“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 sw
ear. 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.
9
THE LIONS
“Whose Deed Follows His Word”
The lions had always bothered Chris Hallam. Standing on either side of the entrance to the chapter house, they looked forlorn and neglected, their paint chipped, discolored, and faded, as if they were animals left behind in the cages of a traveling carnival. The sad cats lacked the right scale. Maybe half the size of the real thing, they were far too small for the white columns in front of the once-grand home. The statues sent a message about the state of the chapter—an accurate one, Hallam understood quite quickly.
The young men of Ohio State University’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter had turned to him for help. They needed a new volunteer adviser. They elected Hallam, though “elected” might have been too strong a word. After a few beers, they sent him an e-mail. Hallam, in his late twenties, had never even belonged to a fraternity. When he was an undergraduate at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, Theta Chi had blackballed him. Now, working as an Ohio State residence hall director, he had grown to like some of SAE’s members. With his master’s in higher education and student affairs, Hallam also appreciated a challenge, a way to use his newfound knowledge about adolescent development and social dynamics. Energetic, trim, and youthful, even if his hair hadn’t survived his post-collegiate life, Hallam had always wondered about the potential of fraternities to mold young men. Here was his chance to make a difference.
The lions were the least of his problems. The membership rolls had atrophied to several dozen, hardly enough to fill the dilapidated house. The boiler kept breaking, lead paint needed removal, and thousands of dollars appeared to be missing from the chapter treasury. Its few members were so disorganized that they had thrown a philanthropy event, a sorority powder-puff football game, that had actually managed to lose $50. They screamed at each other in chapter meetings. Some arrived drunk. The house even had a “slush fund” for alcohol. A pledge had nearly passed out after being told to drink a bottle of vodka. The “pledge educator” used to teach new members how to break beer bottles on their own heads. Although the lions were the chapter’s official mascot, another animal might have better embodied the state of the fraternity: its pet rabbit, which left droppings all over the house.
Yet SAE at Ohio State had a proud history. On the day of its installation in 1892, three other Ohio chapters came to mark the celebration in Columbus, Ohio, in a suite of rooms at the luxurious Chittenden Hotel, which then served as the residence of Governor William McKinley. To mark the occasion, SAE made McKinley an honorary member. Later, McKinley wore his SAE badge at his inauguration as the twenty-fifth US president in 1897 and, to this day, the only one to have belonged to the fraternity.
Ohio State remains fertile territory for fraternities. One of the largest public universities in America, with a football stadium bigger than those housing NFL teams, Ohio State has 60,000 students, and its size can make the bonds of Greek life seem especially attractive. But the twenty-first century had been unkind to SAE. In 2001, Ohio State administrators shut the chapter after 108 years on campus. The members had become best known for throwing beer bottles and frozen water balloons at pedestrians, cars, and other houses. One of the chapter’s own advisers had called its behavior “inexcusable.”
Now, to turn the chapter around, Hallam befriended the young men while setting boundaries. He met each member for a meal and joined the chapter’s Sunday dinners at a Japanese steak house. He visited before parties and sat with members as they watched professional wrestling on TV. He encouraged the men to require ties and jackets at chapter meetings, which he attended himself.
“You can choose to break the rules,” he would tell them. “But, if you are caught, no one gets to complain, and you admit it. My job comes first. I would never lie to the university or hide anything.”
Hallam urged the men to dream big. He said they should compete for national SAE honors and, one day, the John O. Moseley Zeal Award, which honors the chapter in the United States that best reflects the values of a True Gentleman.
The response from his charges was less than enthusiastic: “Do not be an idiot,” a member named Kevin Bowen told him. “You’re looking for greatness. We’re just not there.”
Hallam also insisted the chapter would get new lions. Bowen was skeptical. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “We’re never getting new lions.”
