“Who Does Not Flatter Wealth, Cringe Before Power”
I an Gove’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter was in serious trouble. Gove, the son of a sailor in the Merchant Marine, wasn’t about to back away from a fight to save it. On a Tuesday evening in November 2012, he sat in a conference room facing a panel of classmates and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Gove, who was twenty-one years old and chapter president, planned to go to law school to become a litigator. Now, the college senior had the chance to test his mettle. Usually, he drove a pickup truck and chewed tobacco. On this day, he wore a suit and tie as he confronted the student-conduct board hearing. The chapter faced charges of hazing, underage drinking, and violating a ban on social events. Overseeing the prosecution was an assistant dean, an educator with a PhD who administered the school’s honor code and wanted SAE shut down.
It looked like an unfair fight, but Gove had a secret weapon: One of the sharper legal minds in the state of North Carolina sat by his side. His associate was a trial lawyer, state senator, and sometime law professor named Thom Goolsby. A leading Wilmington citizen, Goolsby was an SAE alumnus from his days at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Known for his caustic wit, conservative Republican politics, and dapper style, he was a man who could pull off a purple seersucker suit with white shoes. He didn’t think much of the proceeding or the way his fraternity brothers were being treated. “This is a kangaroo court,” he sniffed to Gove. The eminently qualified SAE legal adviser whispered in Gove’s ear as if they were co-counsel.
“As a reminder, Senator Goolsby, you may not speak or address the board, but you are allowed to talk with the respondents,” the student chairing the tribunal had said at the opening of the hearing.
Even in silence, Goolsby’s presence spoke volumes to administrators in the room. UNC–Wilmington counted on state funding. Not only had Goolsby chaired the state legislature’s judiciary committee, he sat on the finance and higher education panels as well. Outside the hearing room waited another state-capital power broker, Parks Griffin, one of the chapter’s founding members. Griffin ran a local insurance agency and also raised money for Pat McCrory, North Carolina’s Republican governor.
That evening, during the more than three-hour hearing, Gove did Griffin and Goolsby proud with his aggressive representation of SAE. Every chance he could get, Gove objected to the proceedings as biased against the fraternity. Gove asked members to disregard e-mails from a next-door neighbor who had dutifully chronicled a series of late-night keg parties that fall. He saw it as outrageous that he couldn’t cross-examine the neighbor, whose integrity he soundly impugned.
“These are college kids living next to a neighbor who obviously doesn’t want college kids living next to him—which is why he fabricated this testimony that he’s not here to defend,” argued Gove in his low, flat baritone that signaled confidence and command.
At times, Gove had to be nimble, as he was acting as both defense attorney and defendant. A board member asked him why he had lied to the police when the officer had busted a party at an SAE house. Gove had been asked if it was a fraternity party, and he had said no.
“That’s actually a form of profiling by police officers,” said Gove. “It’s like someone asking if I was Jewish when they were out on the scene. Yeah, I said, ‘No.’ I shouldn’t have answered it. That doesn’t pertain to the officer’s investigation.… That also shows a very biased tendency from the officer. We have to be cautious of when, you know, you deal with police profiling.”
Gove exuded confidence, even though the dean’s evidence seemed overwhelming. The ill-fated evening had begun at the Cape Fear Men’s Club, the haunt of generations of politicians and business leaders in Wilmington. The state’s oldest private club, known for its extensive collection of maritime memorabilia, faced periodic criticism over its lack of black and female members. On a Wednesday evening that September 2012, the chapter had gathered at the club to initiate eighteen pledges. After the so-called pinning ceremony, the men were still wearing ties and jackets with their fraternity badges when they stopped for slices at Fat Tony’s Pizza. They then headed to an off-campus house for a celebration with sorority women. The fraternity leaders directed the young men to drink only from a cooler with strong liquor inside, a pledge later told the university. He suspected it was “PJ,” the term often used to describe grain alcohol mixed with Kool-Aid. After a neighbor complained about the party, the police arrived around 11:00 p.m. One eighteen-year-old pledge mistook a police cruiser for a taxi and tried to climb inside, then vomited in nearby bushes. An officer reported seeing men screaming at pledges in coats and ties who were doing push-ups. Later that evening, police found a drunk pledge, who had left the party, passed out in the bathroom of Wilmington’s Browncoat Pub. He became the third underage SAE recruit to be hospitalized for drinking after fraternity events that year. Pending an investigation, the college banned the chapter from holding parties.
The next month, SAE was cited for violating the ban by holding a toga party mixer with the Phi Mu sorority. The dean’s office asked a Phi Mu member to testify. Before the hearing, SAE’s vice president contacted her and told her to deny it was a mixer, even though she had signed a document saying it was. He told her to call it instead an informal “grab-a-date,” a category of party where women each pick a man and aren’t restricted to a single fraternity.
“This has the potential to completely kick us off campus,” the vice president texted her. “We need you to say you just filled it [the form she signed registering the mixer] out too quickly because you didn’t think it mattered and that you intended to have a Phi Mu grab a date. There were other organizations there other than SAE. I know this is a lot to ask but our fraternity could potentially hang in the balance of what you say.”
The dean’s office seemed to have unassailable evidence of fraternity wrongdoing: documentation of witness tampering, police testimony that included a seventeen-minute dash-cam video of the drunken underage pledges, and a signed statement from a pledge about the cooler full of mysterious liquor. Many a defense lawyer would counsel his client to plead guilty. But Gove had no such plan. Neither did Senator Thom Goolsby or Parks Griffin, who would be chairing the governor’s inauguration committee. When they were finished, the administration and the college’s own president would learn the cost of tangling with SAE.
