True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  Goodwyn and Benton Hughes, SAE’s rush chairman, said they had courted a black student named Justin Woolfolk in 2014. Like Goodwyn and Hughes, Woolfolk attended Montgomery Academy, where he was a tailback on the football team. “He would have been the first black SAE,” Goodwyn told me. Later, Woolfolk told me he understood the historic nature of joining the chapter. At Montgomery Academy, one of his teachers, an Alabama graduate, pulled him into his office and told him, “You know what a big deal it is.” Woolfolk said he felt welcome when he spent time in the SAE house during his rush visit in high school. “I wasn’t treated like a token black person,” he said. “They embraced me like I was anyone else.” Woolfolk ended up going to Birmingham Southern College instead because he could continue to play football. Without changing recruitment practices, Goodwyn’s approach—looking at only a handful of black students from fraternity feeder schools—guarantees any progress will be slow. Still, Goodwyn predicted that one day the chapter will accept a black member. “It will definitely happen,” he said. “It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of who and when.”

  PART THREE

  REBIRTH

  8

  THE PHOENIX

  “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 no
t 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 befo
re 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.”