“Whose Conduct Proceeds from… an Acute Sense of Propriety”
On a cloudless spring afternoon in Newport Beach, California, Bradley Cohen was on his home turf. As T. Boone Pickens, the famed oil tycoon, flew in on his Gulfstream jet, and other guests made their way to the Marriott Hotel and Spa with its stunning views of the Pacific Ocean, Cohen, Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s national president, prepared for what he knew would be a contentious 159th annual convention. Cohen was under fire. He had been barnstorming the country to defend an unpopular decision: eliminating a fraternity’s most cherished tradition—pledging. Cohen believed the months-long initiation period for new members had become embroiled in horrific abuse. Now, traditionalists had gathered against Cohen. In a move unprecedented in the modern era, they were running a candidate to oppose his vice president and designated successor. His legacy, not to mention the lives of future undergraduates, hung in the balance.
The SAE men, some in seersucker suits and bow ties, sat outside in the hotel’s rose garden, where Cohen had been married twenty-four years before. Inside, on a stage, Cohen interviewed Pickens. In his trademark Oklahoma twang, the eighty-seven-year-old investor recounted his own hazing at Texas A&M and Oklahoma State. The beating with a paddle left his behind red for a week. He derided political correctness and said he was “lucky” his college basketball team had had no black players because it gave him the chance to compete. Pickens spoke of his conservative politics, his worship of Ronald Reagan, and his disdain for Barack Obama.
The mostly white crowd—albeit with more than a few Latino and black members—applauded.
It wasn’t exactly the message Cohen hoped to send at the convention, and it certainly wouldn’t have played well on most college campuses. But Pickens’s star turn represented an important vote of confidence in Cohen’s leadership. Pickens had questioned SAE’s decision to ban pledging but eventually came to publicly endorse it. Cohen needed all the help he could get in challenging this tradition.
SAE’s national president seemed ideally suited to the task: the fifty-two-year-old Cohen was both a fraternity insider and outsider. The son of a champion athlete, he was square-jawed, six foot one, and muscular. A self-made Southern California real-estate entrepreneur, he and his wife, Kim, a former stage actress, had three children, the eldest in high school. Like Pickens, Cohen was a Republican who revered Ronald Reagan. Cohen also reveled in the fraternity’s more nostalgic traditions: he once suggested that flowers and sorority serenades could be antidotes to misogyny and sexual assault. “We have to get back to the old ways,” he told the men during a seminar on the annual leadership cruise.
Yet Cohen’s very presence as the head of this convention in June 2015 was remarkable. He was SAE’s first Jewish president. In a fraternity that had long prized its ties to families tracing their roots to the antebellum South, he was also an immigrant, a naturalized American citizen who spoke with an accent. It was the lilting, musical cadence of his native South Africa, where he grew up under the policy of racial separation known as apartheid. When Cohen was a teenager, his family had fled to America because of fears of violence as the regime collapsed. Because of his background, Cohen understood the need to respond to critics who called for more diversity in fraternity chapters after the racist Oklahoma video became public. Still, when asked how he felt being part of a racist organization, he had a stock answer that demonstrated tone-deafness to matters of race: this white native of apartheid South Africa described himself as SAE’s first “African American president.” Although Cohen supported the hiring of SAE’s first full-time diversity director, he, nonetheless, remained true to his conservative bona fides. He opposed any kind of affirmative action. “This organization was not going to enter into an era of quotas,” he said.
But Cohen understood—and rejected—SAE’s racist and anti-Semitic history. He once brandished a 111-year-old volume of the fraternity’s laws so he could tell hundreds of shocked undergraduates about the “Aryan” requirement and the prohibition of members with a parent who was “a full-blooded Jew.” He considered himself a case study in the evolution of the fraternity. Now he was offering a vision of an organization that no longer forced young men to drink until they passed out. To illustrate this renewal of purpose, he liked to wear a necktie emblazoned with SAE’s cherished symbol.
“We’re like the phoenix,” he would say. “We’re rising from the ashes. It’s a new beginning.”
