True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  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 gi
ving 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.”

  PART TWO

  LEGACY

  5

  SING, BROTHERS, SING

  “Who Thinks of the Rights and Feelings of Others”

  More than forty freshman fraternity pledges gathered in the cavernous dance hall of their University of Oklahoma chapter house as upperclassmen stood on a balcony. When the pledges looked up, they could see a Sigma Alpha Epsilon crest and its symbols of honor: a knight, a shi
eld, and a phoenix rising from the ashes, representing the fraternity’s post–Civil War revival. The students knew they were lucky to be part of such an august institution. On the glorious fall days when the Oklahoma Sooners played home football games, alumni would gather to drink beer and whiskey, listen to live music, reminisce about their days in the chapter, and exchange stories of boom and bust in the oil patch. When the chapter house opened in 1965, the beige brick split-level residence, built in the Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie Style, had inspired wonder and envy on Oklahoma’s leafy fraternity row. Relying on wealthy alumni and financial backing from the university, it had cost the equivalent of $4 million today. A high wall ringed the house, reinforcing a sense of exclusivity and secrecy, as if it were a diplomatic compound in some faraway capital. Almost twice the size of the Oklahoma governor’s mansion, the house boasted air-conditioning, a poolroom, and a multiplex stereo system. It slept eighty, including suites for its president, treasurer, and house mother.

  The setting reflected the chapter’s prestige and influence, which rivaled the grandest Southern houses. To a degree not fully appreciated by outsiders, members of SAE had helped build the state’s flagship campus in Norman, about twenty miles south of Oklahoma City. The university’s art museum was named after Fred Jones Jr., an SAE member who died in a plane crash in 1950 during his senior year. His parents, who made a fortune running one of the nation’s largest networks of Ford auto dealerships, donated the money for the building. Two members of the chapter belonged to the family that founded Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores, a main sponsor of Sooners athletics and a major donor to the university. Another SAE alumnus used his private jet to fly football coaches on scouting trips. SAE members sat on the board of the university’s charitable foundation, and many others could be counted among the university’s most loyal donors. The young men on the dance floor that evening in February 2015 knew they were now part of a tradition that could take them as far as they wished to go in Oklahoma—and beyond.