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    • May 26, 2011

    Why Is the Federal Government Disciplining Frat Boys?

    by Kevin Ryan

     

    Last October a group of Yale freshmen pledging a fraternity made jackasses of themselves by marching around the campus chanting a vulgar slur against women. Complaints poured in and the university took action. Several fraternity members were disciplined and Yale banned the offending fraternity from all campus activities for five years, saying “the actions were necessary to ensure an educational environment free of harassment and intimidation”. Quite embarrassing for a prestigious institution and the alma mater of two recent presidents (Bush 1 and Bush 2) and a close contender (John Kerry).

    That was not enough, however. The federal government got wind of these campus hijinks. The US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has also launched an investigation “to review Yale’s policies for dealing with sexual harassment and assault cases”. The Feds are coming after Yale under the flag of the 1972 Title IX Act (20 United States Code Section 1681: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”).

    My experience with fraternities and sororities is limited. I don’t recall ever encountering a member of either tribe during my undergraduate days at a large university. I did, however, have a brush with fraternities toward the end of my graduate studies at Stanford University. Being newly married and on the outskirts of poverty, my wife and I accepted an offer to be “faculty residents” for a freshmen dormitory of 90 boys, boys who had just escaped from the horrendous oppression of their parents and their high school teachers. Their newfound freedom quickly found expression in incredible slovenliness, loud cursing, a few fist fights and the consumption of large quantities of brown beverages. We still bear scars and invariably wince when we reflect on that near-Animal-Farm year.

    One of the most upsetting events happened when our boys returned from Christmas vacation and fraternity “rush week” began. The fraternity “men” came around to pick over our boys and begin their recruitment drive. Watching the process up close was heartbreaking. Many boys were not selected and were instantly labeled as “rejects,” “losers,” along with several less flattering tags. It was the first time most of these boys had faced rejection. To say the least, many took it quite poorly.

    Late one night, worried about what to do and angry at the fraternity system, I asked my wife for advice. She had been very much a part of the fraternity and sorority life at a big state university. While sympathetic to the boys who lost out, she described her experience. Having been raised on a farm and being away from home for the first time, sorority life had provided her a haven in a huge and otherwise impersonal university campus. She described how the rules and traditions provided structure and how important the friendship and example of the older girls was. She thought that in the better fraternities the same was true for the boys.

    Clearly fraternities and sororities are like families, close communities where the individuals are linked by bonds of loyalty and friendship. And, like families, there are good ones and bad ones; families that have good years and bad years; families that occasionally do noble things and families that do incredibly stupid things. The offending Yale fraternity (a DKE chapter, for those of you into the arcana of the fraternity-sorority world) seems to have fallen into this last category. Fine. But why unleash a gaggle of Washington lawyers on Yale? Why wheel in the investigatory and legal machinery of the federal government of the United States?

    It is not as if Yale University had ignored the crude and offensive behavior of the students and a campus organization for which it was responsible. The University punished individuals and banned the fraternity from recruiting or engaging in activities on campus for five years.

    This didn’t satisfy a small group of current and former students, who pleaded for Washington to come in and straighten out the situation. They are like children who, after parents have meted out punishment to their siblings, run to the mayor and ask him or her to visit their home to impose justice.

    What is happening to the United States? Are we so silly that whenever there is a perceived injustice, we take it to the highest authority? What about petitioning Yale’s president? Or asking the Faculty Senate or the university’s Board of Trustees to see that justice be done? Or the powerful Yale Alumni Association? Or the state of Connecticut which grants Yale its charter? What is this childish obsession with the federal government?

    And do not Americans have to scratch our collective heads at a government that takes up such a case and send its lawyers to New Haven to hold hearings, take testimony and arrange depositions? Are there not more worthy issues or even more dire problems confronting the federal government? Are we so rich in 2011 that we are ready to spend several hundreds of thousands to get to the bottom of the rude chanting of some frat boy wannabees? Or is this just one more example of a bloated, out-of-control government bureaucracy taking over the responsibilities of an increasingly infantilized citizenry?

     

    This article was originally published on MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons Licence. If you enjoyed this article, visit MercatorNet.com for more.

    Tagged as: Animal Farm, college, Creative Commons Licence, slider, United States

    The views expressed by the authors and editorial staff are not necessarily the views of
    Sophia Institute, Holy Spirit College, or the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.

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    By Kevin Ryan

    Kevin Ryan founded the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, where he is professor emeritus. He has written and edited 20 books. He has appeared on CBS's "This Morning", ABC's "Good Morning America", "The O

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    • digdigby

      WE are paying for this. Millions and millions to these leeching lawyers. I’d love to know what this one particular example of Federal insanity is costing us.