COLLEGE ADMINISTRATORS WHO try to crack down on fraternities find themselves confronting a determined adversary that is well financed, politically connected, and capable of frustrating the most dogged investigators. Even college presidents have reason to fear for their jobs. Both on campus and through their trade organizations and Washington political-action committee, fraternities have successfully fought measures to curb drinking, hazing, and sexual assault. The battles are so bitter partly because they reflect America’s cultural divide. Decades of studies have found that Greek-letter organizations attract conservative students on college campuses, whereas college professors are more likely to be liberal. Reflecting this ideological clash, fraternities chafe at restrictions on individual behavior in the belief that young men are best left to their own devices to govern themselves. Their mostly white, male members can view themselves as an aggrieved group, oppressed by what they consider to be the overbearing regulation of “politically correct” universities.
In a country divided so starkly by political orientation—into Republican “red state” and Democratic “blue state” territory—college administrators and fraternity leaders often find themselves speaking different languages. Consider how Gove compared himself to a member of a minority group who had been the victim of police profiling; as they pressed their case, Gove and his alumni backers would increasingly employ the vocabulary of the American civil-rights movement that fraternities once so firmly rejected. The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has identified a defining characteristic of the American right’s definition of freedom. It focuses on the “freedom to”—such as the freedom to bear arms or ride without a motorcycle helmet. Fraternities often cite this kind of liberty—to choose their friends and to socialize—without interference from those they consider to be hostile college authorities. (To an outsider, it recalled the 1980s Beastie Boys lyrics: “You gotta fight for your right to party.”) In Hochschild’s view, progressives tend to stress a different view of freedom—the “freedom from,” for example, pollution, racial bias, or sexual discrimination and assault. Universities, then, have a bias toward regulation. They are more concerned about students’ freedom from the dangerous environment some fraternities create.
The solution, on both sides, would seem obvious: secession. Colleges could ban fraternities or refuse to recognize them. Fraternities could operate as truly private separate organizations, free from disciplinary control. But universities and Greek organizations often need each other. Fraternities are heavily invested in their colleges and communities. Fraternity and sorority alumni are more likely to give to their colleges and are larger lifetime donors than other graduates. Especially at cash-strapped public universities, colleges rely on their housing as quasi-official dorms and would have to come up with an expensive alternative. Fraternities and sororities, which house 250,000 undergraduates, are the second-largest student landlords in the United States after colleges. At the same time, a college’s blessing helps a fraternity recruit dues-paying members that keep their houses and national organizations solvent. Chapters benefit financially from colleges’ endorsement, their free advertisement on websites, the complimentary office space on campus, support from administrators—and, in places such as Indiana and Alabama, direct taxpayer support, by offering public land for their houses. For all their power, fraternities are often scrambling for funding for their houses because only a relative handful of alumni volunteer or donate money. Like a couple stuck in a bad marriage, fraternities and universities both need—and resent—each other.
The dynamic is even more complex because national fraternity organizations, whose small headquarters can each be responsible for hundreds of chapters, rely on colleges to police members. As a result, the umbrella group often finds itself at odds with undergraduate members and local alumni. On campus, college deans are a national organization’s first line of defense against extreme behavior that could kill members, as well as subject a fraternity to years of costly and potentially institution-ending litigation. The year before the three Wilmington SAE pledges were hospitalized for intoxication, George Desdunes, the Cornell University SAE brother, died of alcohol poisoning. Earlier that same year, Jack Culolias, the SAE member at Arizona State University, was found dead in a river after a night of drinking. The next year, Joseph Wiederrick died under a bridge of hypothermia after drinking at an SAE party at the University of Idaho. To prevent such tragedies and protect itself from catastrophic financial losses, the national SAE organization promotes rules against underage drinking. In the UNC–Wilmington hearing, the college was, in effect, trying to enforce SAE’s own rules. In fact, Blaine Ayers, SAE’s executive director, backed the school’s disciplinary efforts, saying the Wilmington members had “tarnished the good name of the fraternity.” But the chapter pressed on with its fight anyway.
Local alumni can employ rough tactics. In 2002, David Fiacco, the University of Maine administrator overseeing judicial affairs, suspended its SAE chapter for a year for underage drinking at a party. Citing “high-risk student behavior” and a history of similar violations, Fiacco ordered the chapter to undergo alcohol education, perform 750 hours of community service, and ban drinking in its chapter house. The chapter’s prominent alumni decided to fight back. They included Greg Jamison, an insurance executive who chaired the University of Maine Alumni Association, and James Dill, a University of Maine pest-management specialist who later became a state senator. The alumni hired an attorney, Larry Willey Jr., a former Bangor mayor, who retained a private investigator to look into Fiacco’s background for evidence of bias against fraternities. The investigator tracked down Fiacco’s 1998 conviction for driving while intoxicated in Colorado, as well as a restraining order taken out by a former girlfriend, according to court records. The group, none of whom responded to requests for comment, arranged to have the information mailed in a plain manila envelope from Colorado to the University of Maine System Board of Trustees, the university president, the campus newspaper, and the Bangor Daily News. “Is this honestly the best qualified candidate that the University of Maine could find for the Office of Judicial Affairs?” they asked in an unsigned letter. The newspapers didn’t print the material, and the university stood by Fiacco. The judicial officer later sued SAE over its tactics, alleging the intentional infliction of emotional distress. In his complaint, Fiacco said he had become depressed and withdrawn and had to receive counseling. A judge dismissed his case because the information was true and Fiacco was a public figure. Fiacco, who retained his role, said the episode reflected poorly on the chapter’s values. “If you’re going to say it, put your name to it,” Fiacco told me. “To have someone mail something anonymously from Colorado back here in Maine, it’s pretty shady.”