BRAD COHEN’S TITLE, “Eminent Supreme Archon,” made him sound like a king ruling by divine right. But, in fact, he headed a volunteer board with little power to rein in the fraternity’s alarming behavior. Until the adults in headquarters confronted that reality—and changed it—they were doomed to oversee a never-ending parade of insurance claims, court judgments, injuries, rape allegations, and deaths. To a large degree, fraternities’ legal strategy depended on the national fraternity keeping its distance so the organizations could avoid liability. But that strategic distance is not a recent phenomenon. The political structure of most fraternities resembled the United States before the Constitution, when the federal government had little authority. At SAE, each chapter functioned, by and large, autonomously. The national organization could confer a charter—and suspend it. It could offer guidance, but its national staff of thirty-nine was hardly in a position to police 15,000 undergraduates. Most important, any significant decision—any change to fraternity law—was subject to a vote at a national convention, held once every two years. A two-thirds majority had to approve a change. Because only 1 percent of alumni were active volunteers, undergraduates were overrepresented at the convention. Quite simply, the kids were in charge.
The power of adolescents within the organization had doomed SAE’s two recent attempts to curb drinking. In 2011 and 2013, SAE’s board proposed banning alcohol in chapter houses. Over a decade, that approach had reduced injuries, deaths, and sexual assaults at rival Phi Delta Theta, which required dry houses starting in 2000. Its claims plunged 90 percent, and its per-man liability insurance fee decreased by half, to $80 a year. SAE brothers paid as much as $340.
“If your founders were in this room today considering all the facts and information, what would they do? Would they allow your culture to be defined by alcohol in Animal House?” Christopher Lapple, Phi Delta Theta’s national president had asked the SAE convention in 2013.
Perhaps they wouldn’t. But Chris Smith, president of SAE’s Florida State University chapter, would. “FSU is known for being a party school,” Smith said. “Kids go there for the social atmosphere, you know. They go there for the football. I mean, the academics is mediocre, I mean, I’ll be honest.”
Smith said SAE couldn’t enforce the policy: “Going dry is just going to force a lot of these chapters to just blatantly lie to the nationals. That’s not really going to solve anything.” He said eliminating alcohol had eroded Phi Delta Theta’s social capital at Florida State.
“The chapter’s culture has completely changed,” he said. “I mean it’s not very often you can literally tell, like, the different pledge classes just by the way they look. I’m not trying to be superficial here, but that’s the case. One of the most prestigious chapters at my school has now become a laughingstock.”
A brother from a decidedly non-party school agreed: Dylan Moses, president of the chapter at Johns Hopkins University.
“It seems as though their time away from the chapter collegiate and into the bureaucracy that is the SAE national has left them with a deficit of what it means to be an undergraduate brother of SAE and what college life entails,” Moses said.
With the bombast of a young man impressed with his own education, not to mention the sound of his own words, Moses called the older men cowards.
“While I’m all in favor of keeping the honor of our fraternity sacred and our virtue safe, I feel that it is a mistake to quiver in the fear that has been shown by this council,” Moses said. “Drinking in our houses doesn’t seem to be the issue. Rather the issue seems to be drunk brothers doing dumb things, which unfortunately is a commonality amongst most fraternity men, sorority women, and society in general.”
Moses treated the virtue and honor of the True Gentleman as an afterthought. He defended the inalienable right to be drunk and stupid.
THAT YEAR, 2013, when Cohen became SAE’s president, he began to realize that he would have to challenge the right of adolescents and young adults to wield this kind of power over the fraternity. Otherwise, he feared, it was headed for extinction. To Cohen, this was a frightening and unacceptable prospect. He counted his SAE initiation as among the most moving ceremonies of his life, along with his wedding and the naming of his children. Cohen credited the fraternity for his life’s trajectory. He was sixteen and a high school junior when his family immigrated to Phoenix, Arizona. Cohen’s father, Desmond Vernon Cohen, a doctor then in his fifties, faced the challenge of establishing an obstetrics and gynecology practice in a new country. He left behind deep ties to his former nation, having twice represented South Africa in the Olympics on the swimming and water polo teams. Wanting to stay close to his family, Cohen enrolled at the University of Arizona at Tucson. As a foreign student—and like many at big public universities—he felt lost. “I hated my freshman year,” he told me. “I was lonely. I was in a dormitory. I didn’t know where or what anything was.”
As a sophomore, when SAE alumni started recruiting to reestablish a chapter, Cohen jumped at the chance to belong to a fraternity. From the beginning, Cohen understood the duality of Greek life. The chapter had been shut down in the late 1970s for hazing. Members had branded pledges’ buttocks with “Phi Alpha,” the SAE salutation and motto. Once the chapter reopened, Cohen had also been hazed, if gently. He had been required to do menial tasks and was the subject of practical jokes such as being made to sit for an entirely fictional national exam. “It was just silly old pranks from way back when,” he said. “But, by today’s standards, they wouldn’t fly.”
