head to the left, vomit or mucous on the side of his mouth, his eyes rolled back. One of his pant legs was rolled up, a zip tie around his ankle. Another zip tie with duct tape around it lay on the floor nearby. His pants were down by his mid-thighs, his shirt halfway to his stomach. Ramstead yelled, trying to wake him. He grabbed Desdunes’s feet and gave them a shake. No response. When Ramstead called 911 on his cell phone, the operator asked if he could sense any breathing. Ramstead couldn’t tell. He also couldn’t feel a pulse, and Desdunes’s hand was cool to the touch. Upon arrival, emergency workers tried CPR, then drove Desdunes to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The cause was alcohol poisoning; his blood alcohol level was almost .40, or five times the legal limit for driving.
It took five hours to drive Desdunes’s body from the medical examiner in Binghamton, New York to his hometown, New York City. Marie Lourdes Andre, Desdunes’s mother, was at work. She got a call from the human resources department at Brooklyn’s SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where she counseled AIDS patients, according to an account in the New York Times. She worried she was about to lose her job. Andre, a former nanny whose husband died of lung cancer, had worked hard to get this far. She had a good job and a son at an Ivy League school, on his way to be like the doctors she saw every day at the hospital. When she arrived at the human resources office, she found a police officer waiting to see her.
“Do you have a son named George at Cornell?”
Andre walked down the hall to an examining room, where her son was lying face up on a gurney. A sheet covered his body, but she could see his face. She screamed.
FOR THE NEXT few days, the Ithaca and Cornell police investigated Desdunes’s death, questioning the fraternity’s officers, his friends, and all the pledge brothers who drove him, tied him up, and fed him liquor. Ithaca police lieutenant Christopher Townsend noted the uncooperativeness of Desdunes’s fraternity brothers. It was a conscious decision, the brotherhood closing ranks against the authorities. Eric Barnum, the president, texted all the members, telling them the chapter had hired an attorney, and no one should talk with police.
One pledge went even further. He tried to cover his tracks. At 1:15 p.m. that day, he sent a panicked text to his roommate.
“I need you to do me a favor. It’s extremely urgent. Throw out all zip ties and duct tape in the room, please. ASAP.”
“Is everything all right?”
“No, I can’t really talk right now. Please, get rid of it.”
His roommate reported the text to the police, who collected the duct tape and zip ties as evidence.
Wyler, Desdunes’s fellow kidnapping victim, was the most forthright. He described the night in great detail, giving the clearest picture of what it was like to be blindfolded on the couch. “Where do you want me to begin?” he asked a Cornell police investigator. “Hopefully, this won’t happen again.”
The case was, of course, a national media sensation. It had all the elements: drinking, privilege, the Ivy League, a young promising life cut short. There was also the racial angle, a young African American man kidnapped at a historically white fraternity. Later, after the racist chant in Oklahoma became public, Desdunes’s death would be cited as an example of the treatment of blacks at SAE. In this case, though, for all the chapter’s other flaws, Desdunes seemed to be welcome in a chapter that prided itself on its diversity. Another member, Svante Myrick, who graduated in 2009, has since become the City of Ithaca’s first African American mayor, as well as its youngest.
SAE, which said it had a “zero tolerance policy” for violations of its alcohol and hazing policies, suspended the chapter. In March 2011, Cornell said SAE would lose its recognition for at least five years. The public viewed Desdunes’s death as primarily about hazing. In fact, it might not have met the legal definition in most states. Usually, older fraternity brothers haze freshmen, and the younger students risk injury—or worse—as a condition of joining an organization. In this case, the victim was already a member. Some called it reverse hazing. In a way, it more resembled a twisted drinking game—Trivial Pursuit, alcohol edition. But New York State has a broad definition of hazing—conduct that risks injury “in the course of another person’s initiation into or affiliation with any organization.”