Frustrated with disciplining individual chapters, colleges often target all their fraternities, and, when they do, they run into a powerful roadblock: the North-American Interfraternity Conference, the trade group representing about seventy historically white fraternities. Founded in 1909, it works with the main sorority trade group and other Greek organizations, as well as sympathetic politicians in Washington and state capitals across the country. Its leader was Pete Smithhisler, a bespectacled, gray-haired Midwesterner who choked up when giving a speech about the day he was invited to join Lambda Chi Alpha as an undergraduate at Western Illinois University in the 1980s. “I knew those men, and I knew I wanted to be like them,” said Smithhisler, who became the Interfraternity Conference’s president in 2007. He spent most of his professional life promoting and defending fraternities, which he called “the premier leadership experience on college campuses.”
Smithhisler’s Interfraternity Conference fought any college trying to restrict recruitment. Some higher-education leaders and public-health experts promote bans on recruiting freshmen, especially in the first semester. First-year students make up about 40 percent of fraternity-related deaths. It’s no mystery why. Fraternity members drink more than any other group on campus, and the youngest students, away from home for the first time, are the most likely to binge drink and be victims of hazing. Aaron White, who directs college and underage drinking prevention research at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told me: “The first couple of months of school are a particularly vulnerable time for students with regard to heavy drinking. Delaying rush makes a lot of sense.”
But Princeton, Duke, and Vanderbilt are among only eighty of eight hundred campuses with fraternities that require the organizations to defer the recruitment of freshmen, typically for a semester or longer. The Interfraternity Conference has successfully opposed deferred recruitment at dozens of other campuses. Fraternities, of course, stand to lose one-fourth of their revenue if freshmen can’t join. The conference also argues that restrictions deprive freshmen of opportunities for leadership, career networking, and charitable work. As Smithhisler once said, “It would be a travesty if the fraternity experience were not available for the development of these young men.” At the University of Colorado at Boulder, the conference backed fraternities’ decision to operate without university recognition, rather than accept deferred recruitment and live-in chapter advisers. The conference threatened to sue the University of Central Florida when it instituted a recruitment moratorium because of excessive drinking. The college lifted the ban.
At times, the pressure can build behind the scenes. In 2010, California Polytechnic State University banned the recruitment of newly arrived freshmen after the alcohol-poisoning death of Carson Starkey, a first-year pledge, during an SAE initiation ritual. Almost immediately, the Interfraternity Conference sprang into action. Conference officials e-mailed and met with administrators. They even paid the $8,000 bill for an assessment of Greek life. The report, prepared by fraternity executives, college administrators, and a social worker, was damning. It called recruitment “dehumanizing and superficial” and said alcohol was “a, and perhaps THE, defining factor” of Greek life. Nevertheless, the report called for an end to deferred recruitment, saying it ran “counter to a student’s right to choose.” A new president and vice president for student affairs—both fraternity men—supported the argument, even though the student newspaper editorialized that the school was “opening the door to more trouble.” Carson Starkey’s parents, who ran a nonprofit group to raise awareness about alcohol poisoning, also opposed the move. “I find it troubling that they would be advocating against our efforts to try to save lives,” his mother, Julia Starkey, said of fraternities.
More recently, the Interfraternity Conference, along with college alumni, sought to block another way to change fraternities: forcing them to accept women, partly to reduce the risk of excessive drinking and sexual assault. In 2012, Trinity College, a well-regarded liberal arts institution in Hartford, Connecticut, took aim at single-sex fraternities, saying they were part of a “hedonistic” culture that hurt academics and endangered students. In recent years at Trinity, two drunk pledges had suffered spinal cord injuries, and scores of others had been hospitalized for excessive drinking. Under President James Jones, the college cracked down on events with alcohol, banned pledging, and said Greek houses must recruit co-educational pledge classes by 2016. Fraternity alumni revolted by withholding donations and raising money for a lawsuit. Many worked on Wall Street or in influential corporate jobs and had been among the school’s most loyal supporters.
“I’ve been contributing for many years; I’m not going to anymore,” said Hans Becherer, a 1957 graduate and former chairman of Deere and Company, the world’s largest agricultural-equipment company. “It’s a very nice liberal view that Jimmy Jones is pushing—that everybody is going to be happy in a new social organization. I think people like to join with similar-minded kids.”
Not long after, Jones announced he would be leaving a year earlier than expected, in 2014. His successor as Trinity’s president, Joanne Berger Sweeney, dropped the plan to require co-ed fraternities.