The adviser viewed the young men, like the house, as fixer-uppers. Hallam had to ask the university to make an exception for one prospective member with poor grades. “I didn’t know where I was going in life,” the member would recall later. “Hallam saw something in me and put his neck on the line.” To fulfill Hallam’s vision, the chapter changed the way it recruited new members. Officers ignored legacy preference and began judging prospects on their merits. The chapter welcomed more first-generation college students and members of minority groups. In 2009, the brothers initiated Hallam himself as a member of the fraternity. “It’s a privilege to be an SAE,” Hallam told me. “I waited thirteen years for that badge.”
Hallam was proudest of how the chapter’s members shifted their attitudes. The brothers looked out for each other. Over the years, three members had been hospitalized for depression; one had tried to kill himself by drinking Drano. The members rallied around the men and visited them in the hospital, which eased the transition back onto the campus and through graduation. “I’m here for you,” individual members would tell the returning brothers. After the racist Oklahoma video surfaced in 2015, the chapter hosted a campus-wide diversity presentation and helped minority fraternities raise money for their philanthropy events.
Hallam, who is openly gay, worked from the beginning to make the chapter more welcoming to brothers who didn’t fit the traditional vision of fraternity masculinity. When he started out as an adviser, Hallam heard a member lash out at a chapter meeting by calling another member “a pansy faggot.”
“You know I’m gay, right?” he said, pulling the member aside.
A couple of years later, he witnessed the same student admonish a housemate who said “faggot”: “We don’t use that word here.” In 2012, Donovan Golich, a freshman member, stood up in front of thirty-nine pledges and let them know he was gay. “It was really a nonissue with them,” said Golich, who said he would bring his boyfriend to chapter events. “You come as you are. We are going to accept you that way.”
The Ohio State chapter’s greatest test came in February 2015, when Mike Moore, the president, began hearing reports of a member’s aggressive treatment of women. The culminating incident occurred during spring break in Panama City Beach, Florida, when the member brought a woman to his hotel room, then allegedly performed a sex act on her after she told him to stop. “He eventually stopped and apologized profusely, but she still felt incredibly uncomfortable and was not OK with what happened,” a member told Moore in a text. Moore, who had not been on the trip, interviewed members and the woman, who was also an Ohio State University student. She confirmed what had happened. “That was pretty much it for me,” Moore told me. “I didn’t feel comfortable with this anymore.”
Moore called Hallam, who had since taken a position as associate director of housing at the University of Cincinnati but was still overseeing SAE volunteer advisers. SAE expelled the fraternity member accused of the sexual assault. Moore s
hared his report with the university and also testified before a disciplinary proceeding. It was difficult for him to turn on a brother, but he felt he needed to protect the fraternity. “I knew this was not the chapter I joined,” Moore said.
Soon after, the chapter applied for the Zeal Award. Its application noted that members won many university-wide Greek awards such as Man of the Year, Outstanding Chapter President, and Volunteer of the Year. The chapter raised $14,000 for Children’s Miracle Network, SAE’s favored charity, which provides for pediatric care, and that was a 50 percent increase from the previous year. Over four years, chapter membership had tripled, to 115.
In August 2015, on the national fraternity’s annual leadership cruise, members filed across a stage. At long last, they had won the Zeal Award. Hallam had so inspired the chapter that its members fulfilled their dream, which many had considered unattainable. Several weeks later, this achievement would become even more pivotal in Hallam’s life in a way no one could have anticipated. One day at work, he collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. There, at thirty-six years old, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The doctor gave him a year to live. After he told his parents, he called Moore. Over the course of their time at the fraternity, they had become like family—like brothers.
On a Monday evening several months later, Hallam asked to make a guest appearance via Skype at the Ohio State chapter house. Moore put a laptop on a high table so that Hallam could see the signs of his handiwork. Through the computer screen, he addressed seventy-five men in ties and jackets. Hallam knew the formality was the result of a $5 fine the fraternity had instituted for showing up to chapter meetings in jeans, sweatshirts, and flip-flops. Hallam looked pale but otherwise spoke clearly and with purpose.
“Before I pass, I’m going to get the chapter some new lions,” he said. “It’s the one goal I have left to achieve.”
True Gentlemen Page 22