In May, a grand jury charged three pledges with first-degree hazing and an offense related to providing alcohol to a minor: E. J. Williams, the wide receiver; Max Haskin, the varsity tennis player; and Benjamin Mann—who like Desdunes, was from Brooklyn. Investigators said Haskin, Mann, and Williams had been among those in the Honda Pilot who picked up Desdunes, tied him up, and took him to the house for the interrogation. The students faced misdemeanor charges, carrying a maximum penalty of a year in jail. A fourth student—the pledge who sent his roommate the message asking him to dispose of the zip ties—was charged with evidence tampering, as well as hazing. The court sealed the proceeding because that student was eighteen at the time and considered a juvenile. The grand jury indicted SAE, as an organization, too. A month later, Desdunes’s mother, seeking $25 million in damages, sued the fraternity and many of its members. Her civil suit attacked the entire culture of the chapter, including its underage alcohol bingeing and hazing.
On May 21, 2012, fifteen months after Desdunes died, the pledges faced the criminal charges at the Tompkins County Courthouse, just half a mile from Cornell. The men waived their right to a jury trial and put their fates in the hands of a judge. Whereas the prosecutor argued that the events met New York State’s broad definition of hazing, Raymond Schlather, one of the defense lawyers, said the pledges themselves were a kind of victim, bullied into kidnapping: “These seniors, juniors and sophomore brothers of SAE were adamant, and, in fact, called these young pledges sissies, and what have you, for not having engaged in what they considered a time-honored ritual.” In fact, he said, the grand jury indicted the entire fraternity not only for underage drinking, but for hazing because the “entire chapter is an accomplice in this case.”
The defense focused on how much Desdunes drank from 10:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m.—by Schlather’s count, twelve to eighteen ounces of liquor, equivalent to eight to twelve 1.5-ounce shots. The lawyers said that’s likely why Desdunes died. They also said the drinking was voluntary. Testifying for the prosecution, Desdunes’s girlfriend said he didn’t show evidence of impairment when they were together: “I mean the text messages I was receiving afterwards, which were perfectly coherent, better than most I receive sometimes, not really a sign of a very drunk person.” Many of the fraternity brothers who appeared in court were vague in their recollections or said they couldn’t recall key moments, exasperating the prosecutor, who told the judge: “I am asking the Court at this point to allow me to treat them as a hostile witness on the basis that these questions and answers are evasive. These are college-educated students, and they cannot remember anything about this night.”
The judge found the three fraternity pledges not guilty of all charges; after the acquittals, the court sealed the proceeding, and the judge’s reasoning is no longer public. Schlather told a reporter that the court had “determined without any hesitation or equivocation that these guys are innocent.” But, he added: “Having said that, I emphasize that there are no winners, because someone is dead and the family is in pain, and frankly, the lives of three young men are irrevocably harmed.” SAE didn’t defend itself, so it was found guilty of misdemeanor hazing-related charges and levied a $12,000 fine.
The civil case, which was close to a confidential settlement in 2017, has undoubtedly exacted a heavier toll. Desdunes’s mother had hired Doug Fierberg, a Washington, DC, lawyer who has made his career suing fraternities and extracting multimillion-dollar settlements. Fierberg sees himself as an activist intent on improving the safety of fraternities. Because three-fourths of men living in frat houses are underage, he said, national fraternities need to require an adult living on-site—as sororities typically do. Instead, at the Cornell chapter, Fierberg told me, “Anything goes inside of that house.”
Fierberg was skeptical of fellow members’ accounts of Desdunes’s heavy drinking. In his view, to absolve themselves of blame, they were impugning the memory of a brother who could no longer defend himself. Testimony in the civil case revealed how undergraduate members hid their infractions by assigning “lookouts” when they knew they were breaking the rules. The adults overseeing SAE relied on the honor system, or after-the-fact punishment. SAE’s volunteer adviser, Ron Demer, who was in his seventies, rarely visited the house after early evening. Cornell administrators, while praising the benefits of Greek life, viewed their own role as largely educational. Even though the college devoted substantial sums to supporting fraternities and sororities, deans considered themselves more as partners than regulators. Travis Apgar, the associate dean overseeing fraternities, commanded a staff of eight and a $700,000 annual budget. In the Desdunes case, lawyers asked him why the school didn’t make use of these resources to monitor chapters by showing up at parties. Apgar replied that such policing would violate the spirit of fraternities as a “self-governance community.”