Similarly, Trinity’s Connecticut neighbor, Wesleyan University, that same year mandated that its two remaining all-male fraternities accept women by 2017. The school required all undergraduates to live in school-sanctioned housing. Amid concern about sexual assault, the Wesleyan Student Assembly had conducted a survey. It revealed that 47 percent of students felt that fraternity party spaces were less safe than elsewhere on campus—and of those, 81 percent said co-education would make the spaces safer. A student had sued Wesleyan in 2012 after she said she was raped at a fraternity house. Sexual-assault concerns helped convince President Michael Roth to require co-education. He also saw a broader need to remake Greek life for a modern college. “All of these Greek organizations excluded African Americans; all of them excluded Jews; many excluded Catholics, at some point in their history,” Roth said. “And then they changed. This seems to me like that kind of change.” The fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon sued, claiming it had been deprived of rights enjoyed by other organizations on campus. With the case pending, the group has been operating without a house. “I think it’s a really tragic loss for the campus, but also for my brothers,” fraternity vice president Will Croughan told a reporter.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, Harvard University’s leaders also want all their campus groups to be co-ed. Along with fraternities, the school is targeting its all-male “final clubs,” such as the Porcellian, which counted President Theodore Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as members. In 1984, Harvard stopped recognizing final clubs, yet they continue to exert a powerful hold on campus social life, as do fraternities. After complaints about the 2016 decision to forbid members of single-sex clubs from holding leadership positions, Harvard said it would re-examine the policy. But in July 2017, a faculty committee advocated a more decisive step: a ban. The professors’ policy would prohibit Harvard students from joining “final clubs, fraternities or sororities, or other similar private, exclusionary social organizations.” The school would phase out the organizations, eliminating them entirely by 2022. The groups promote “gender segregation and discrimination” and “go against the educational mission and principles espoused by Harvard University,” the committee said. To take effect, Harvard’s president would ultimately have to endorse the controversial plan.
As at Trinity and Wesleyan, the school faced a backlash from the Interfraternity Conference and other Greek organizations, as well as many Harvard alumni, professors, and students, who said the college has violated undergraduate rights. “I sincerely hope that the administration will not set the precedent of creating a ‘blacklist’ of organizations that students cannot join,” said Charles Storey, graduate board president of the Porcellian. “Such McCarthyism is a dangerous road that would be a blow to academic freedom, the spirit of tolerance, and the long tradition of free association on campus.” He also said that admitting women would increase the risk of sexual assault. He later apologized and resigned his Porcellian post after outrage over that remark.
Fraternities have many allies in this fight. Federal law enshrines Greek life. In 1972, the landmark Title IX civil-rights law endangered single-sex groups. It prohibited sexual discrimination at colleges receiving federal money. Two years later, Senator Birch Bayh, Title IX’s author, introduced a law specifically exempting fraternities and sororities. The Indiana Democrat, while fighting for women’s rights, was also a fraternity man. He had joined Alpha Tau Omega as an undergraduate at Purdue University. Greek organizations, unknown to most outside their world, hold extraordinary sway in the federal government, as I was to discover during a trip to Washington, DC.
IN THE SHADOW of Capitol Hill, taxis and limousines arrived to drop off guests for cocktails at the elegant Liaison Hotel. Flanked by two American flags, members of Congress posed for photos with fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. The congressmen were the honored guests of the Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee, or FratPAC, which bills itself as the largest PAC representing college students and higher education in America. Each spring, hundreds of fresh-faced undergraduates storm Congress to lobby for fraternities and start a lifetime of networking for their own careers. The day culminates with this $500-a-plate cocktail reception and fund-raiser. On this Wednesday evening in April 2016, their host was FratPAC’s executive director, Kevin O’Neill, a partner at the Washington law firm Arnold and Porter. O’Neill, a member of Lambda Chi Alpha who graduated from Syracuse University in 1992, had been the school mascot, Otto the Orange. Now, he name-checked rival schools’ teams to get the crowd excited during the cocktail reception as politicians grabbed the microphone and held forth on the power of Greek life. Bradley Byrne, a US congressman from Alabama, proudly recited his fraternity credentials. At Duke University, he had joined Phi Delta Theta. Two of his sons were now members. A third joined the Kappa Alpha Order. His daughter was a Chi Omega and his wife, an SAE “little sister.” His chief of staff, Alex Schriver, was a Delta Tau Delta at Auburn University before he took the DC job at twenty-five. “He hired one of our star students,” O’Neill bragged to the crowd about Schriver. “He’s the youngest chief of staff in the House of Representatives.”
Richard Hudson, a congressman from North Carolina, also testified to the power of the fraternity network. He had joined the Kappa Alpha Order at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he became student body president. After college, his KA brothers worked on his political campaign. His chapter treasurer, who became a corporate executive specializing in accounting, handled the finances. “I’m eager to work with you,” Hudson told the crowd. “It’s important to be here in town and network like you’ve been doing. Keep those business cards and stay in touch.”
FratPAC magnifies the formidable clout of fraternities in Washington. As noted in the introduction to this book, 39 percent of senators in the 113th US Congress, and one-fourth of US representatives, belonged to Greek organizations—as well as one-third of all Supreme Court justices and about 40 percent of US presidents. SAE hasn’t had a president since McKinley, but it has had its share of kingmakers. Bill Brock, a 1953 graduate of Washington and Lee University, was a former US senator from Tennessee who became the Republican National Committee chairman credited as the architect of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory. In the 1990s, another RNC chairman, Haley Barbour, who had joined SAE at the University of Mississippi, helped engineer the first Republican takeover of the US House and Senate in forty years.