In the fledgling chapter, Cohen rose quickly, serving two terms as president. He enjoyed theme parties, including one where he dressed as a Zulu warrior in a scanty leopard-print outfit. (Today, of course, the affair would be considered offensive on a college campus.) “My parents had no idea what fraternity was all about, and literally watched me grow from a shy and timid boy to a confident young man because of SAE,” said Cohen, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and business administration in 1985. By the end of his undergraduate career, Cohen had helped build one of the fraternity’s largest chapters, with 140 members. Cohen’s hustle impressed SAE’s national leadership, which offered him the position of director of expansion at the Illinois headquarters. In two years, Cohen helped establish more than twenty new chapters, including one at Yale. In 1988, Cohen moved to Southern California and made his name in the real-estate escrow business. In 2009, after the housing market collapsed in the financial crisis, he opened his own company, Granite Escrow Services, which grew to have annual revenue of more than $10 million, with almost one hundred employees and seven offices.
Cohen kept up the Greek tradition of philanthropy. He focused on a personal cause. He and his eldest son, Devon, have Type 1 diabetes. Both were diagnosed at age eleven. Cohen served on the executive board of the University of California at Irvine diabetes research center. In 2012, Devon held a fund-raiser for his bar mitzvah that raised almost $30,000 for diabetes research. He also donated two hundred teddy bears with medical identification bracelets to Children’s Hospital of Orange County. As he started high school, Devon shared his father’s love for SAE. He liked to wear a purple-and-gold bow tie and knew the fraternity’s handshake. But the Cohen family knew that, for a diabetic, heavy drinking could be fatal. “As a mother, I would have been scared to put him in an environment like that,” Kim Cohen told me. It was a stunning admission. The wife of SAE’s president wasn’t sure her son would be safe in the fraternity. Neither was the president.
Outside pressure mounted. In December 2013, my colleague David Glovin and I published a 5,000-word Bloomberg News article that detailed nine drinking, hazing, and drug-related fatalities at SAE, which we called “the deadliest fraternity.” That same month, a drunk SAE member at Washington and Lee University drove off the road after a party and slammed into a tree, killing a passenger, a twenty-one-year-old female student. The next month, a drunk freshman at Alma College in Michigan left an SAE party wearing a polo shirt and no coat. Two days later, he was found dead of hypothermia. Lloyd’s of London became increasingly concerned about the risk of insuring SAE and threatened to drop coverage. In February, Cohen learned that JPMorgan Chase & Co., which handled the SAE foundation’s investment account, was reconsidering its relationship. JPMorgan worried its association with SAE could tarnish its reputation. “If JPMorgan is going to turn us down, who’s next?” Cohen asked himself. “What if universities start saying SAE’s not welcome?”
Cohen and the four other members of SAE’s volunteer board, the Supreme Council, worried that the loss of insurance could end the fraternity. As they had twice failed to ban drinking in chapter houses, they decided to fight hazing instead. But how? The fraternity had long ago banned it, to no avail. They decided then to outlaw pledging. The pledge period was the time freshmen were most vulnerable to abuse and most likely to die of alcohol poisoning. The decision was revolutionary, as much for its approach as for its substance. The members of the Supreme Council decided to take action without putting it to a convention vote. They had learned from experience with the proposed alcohol ban; they might never get the two-thirds majority required for passage. What’s more, they decided they couldn’t wait until the next convention. Cohen invoked an emergency exception. Out of his own pocket, he paid $800 an hour for an attorney to review SAE’s laws in order to defend the decision.
Even then, the men knew the council could be voted out of office at the next convention. The volunteer members could live with that consequence. But Cohen was especially worried about Blaine “Boomer” Ayers, the only leader approving the decision who worked full time for SAE. The $150,000-a-year executive director had four young daughters. Ayers, the Kentucky native known for his bow ties and sessions on etiquette, was a teetotaler who cautioned undergraduates about making the fraternity the center of their lives. In his view, it should be faith, family, and country. Ayers, who had been hired in 2011, backed the decision without reservation. “How many more new members have to die before everyone is willing to change the way we operate?” he asked.
