Colleges Condone Fraternities’ Sexist Behavior

Nicholas Syrett is an assistant professor of history at University of Northern Colorado and the author of "The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities."

Updated May 6, 2011, 11:30 AM

College fraternities are built on exclusion. For nearly 200 years fraternities have been exclusive organizations for men who want to spend time with others like themselves: usually straight white men. Men in these organizations have identified with what sets them apart from those they exclude, their manhood. Fraternal masculinity has, for at least 80 years, valorized athletics, alcohol abuse and sex with women, while disdaining intellectual inquiry for its own sake (colleges’ ostensible purpose).

Have fraternity men, as a group, been the most vocal in creating a hostile climate for female students? The record says yes.

In all of these pursuits, fraternity brothers have usually bested their fellow students. The evidence indicates they still do.

In the 20th century some fraternities became quite organized in their hostility toward women, with protests against coeducation, and coordinated ostracism of the first classes of female students; one 1960s California fraternity sponsored “Hate Women Week” on campus.

By the 1980s, a number of studies have shown that there was a widespread movement among fraternities toward alcohol-fueled sexual aggression and assault, whereby victimized women are understood as vehicles for men¹s pleasure and bonding.

While statistics on the incidence of sexual assault are notoriously unreliable, over the past 30 years psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and educators have continued to document alarming trends in pressure to have sex among fraternity men, coerce it from unwilling women through the use of alcohol, and report about it afterward to the assembled brotherhood.

Do all fraternity men behave this way? Of course not. But have fraternity men, as a group, been the most organized and vocal in creating a hostile climate for female students on campuses? The historical record says yes.

Footage of Pledges From a Yale Fraternity

The chicken-or-egg question is this: do fraternities promote misogyny in members or do freshmen with retrograde gender politics seek out fraternity membership? The answer is both. We all join organizations whose values already match our own. But by promoting one version of masculinity – hard drinking and sexually aggressive – fraternities pressure men to change in order to earn membership and status within them.

Either way, if colleges support organizations promoting these attitudes, they tacitly condone them as well, encouraging men to believe there is a place for such beliefs on campus. The colleges themselves are thus culpable, which is precisely the point of the suit lodged against Yale.