During the FratPAC evening at the Liaison, the conservative Republican bent of Greek life was on full display. The two Southern speakers Byrne and Hudson were both Republicans. Byrne could trace his ancestors in Mobile to the 1780s. The National Journal called Hudson the twelfth-most-conservative member of the 113th Congress, and the National Right to Life and the National Rifle Association both gave him top ratings. Since 2005 when it was founded, FratPAC has given almost two-thirds of its more than $1.3 million in campaign contributions to Republican lawmakers.
FratPAC’s legislative goals represent the fundamental contradiction at the heart of its agenda: it wants public support without government scrutiny. On the day I visited its annual fund-raiser, FratPAC’s priority was passage of the Collegiate Housing and Infrastructure Act, which would let Greek organizations use tax-deductible donations to build and renovate chapter houses, not just for libraries and study halls. Congress has estimated the law would cost taxpayers $148 million over ten years, although fraternities maintain their housing saves public universities from issuing billions of dollars in debt to finance new dorms. Representative Pete Sessions, an alumnus of Pi Kappa Alpha’s chapter at Southwestern University, first sponsored the tax proposal. The Texas Republican, who received $42,000 from FratPAC, had more than one hundred co-sponsors. In an early round, its sponsor had been Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican and former vice-presidential candidate who later became Speaker of the House. FratPAC funneled $42,500 to Ryan, who belonged to Delta Tau Delta as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. Now these politicians were joined by eager, impeccably dressed fraternity men and sorority women who stormed their local members of Congress to beg for a tax break.
Two of the fraternity lobby’s other priorities include ensuring the survival of single-sex campus organizations and opposing what it considered ill-advised plans to rein in student misbehavior. In 2012, FratPAC bore down on US representative Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat and former elementary school principal. Wilson, known for her flamboyant cowboy hats, called herself the “Haze Buster.” She had backed a Florida anti-hazing law in the state legislature and had proposed a national anti-hazing law. It would revoke federal financial aid from anyone found responsible by a school disciplinary board for hazing. She appeared in Washington with the mother of Harrison Kowiak, who had been beaten to death during a Theta Chi hazing ritual at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. O’Neill, the FratPAC executive director, reached out to Wilson, as did some college administrators and members of African American fraternities. The lawmaker had belonged to the historically black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and FratPAC had donated $1,000 to her campaign. O’Neill maintained that hazing was better handled by local police because college disciplinary boards don’t offer enough legal protections, such as a right to a lawyer. Wilson never introduced her bill.
The fraternity lobby had been even more worried about the due-process rights of college men in sexual-assault cases. Although others, including prominent law-school professors at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, shared its concern, FratPAC took its zealous defense too far for even many of its own undergraduate members. In 2015, three Republican lawmakers introduced the innocuously named “Safe Campus Act.” Its most controversial provision would have required the victims of sexual assault to report the allegations to law enforcement before requesting a campus hearing. Two of its sponsors were beneficiaries of FratPAC, Sessions and US representative Kay Granger, a Texas Republican who had received $10,000 in contributions. To make the case, the Greek movement formed the Safe Campus Coalition. It was made up of the two main fraternity trade groups—the Interfraternity Conference and the National Panhellenic Conference, which represents sororities—as well as three national fraternities, Kappa Alpha Order, Alpha Tau Omega, and Sigma Nu. The coalition spent $250,000 lobbying for the bill. It hired FratPAC’s O’Neill and Trent Lott, a Sigma Nu member and the former Republican US senator from Mississippi.
The bill provoked a firestorm. US senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri both excoriated Greek organizations for backing the measure. Democrats and prominent advocates for sexual-assault victims, they were also sorority women. Gillibrand had been a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at Dartmouth; McCaskill, a member of Kappa Alpha Theta at the University of Missouri. Each had received $2,500 from FratPAC. Many individual members of sororities and fraternities, not to mention groups representing universities, also considered the proposal wrongheaded. Eight national sororities ultimately broke with the trade groups and dropped their support of the bill. “We believe our sisters who are survivors should have choices in how, when and to whom they go for support or to report the crime,” Alpha Phi wrote in a letter to its members. The national fraternity groups ultimately abandoned the bill, too. Amid concern over the lobbying campaign and the Interfraternity Conference’s overall approach, Smithhisler resigned.
In this case, the Greek organizations met their match. The UNC–Wilmington disciplinary hearing would be a tough fight, too.
AS THE HOURS wore on in the Wilmington hearing room, Ian Gove, the SAE chapter president, never really disputed the central accusation against SAE: the fraternity threw a party where many pledges and other underage students were drinking to excess. Instead, he stressed a few sidelights. The police didn’t see any “open source” of alcohol that the fraternity provided, and they didn’t make any arrests. (They did, in fact, issue a citation for underage drinking.) As for the alleged hazing, Gove maintained that a couple of members, not pledges, were showing off in a push-up competition.
In one stroke of luck for the chapter, one of the pledges at the party recanted his signed statement that said the fraternity had insisted the new members drink from the cooler full of mysterious liquor. (This was the same undergraduate hospitalized after being found in the local bar.) He testified that the university had pressured him to sign a statement he hadn’t read completely. That evening, infuriating the assistant dean prosecuting the case, he now said that the liquor at the party had found its way to him through a different route: A “good-looking girl,” whose name he didn’t remember, had handed him a drink.
What about the pledge who had been so drunk that he mistook the police car for a taxi?