So the council sketched out a plan. Under the new initiation system, SAE chapters would extend recruits a “bid,” or invitation to join, and students who accepted would become full members within ninety-six hours. Cohen kept the plan under wraps. He feared that hazers would accelerate their abuse of pledges before the program was eliminated. On March 7, coinciding with the celebration of the anniversary of the fraternity’s founding, Cohen announced the pledging ban—the same day JPMorgan finally terminated its relationship with SAE.
“As an organization, we have been plagued with too much bad behavior, which has resulted in loss of lives, negative press and large lawsuits,” he said in a video address.
The move made national headlines, drawing praise from many quarters that had once condemned SAE. E-mails and phone messages poured in from college administrators, fraternity members, and families whose sons had suffered from hazing. The most meaningful reaction came from the Starkey parents, whose son had died of alcohol poisoning during an SAE initiation ritual at California Polytechnic State University. “I will tell you my proudest moment was seeing the relief of the Starkey family—that their son hadn’t died in vain,” Cohen said.
But the pledge ban immediately stirred a backlash. “It doesn’t feel right,” Christian Couch, a twenty-one-year-old junior from California State University at Long Beach, told me. “You just sign up and you’re automatically in. It’s the easy way out.”
On a Facebook page called “SAE Cause for Change,” posts warned that brotherly bonds would fade or pledging would go underground. They questioned whether the SAE board had the authority to ban pledging.
Some angry students complained that the new recruits would become “insta-bros.”
“Doing away with the pledge program is like giving all the kids on a youth soccer team trophies at the end of the season for doing ‘a good job,’” one critic wrote. “People need to face adversity in order to feel accomplished.”
By June 2015, the next convention, Cohen had a revolt on his hands.
AT THE OPENING session, four hundred members filed into the Marriott resort’s ballroom, finding their places behind rows of long tables organized by region. Flanked by two flags—the American and SAE’s purple and gold—Cohen delivered an impassioned defense of his board’s action.
“We were faced with being labeled, correctly so, the deadliest fraternity in America, whether we liked it or not,” Cohen said. “We had killed more undergraduate members through forced alcohol hazing than any other fraternity or sorority out there, and it was time to make a change. This wasn’t five guys sitting in a dark room and some conspiracy theory to override and screw over the convention. This was a survival mode to save and protect SAE. We would not have survived.”
Cohen painted a grim picture: “I am not an alarmist. I am a realist. And I am here to tell you, brothers, if we hadn’t acted as quickly and as swiftly as we did, and we would’ve had another incident, God help us all. Our insurance might’ve been canceled. It guaranteed would’ve gone up to the point we couldn’t afford it. Universities would’ve said we’re done with SAE. And can you imagine Oklahoma hitting two months ago, and SAE still having all these hazing incidents?”
As Cohen wound down his speech, he told the members they still hadn’t tackled the most significant problem: “Every one of our deaths, every one of our closings of a chapter we had problems with has in some way or shape or form involved alcohol.” He warned of the lawsuits over the deaths at Arizona State and Cornell, as well as the sexual assaults at Johns Hopkins.
“How does a chapter allow anybody into their house, not only a minor—I mean, an underage drinker, but a minor—who then got brutally raped in the bathroom?”
In closing the speech, he suggested the worst could be over. “This last eighteen months has probably been one of the most challenging times in our fraternity’s history since the Civil War, bar none. Despite what we’ve read, despite all the negative publicity, despite the embarrassment, despite the upheaval, we have come through it shining. We have made this fraternity better than it was, and I am proud more than ever to be an SAE.”
Ayers made just as impassioned a plea. “We were getting questions: ‘Why are you not doing more, and why didn’t you do more to protect my son?’ And, as a parent and your executive director, that haunted me.” The fraternity would vote on a measure that would give the Supreme Council the authority to act between conventions. Their decision would then later be subject to a convention vote—but requiring a simple, not a two-thirds, majority. The change would empower the council as never before.
The opposition complained that Cohen and his board were violating democratic traditions. Their presidential candidate was Darin Patton, a Florida lawyer and financial planner, as well as a former University of Central Florida student-body president and homecoming king.
“The Supreme Council ruled by decree when they changed fraternity laws without the consent of the fraternity convention,” said Marco Pena, a Central Florida classmate, hospital executive, and unsuccessful Republican candidate for the statehouse. “One person or even five should not make the decisions for the fraternity. That’s why we have these laws.”