In making that comment, Apgar sounded like a fraternity man. That wasn’t surprising, because he was. In the same way the Federal Reserve draws on bankers for their expertise, colleges tend to pick fraternity and sorority alumni to oversee Greek life. Apgar belonged to the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity when he was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Albany in the 1990s. He was also a popular paid speaker and consultant to colleges and Greek organizations across the country, offering his own cautionary story of being hazed as a pledge. In an interview with the Cornell Alumni Magazine, Apgar made the common fraternity argument that flies in the face of all the facts, suggesting fraternities didn’t drink any more than other students on campus. “There’s a lot of underage drinking in our student body, period—it’s not unique to fraternities,” he said in November 2010, three months before Desdunes’s death. Still, he acknowledged that the “fraternity community” had, at least tacitly, endorsed underage drinking: “We’ve inadvertently turned a blind eye to it to a large extent. And by doing that, we’ve unintentionally sent our students a message that they have interpreted as, ‘New York State law doesn’t apply to you.’”
Fierberg also maintains that fraternities’ strategies protect the organizations financially, rather than eradicating dangerous behavior among their members. After the Desdunes case, he said SAE reorganized to try to keep its wealth out of the hands of the Desdunes family and others who sue the fraternity. At its 2015 national convention, the fraternity changed its bylaws, separating the national organization from the fraternity’s charitable foundation—which has $15 million in land and investments—and its housing corporation, which oversees more than $400 million in real-estate holdings. (Clark Brown, SAE’s general counsel, said the move was unrelated to the case.)
As is now standard after drinking deaths, SAE’s lawyers argued the young men violated SAE’s risk-management policies, so they had voided their insurance coverage. In April 2015, Barnum, the president of the chapter, and his parents sued Lloyd’s of London, SAE’s insurer, seeking coverage. A judge ruled against them. That means Barnum, a project manager at citizenM, a boutique hotel chain, and his parents must rely on their State Farm homeowner’s policy.
I reached out to members who were named in the court case. Picket, Desdunes’s roommate, was the only one who responded in any detail. “His death is a tragedy I’ll probably never fully get over,” Picket wrote to me in an e-mail. The buddies had a long-standing arrangement to lock their door, then text the key’s location, if either one needed a good night’s sleep. He said his decision to take that step to avoid being kidnapped still haunted him. Each year, as many as fifty chapter members visit Desdunes’s grave on the anniversary of his death. “There’s a culture in Greek Life, and our fraternity was no exception, where kids are on their own for the first time and we’re all drinking too much,” wrote Picket, who now worked as a real-estate analyst at a money manager in New York. “I wish I would have done more to help George.”
After SAE lost its recognition at Cornell, another fraternity opened its doors to the now houseless pledges who had belonged during the kidnapping. Sixteen of the twenty-two joined Tau Kappa Epsilon. Cornell administrators expressed concern the men would transfer SAE’s culture to TKE. They were reassured the men had learned their lesson. SAE and TKE both had long and illustrious traditions at Cornell and across the country. Both had stately Tudor-style mansions with names evoking English country estates—Hillcrest at SAE, Westbourne Manor at TKE. President William McKinley had been an SAE; Ronald Reagan, a TKE. Like SAE, TKE’s national organization forbids underage drinking in its “risk-management” policies.
In November 2011, TKE held a recruitment event at a Chinese restaurant and offered beer and hard liquor. A freshman ended up so drunk that the brothers took him to his dorm and handed him over to his roommates. He later had to be hospitalized. Ari Fine, a student from suburban Boston, had been there that night. Fine had also driven the Honda Pilot that picked up Desdunes at the SAE kidnapping. He had become TKE’s treasurer. In a deposition, Fine later recalled that neither he nor anyone else did anything to stop the underage drinking at the event. Cornell revoked TKE’s recognition because of “repeated high-risk behavior around alcohol.” The school faulted the fraternity for failing to take the freshman directly to the hospital. The brothers had learned little, if anything, since that night in February when drinking games turned deadly for George Desdunes.