That pledge also sought to shift responsibility from the chapter. While taking a taxi to the pinning ceremony some four hours earlier, he said, he stopped at a store and convinced a stranger to buy him a 23.5-ounce Four Loko, a caffeine-infused malt liquor drink, and a 24-ounce Bud Light Tall Boy. Back in the cab, he said, he had chugged those drinks but had imbibed nothing else at the party. The board was skeptical that the early evening alcohol could have left him so sick and disoriented. He weighed 215 pounds and said he regularly drank three beers in a sitting. And how should the board understand the e-mail begging the sorority member not to describe the toga party as a mixer? Gove and his vice president maintained the gathering had, in fact, always been “grab-a-date,” and the message had merely been inelegantly worded.
At the hearing, pledges testified that most of the people attending the party were holding drinks and, of course, many, if not the vast majority, were under age twenty-one. Gove was asked if, as president, he bore some responsibility for underage drinking at the party.
“I mean, to be honest with you, I don’t, you know, go around and [check] breath,” he replied, then added: “I’m not trying to be smart.”
At the end of the hearing, Gove promised that the chapter would undergo alcohol education.
“I don’t think it’s right that many underage people are drinking,” Gove said. “If it was one or if it was all of them, that’s not OK. I’d like to take steps as the president to make sure that’s understood, and I’d like to reach out and help these members.”
Nevertheless, the board found the chapter responsible for alcohol violations based on several underage pledges’ admissions they were drinking at the party. The panel also found that the fraternity had held a mixer with Phi Mu, violating the terms of the social-events ban. It didn’t find the chapter guilty of hazing.
Chip Phillips, the assistant dean overseeing judicial proceedings, recommended a four-year ban on the chapter, citing a need for “significant change in its culture and behavior” and “a consistent pattern of violations.”
“It is only a matter of time before someone becomes seriously hurt or dies as a result of the actions of this organization,” Phillips said.
Gove was outraged.
“Four years of suspension is absolutely absurd,” he told the board. “I feel like bringing up stuff in the past that we have been found not guilty of is an extreme violation of our student rights. I feel like we do a lot for the community, the school, through our breast cancer awareness, our philanthropy events and community service.”
After the proceeding, Dean Phillips headed out into the hall where, he said, about fifteen members surrounded him like “a gang in a schoolyard.” Phillips, who was asked for a copy of SAE’s disciplinary file, said he felt so threatened that he asked for a police escort. (“They were there to support me,” Gove told me later. “They weren’t there to intimidate anyone.”) Mike Walker, dean of students, later called out the fraternity for its “potentially intimidating behavior and disrespectful conduct toward university staff.” The board ultimately suspended the chapter for two and one-half years. Gary Miller, UNC–Wilmington’s chancellor, rejected SAE’s appeal.
Gove and his alumni supporters then staged a public campaign to discredit the disciplinary process and the administration. Chancellor Miller, a biologist who had recently arrived from Wichita State University, was hardly an anti-Greek zealot. He had joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity as an undergraduate at William and Mary. Still, the SAE members scoured the record for bias. They challenged the impartiality of a judicial board composed of university employees, non-Greek students, and members of rival fraternities. They noted that Dean Walker was a member of rival Tau Kappa Epsilon, and the school had given a lesser penalty to that fraternity for what SAE considered a more serious infraction.
Tapping the SAE network, Gove reached over the chancellor’s head to the state capital in Raleigh. He wrote to John R. Bell IV, a UNC–Wilmington graduate who had belonged to the SAE chapter. Bell was now a Republican state representative, a rising star on his way to becoming House majority leader. Gove convinced Bell to sponsor a bill that would require colleges to permit undergraduates to hire lawyers for disciplinary hearings. As Gove pressed his case for a right-to-counsel law in the capital, he also managed to secure a coveted internship in the governor’s office.
“This fraternity is not only dear to me, but also to the other hundreds of alumni and members that it encompasses,” Gove wrote to members of the General Assembly. “That is why it was so disheartening to be the active president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon as the UNC–W Dean of Students office stripped us of our right to be a student organization.”
Gove bemoaned the “total disregard for due process,” lack of legal counsel, and “coercive investigative tactics used by an administrator to seek confessions among the students.” SAE had been victimized by “prejudice” from an administrator because the fraternity brothers have “diverse viewpoints, values or beliefs.” Gove was referring to an episode from 2008 that he believed had poisoned the administration against SAE. Late one September evening, SAE members had been playing seven-on-seven flag football against the Kappa Alpha Order. The two were natural rivals, both proud of their Southern roots. After SAE scored a touchdown, a member ran down the field, past the other team’s sidelines, holding an SAE banner that included a Confederate battle flag. Horrified, the referee told the student to stop. “Heritage, not hate,” the SAE member replied. The college suspended the chapter from the intramural program until the next school year, citing taunting and unsportsmanlike conduct. The chapter suspected it was for flying the rebel flag. “It was just two Southern fraternities playing football,” Gove told me later. “But the university considered it a hate crime, even though it was free speech. After what happened, the university targeted us.”
The higher-education establishment fought against Gove. A national group representing student-conduct boards warned that a law could give an edge to those who could afford to hire lawyers. “Whoever’s able to hire the best and most expensive attorney is likely to win the day,” said Chris Loschiavo, the group’s president, who directed judicial proceedings at the University of Florida. The University of North Carolina said the law would make discipline more adversarial, lengthy, and costly. The UNC–Wilmington Student Government Association agreed.