One of the dissenters was Michael Scarborough, the former national president. Scarborough had been furious when Cohen shut down his chapter at Salisbury University for hazing. Before, he had been one of Cohen’s fans. In 2009, Scarborough had nominated Cohen for a board position and praised him effusively. “Brother Cohen is the true Renaissance man, the true gentleman and a true leader,” he had said. “This fraternity certainly would be poorer without him.” Now, he was supporting a candidate for a board position who opposed Cohen’s approach. Scarborough later told me he was skeptical of the ban, believing it would push hazing underground. Mostly, he objected to how Cohen took action. “It was an edict,” he said. “This was something that was shoved down a lot of people’s throats. Candidly, it wasn’t graciously delivered.”
Austin Alcala, an undergraduate from Ball State University, said many in his chapter opposed ending pledgeship. Even more, he worried that its authority would lead to something else: an alcohol ban.
“Basically, this gives the Supreme Council the ability to remove—I know that alcohol-free housing has been talked about without our permission—giving them the ability to basically initiate alcohol-free housing without the convention’s approval,” Alcala said. “I honestly believe the convention should be the ones deciding this for us as a community, not five people.”
Despite several days of complaints and opposition, Steven Churchill, Cohen’s vice president, won, as did the measure giving the board the authority to change laws between conventions. Cohen’s legacy survived.
During his tenure, Cohen and his council had shut down nineteen chapters. Even as SAE opened new chapters, membership dropped from a peak of almost 15,000 to 12,000 by 2017. But several facts were undeniable. Its per-member cost for liability insurance dropped 15 percent. Most significant, the fraternity hadn’t had another death related to hazing or drinking.
Cohen had offered a path forward. The question hung over the convention: Would undergraduates continue to take it?
ON THE FINAL night of the convention, the men gathered again in the ballroom, around tables with purple tablecloths and gold napkins and centerpieces the size of chandeliers. SAE had brought in a tailor to measure members for tuxedos, and many of the college students wore black tie. Past “Eminent Supreme Archons” filed in, wearing fraternity pins and service medals on their lapels as they escorted their wives on their arms. Earlier, on a ninety-foot yacht that SAE had hired for an evening cruise, Kim Cohen had told me she was now ready for her son to join SAE in college. The ban on pledging reassured her. “He can go, 100 percent,” she said. “He’ll do it the right way, with the right guys.” Later, on bended knee, Cohen and hundreds of men serenaded her. In a turquoise dress, with glitter on her eyelids, she looked again like the actress making her curtain call. She clutched a bouquet of sunflowers while the sea of men sang to her: “Violet, violet. You’re the fairest flower to me. Violet, violet. Emblem of fraternity.”
Cohen, who reveled in a sentimental gesture, never passed up the chance to make a speech. Some members made under-over bets based on the length of his addresses. A safe wager would be fifty minutes. For this, his swan song, Cohen invited his three children onto the stage. Cohen’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Syd, wore a purple dress with a gold bow in her blonde hair. Devon, fifteen and now nearly as tall as his father, wore a suit with a purple-and-gold tie.
“Syd, you’ll always be my little SAE sweetheart,” he told his daughter.
Then, he turned to Devon and his brother, Zach, Syd’s twin.
“You two boys, may you all be SAEs, brothers of mine, someday.”
Cohen loved the rhetorical set piece, and brothers would also bet on which one would appear once he stepped before a microphone. One was an early twentieth-century verse by the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. He didn’t disappoint. Cohen’s accent and the timeworn language evoked a British boarding school:
One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
’Tis the set of the sails,
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.
IT WAS A poem about agency, a belief in the ability to shift course in an often hostile world. On this night, the betting men won the jackpot. Cohen offered both of his favorite speeches. As it became clear where he was headed, Cohen heard cheers in the audience, perhaps even the rustling of a few bills changing hands:
People say fraternity men are nothing more than a bunch of guys who lie, drink, steal and swear. I say, yes we are. We lie down every single night, grateful for this incredible experience we call SAE. We drink from the fountain of youth when we initiate young members into the bloodline of this fraternity. We steal a little time to give back to those less fortunate than ourselves. We swear that we’ll leave this fraternity better than we’ve found it.
Cohen wanted to confront the reality of the fraternity man, not deny it. He seized on the double meaning of powerful verbs—lie, drink, steal, and swear. They promised a road to redemption. As someone who reveled in language, Cohen believed the meaning of these words could be reversed, as if a kind of linguistic alchemy could reclaim the soul of the fraternity.