    • Michael PS

      One recalls the incident, in February last year, when Danny Ayalon, the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister spoke at the Oxford Union and an undergraduate bawled “Itbah al-Yahud” (Death to the Jews).

      Even though both the Union and the University distanced itself from the remark as “ill-judged and inappropriate,” there was still a police enquiry. I believe the young man was cautioned.

      Such conduct can cause alarm and insecurity to vulnerable groups and has no place in a University.

      • Matt

        Well, it sounds like a situation where a man didn’t actually commit a crime, but might possibly have been intending to commit one. It is eminently appropriate that there be a “police inquiry” into the matter, and that — having searched for evidence of an actual crime and not found any — the result was a stern warning to the boorish young fool.

        I would assume, however, that the Department of Education didn’t need to get involved.

        Nowhere in this article does the author condone such vile and rude behavior. The point is not that such things ought to be accepted, but rather that their non-acceptability, having already been expressed and enforced by a level of authority appropriate to the offense, oughtn’t become the self-imposed concern of the federal government.

        The frat committed a breach of the university’s standards of student behavior, and thus the university was the proper authority to administer discipline, as it in fact did. Had they also committed a crime against persons or property, it would have been equally proper for the New Haven police to become involved. But I literally cannot imagine a situation which would warrant the federal government taking a direct interest in a boorish frat stunt.

    • Tony Esolen

      It is one thing to shout out that certain people should be killed, and another thing to engage in clearly puerile behavior. A government that thinks it has the right to intervene in such an affair as this one at Yale is tyrannous, pure and simple. The punishment meted out by the Yale administrators was already absurdly harsh.

      AND as far as creating a friendly educational environment is concerned, is there anything in academe so virulently unfriendly to an identifiable group of people as feminist-led courses are? I could tell some stories …

    • Margaret

      There’s actually a great deal more to this story. A group of undergraduate and recently graduated students from Yale, both men and women, filed a Title IX complaint against Yale University for what they claim is a long history of inadequate responses by the university to complaints of sexual harassment and, far more seriously, sexual assault. The fraternity incident is but one of many allegations that triggered the complaint. The Dept. of Education OCR is in fact obligated to investigate the complaint. That is part of its role. If Yale is found to be in violation of Title IX, the university could face losing federal funding and rightly so. This is a situation in which the government attempts to protect students at private universities by holding out the carrot of federal funding. Other than withdrawing Title IX funding from the undeserving, the OCR can take no action, so this is hardly excessive government intervention. As a taxpayer, I support the OCR’s role in this case. I would hate to find my taxes funding a group of spoiled and abusive frat boys. Apart from losing Title IX funding, the university also faces the possibility of losing promising potential students who do not wish to be associated with a school that tolerates abusive behavior. My son, bless his heart, an outstanding high school student, has stated that he will not apply to a school at which one of his sisters would feel uncomfortable.

      • Richard A

        If at all reported correctly, this incident should not be “but one of many allegations that triggered the complaint.” Because it is not part of a “long history of inadequate responses by the university to complaints of sexual harassment”. If the other allegations have merit at all, they are undermined by including an incident in which the university’s response was super-adequate.

    • Jimmy Winston

      The “boys will be boys” defense was rejected decades ago. It’s no longer the 1950s or earlier.

      “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…”
      —20 United States Code Section 1681.

      Hostile environments will never again be tolerated.

      • Angela Lessard

        I don’t think anyone was arguing that “boys will be boys,” was a sufficient response. It was not the response. The question is whether we need to bring out the heavy artillery every time the boys misbehave.

        And let’s not impugn our forefathers while we are at it. The chances are slim that a group of frat boys in the 50s would have done any such thing.

    • Tony Esolen

      Absolutely right, Angela; they wouldn’t.

      It is kind of late in the game, isn’t it, to be complaining about vulgar actions from some frat boys, when we’ve been cheering sexual chaos for years.

      As for complaints that Yale is slow to respond to sexual harrassment claims, I’d have to check that out. It doesn’t seem plausible, given that Yale is a hard-left feminist school just as Princeton and Harvard are.

      And again, I ask — is there any environment so virulently hostile to any identifiable group as Women’s Studies is? Is there? Why should young men have their wallets rifled to support such?

    • Margaret

      Rape rates have dropped significantly over the past few decades (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/rape.cfm .) This is despite the fact that women are more likely to report sexual assault than they were, and their complaints are more likely to be taken seriously. The former head of the IMF was arrested for an alleged assault on a hotel maid. 50 years ago, the maid would probably have been fired and no more would have been said. Women are safer today than they were in my mother’s day, and my daughters will be safer yet. Women’s Studies classes have helped change the climate in which women were once condemned to live. How could any decent person want to go back to the back old days in which abuse of women was more accepted???