In July 2013, Gove’s chapter triumphed. The right-to-counsel bill won nearly unanimous support and was signed into law by Governor McCrory. It was even named in SAE’s honor: the Students and Administration Equality Act, or the SAE Act, for short.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonpartisan civil-liberties group, pushed to pass similar laws across the country. The group was concerned more about the rights of men facing potential felony charges for rape or drug dealing, not fraternity chapters confronted with the loss of college recognition. Still, Arkansas and North Dakota have passed similar laws and student right-to-counsel bills have been introduced in seven states, including Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia.
That summer, SAE gained even greater power on the UNC–Wilmington campus. Governor McCrory appointed to the university’s Board of Trustees two SAE alumni, including Michael Drummond, owner of a High Point, North Carolina, packaging firm. “My goal in joining the board, my sole purpose, was helping the fraternity,” Drummond told me. “I had heard enough. I had had enough. Either get rid of the chancellor or get the chancellor on board with helping the fraternity out.” He recalled telling Chancellor Miller as much: “You can do this one of two ways. Do the right thing and put them on campus or do it the hard way. We won’t stop till we’re done.” (Miller confirmed the conversation.) To address the SAE trustees’ concerns, the university paid $4,500 for an outside review of the chapter’s discipline. Betsy Bunting, a former vice president of legal affairs for the UNC system, backed the college’s decision. “The real problem for the fraternity is that they never disputed the facts establishing their violations of the Student Conduct Code,” Bunting concluded in her report. “They attempted to attack the procedures, but these contentions were minor and did not in any way undermine the fairness of the proceeding.”
Undaunted, SAE’s supporters intensified their attacks. They had a fierce ally in a professor named Mike Adams, a criminologist, sociologist, and free-speech advocate. Adams had defended the chapter in the Confederate flag episode. He also had his own beef with the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, which had denied him tenure. Adams had sued and ultimately won after claiming the tenure denial stemmed from his controversial conservative writings. He specialized in incendiary essays, which he shared with conservative websites and Fox News, with headlines such as “Onward, Christian Pansies” (on the necessity of Christians opposing same-sex marriage) and “Silencing Whitey” (Black Lives Matter as “an anti-white anti-free speech mob”). Adams was also a fraternity man with fond memories of his days at Mississippi State University’s Sigma Chi house in the 1980s. In February 2014, Adams wrote a scathing series of articles about what he considered the abuse of power by UNC–Wilmington administrators. “Dictators and Deans,” one installment was called. Exhibit A was the investigation of SAE: “The idea of questioning kids about potentially criminal conduct without permitting their attorneys to be present (and while facing university counsel) violated widely accepted values of fundamental fairness. The problem isn’t drunken students. The problem is administrators who are drunk on their own power.” Adams, who later became the chapter’s faculty adviser, told me he wasn’t sure what had actually happened. “Whatever the misbehavior was—it was relatively minor,” he said.
By the end of the school year, with the board’s blessing, Chancellor Miller was publicly looking for another job. Supporters took out full-page ads calling for him to stay and some suggested SAE alumni had run him out of town. After only two years on the job, Miller left in July 2014 to become chancellor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. Former trustees’ chairwoman Linda Pearce called Miller “a victim of North Carolina good old boy politics.” Some trustees said Miller’s supporters had exaggerated the fraternity’s power on the board, which had become disenchanted with his leadership. But Drummond, the SAE board member who had given Miller the ultimatum, told me, “If he had made friends with us and helped us, he’d probably still be there.” Miller told me he didn’t want to rehash what happened, except to say, “Our whole goal was to protect students. We made the right decision, and I still feel that way.”
Local alumni also took aim at SAE’s national office, which had kicked out Gove and other members of the fraternity. They again turned to Goolsby, the state senator and trial lawyer who had sat by Gove’s side at the disciplinary hearing. “I have been in the practice of law for twenty years and have conducted hundreds of trials,” Goolsby wrote. “Never have I appeared before a more ridiculous, kangaroo court. The ability to present a fair rebuttal and evidence was virtually nonexistent. Your chapter did not get a fair hearing.” In February 2015, SAE’s Supreme Council reversed itself. It reinstated the chapter and reactivated all the members. The next year, the local alumni won an SAE award, recognizing them “for giving outstanding assistance and guidance to their chapter.”
Now, it was just a matter of returning to campus. Here, the chapter ran into another barrier: William Sederburg, the interim chancellor. Sederburg, a former college president in Utah and Michigan, was skeptical that the chapter had learned its lesson. Bell, the state legislator and SAE alumnus, invited Sederburg for a meeting. It would be at the Cape Fear Men’s Club, where SAE had held its pinning ceremony. Sederburg, a former Michigan Republican state senator, knew a thing or two about optics. “You didn’t want to be seen as a public official in the Cape Fear Men’s Club,” he told me. “It’s known as a bastion of ultraconservatism. It doesn’t have blacks, Jews or women as members.” The chancellor refused the meeting, and SAE just waited him out. In July, the university appointed a permanent chancellor, and the administration agreed to let SAE back on campus.
Even then, the chapter remained defiant. SAE insisted that all communications between the fraternity and the university be in writing—and include a representative of both the alumni and the national staff. SAE declined to submit to the rules of the Fraternity and Sorority Life Office because members considered them undue scrutiny based on “misleading statistics about Greek life.” As a result, the chapter couldn’t join the campus Interfraternity Council like other fully sanctioned fraternities.
