True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  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 the
y 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.