Fraternities: accidents, excess and accountability

A pivotal issue in everything discussed so far is the role of the collegeuniversity in the regulation of student societies through forms of internal, private justice and in the manner they regulate and enforce internal rules and regulations, external requirements and laws. And, above all, who is accountable? Here I shall focus especially on US fraternities by drawing largely on an important, insightful and even disturbing article by Flanagan (2014), an investigative journalist for The Atlantic; her piece also has implications for cases elsewhere. In the US, there are roughly 2,600 accredited colleges and universities with four-year degree programmes. But if the private ones receive federal aid of any sort – and the vast majority do – then they have to comply with federal guidelines (Vedder, 2018). However, with some 5,000 colleges of varying types in 50 states – and with each having its own state legislation on certain offences and with varying compliance cultures – this means that conformity to federal guidelines is sometimes patchy if not resistant. In addition, US fraternities typically have a complex institutional structure, with various national organizations possessing considerable financial means, legal support and political influence. This hierarchical structure – with a strong, assertive and well-resourced Political Action Committee (PAC) at the national level – is not true of the British elite student societies, the Dutch and Belgian corpora and other such societies in Europe.

Flanagan (2014) on fraternities

In her detailed article, Flanagan (20) notes the double record of the traditional US fraternities primarily for White men (Syrett, 2011). They contribute to charities, engage in community service and ‘steer young men towards lives of service and honorable action’, but ‘[t] hey also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of the college itself ‘ (Flanagan, 2014). Then Flanagan started to probe a number of serious, and sometimes bizarre, accidents in fraternities and, in an article entitled ‘The dark power of fraternities’, reported on her year-long investigation.