Sederburg, now a senior scholar with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said the university shouldn’t have agreed to the chapter’s return because it hadn’t accepted responsibility for its behavior. “When you do this sort of agreement with a student group, we want them to tell us. ‘We really want to clean up our act.’ That hasn’t happened,” he told me. “The attitude here is, ‘We’ve been wronged, and we want to fight politically.’”
On its website, the chapter now boasts of its victory in “the fight to end discriminatory practices against fraternities.” A chapter with a member who had displayed a Confederate flag and had met in a club that had excluded blacks was now using the language of Martin Luther King Jr. to defend its cause. An online history of the SAE Act quoted King’s famed letter from the Birmingham jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
IN APRIL 2016, I flew to Wilmington to meet the members of the victorious chapter, men who had defeated two college presidents and inspired their own law. Gove looked the part of a former fraternity chapter president: neatly pressed khaki shorts, a long-sleeved button-down shirt, and loafers with no socks. But Gove was no preppy legacy. He was born in Key West, Florida, but grew up in Raleigh, where his mother worked as a lab technician at North Carolina State University. His father, a former lobsterman, worked as a pilot who guided vessels through the currents of New York harbor. When Gove rushed SAE as a freshman, he wasn’t sure he would fit in. But he immediately felt comfortable with the low-key men he met at the chapter. “Everybody thinks fraternity guys are rich and privileged, and they like to get drunk,” he told me. “But you have to know, it’s more than that.” At Wilmington, dues were $450 a semester; and unlike the grand Southern chapters, this one doesn’t have a house. “This isn’t Alabama,” he said. “We have surfers and fishermen.” He was impressed that the older guys took the time to have conversations about his interests and weren’t just looking to sign up as many students as they could. Gove saw members making a lifelong commitment. “These would be my best friends in years to come,” he said.
When I met him, Gove had graduated from UNC–Wilmington and had enrolled at Campbell University’s law school in Raleigh. Not surprisingly, he wrote his law-school-application essay about the SAE Act. “I learned more through the alumni and the fraternity because of what we went through than I did studying at UNC–W as far as life lessons go,” he told me. “If you truly believe, don’t give up even if it looks like the odds are against you.” Gove said his chapter may not always have followed the rules but had nevertheless been unfairly treated. “I’m not going to say we’re all angels and that no one ever drinks,” he said. “But it’s unfair to hold the entire chapter accountable for the actions of a few bad apples.”
His benefactors awaited us at a fish restaurant, where we sat on a deck in the eighty-degree sunshine overlooking yachts and a drawbridge on the Intracoastal Waterway. Parks Griffin, the governor’s fund-raiser, and Dennis Burgard, owner of a real-estate company and one of the two SAE UNC–Wilmington trustees, were both in their fifties, graying and distinguished. Griffin grew up in Durham, North Carolina, the son of a dentist and City Council member. In 1977, he helped found the chapter just as Greek organizations began their campus revival. Griffin was now the kind of civic-minded businessman at the heart of many a small city. He had been on the boards of the UNC–Wilmington athletic booster club and the North Carolina Azalea Festival, one of Wilmington’s biggest attractions, as well as the Cape Fear Museum and the Wilmington Airport Authority.
As we sipped iced tea and ate chowder, it became clear to me that the alumni had paid little mind to what had happened on the night the pledge was hospitalized.
“The members said we’re angels, the university said we’re devils,” Burgard said. “I knew the truth was somewhere in between.”
In their view, modern universities were overrun with a growing cadre of bureaucrats eager to justify their own existence by targeting fraternities, even though young men drink elsewhere on campus.
“The amount of rules placed on fraternities is crazy,” said Burgard, citing forty pages from the dean’s office. “Any group of nineteen- to twenty-year-old guys are going to drink.”
Griffin continued along that vein: “The chess club doesn’t have to go to sexual-assault training. The chess club doesn’t have to go to a class about alcohol. The university is saying, ‘You fraternity guys are the problem.’ It stigmatizes them.”
The SAE alumni were making a common fraternity argument; their prominence on campus made them a convenient target, a scapegoat for typical male behavior. It relied on the assumption, disproved by decades of public-health research: that everyone drank as heavily as Greek men.
Later that day, I met five members of the newest crew of SAE members for a tour of the university. The chapter had recently raised $1,000 for breast-cancer patients. Members also volunteered at a children’s hospital, helping them secure $10,000 in donations by staffing one of its charitable events. But because they no longer belonged to the Interfraternity Council, they couldn’t compete in intramural sports or join Greek-wide philanthropy events. For a while, they couldn’t have mixers with sororities, though the rules had since been relaxed.
“The campus isn’t on our side,” said Austin Bates, a senior. “The university was very reluctant to welcome us back.”
It was already dark when we walked inside the student union, the site of the chapter’s disciplinary hearing with the administration. It was a bright, airy building, its lobby lined with flags, each bearing the colors and symbols of a fraternity: garnet and gold for Pi Kappa Alpha; azure, crimson, and gold for Delta Kappa Epsilon; purple, green, and gold for Lambda Chi Alpha. The flags’ grandeur and air of permanence made the Greek-letter groups seem more like members of the United Nations Security Council than social clubs for adolescents and young men. One flag was conspicuously missing—SAE’s. The purple-and-gold banner no longer adorned the entryway because the chapter wouldn’t agree to university regulations. It stung, but members weren’t backing down, not even to display their colors. “It would be nice, to say the least,” said Derek Linder, the twenty-one-year-old chapter president. “But we know who we are.”