“…drop off mom too”
Wow, just wow!
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Somehow I’ve never come across Poe’s Law, like it.
Yeah, as a Brit my only exposure to the whole Fraternity/Sorority thing is through TV/film, in which it is pretty consistently about some combination of drink/sex/pranks.
I am genuinely interested in what they are ostensibly for, or what purpose they are supposed to serve. I presume from what people have said the idea is that they are supposed to be about mutual support etc, but that just turns into old-boy/girl networks and degenerates into the kind of stuff on display in this article.
They seem odd to me here in the UK because they seem to be sort of official, without actually being officially part of the university. The same kind of situation exists between the Students’ Union (and the National Union of Students) in the UK, although they are not closed or selective organisations.
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And I don’t get cricket:
College “gridiron” is the second most popular sport in the US, behind the NFL.
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She sounds like a thoughtful young lady.
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Nothing here yet on the bizarrely ironic homosociality, homosexual behavior, and insecure heterosexuality of frat life? Color me surprised!
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My first day in college I met a deeply closeted guy who used the easy accessibility of alcohol as a way to avoid dealing with his sexuality. It was quite sad really. While the other guys in the frat were chatting up girls he was conveniently getting trashed.
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First amendment! First amendment! (although I’ll take the time first to make sure you know how much I object to the signs because I’m awesome)
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I agree, I would never let my daughter go to MIT (49%), John Hopkins (27%), Stanford, Tulane, USC, UP, Creighton, etc, I mean those places are horrible dens of … of… education.
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“Let my daughter”?
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Nice deflection on a common phrase. Now try for substance. Or perhaps you actually have no influence over your child.
Almost all frats have mission statements or creeds or whatever that talk about community service, leadership and friendship and stuff like that. See, e.g., here or here or here.
Practically speaking, many people join to attach the fraternity’s reputation/identity to their personal reputation/identity. They want to be thought of as part of the elite, or part of the party crowd, or part of the jock crowd or nerd crowd or Jewish crowd or black crowd or whatever.
Some join simply for the housing (there are some colleges where frats have big houses that are very conveniently located to the academic facilities). Others join simply because it’s fun (in the US, it’s illegal to drink alcohol before you are 21 years old, but if you’re a member of a frat you’re unlikely to have problems getting booze).
Many join simply because they get recruited by older students they know through other channels. My wife joined a sorority because her college had a very high male:female ratio and she saw it as an easy way to gain a cohort of female friends.
I would add that at many Colleges and Universities in out of the way places or smaller towns/areas they are the social outlet at the school, member or not.
Emphasis on these levels. As in major news coverage, possible jeopardizing of their entire future, etc.
But … as consequences go it’s pretty trivial. I mean, ‘temporary suspension’ is very nearly the LEAST the univ^^^ national fraternity could do. What do you think is an appropriate consquence for repeatedly behaving like assholes in the unive^^^ national fraternity’s name?
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I’d have thought NASCAR might rank that high.
(I’m in the US, but for the most part, it’s like this: ←sports … me→)
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I had to wait until I was home so I could consult my archives:
Matt Groening, Life in Hell, 1987
Before I left for college (UT-Austin) I thought that was an unfair characterization. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Groening had done me a favor, and I quickly decided I had no interest in joining a fraternity, mainly because they reminded me of (and in some cases, were) the exact same people that I was hoping to get away from when I graduated from high school. As fate would have it, I ended up living around the corner from these guys at the time of their “claw hammer” incident. (And I’ll be damned, look which fraternity that was…) I spent the rest of college (and after that, 10 more years in Austin) living at a safe and comfortable radius from West Campus.
But like the blond sweet potato might say: some, I assume, are good people. (Guess I’m no better than he. Or them.)
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There are also dedicated academic and service fraternities. Which I find tend to have much more diverse membership in general.
I want that so bad. You have no idea. The students actually don’t bother me. Fuck 'em. It’s their life and their education- it’s the professors that drive me up the wall. Every first day of the semester, I spend the first class becoming intimately acquainted with an attendance policy and DIRE CONSEQUENCES for missing lecture (up to and including losing points or failing the class.) It’s incredibly insulting to adult students (I’ve discussed this at length with fellow ~30 year olds and older) because invariably if we’re missing a class or two, it tends to be for damn good reasons. Meanwhile, we absolutely don’t buy that BS about “being trained for the real world,” because we know it doesn’t quite work that way. Also, I don’t like sitting next to kids with influenza, they should stay the fuck home.
What it is, is that the professors become cynical about the students. Just yesterday my friend (again, around my age) told me about her first class with a professor who was exasperated at them for shit other students had pulled before. Her response (internally) was, “Fuck you, I didn’t shit in your eggs this morning.” I never had that problem when I took some classes at the Community College. Professors (mostly adjuncts, let’s face it) never really got that cynical. Skeptical, sure, like any professor hearing some not-so-novel excuse for failing to turn in an assignment, but not frustrated enough to put me on the defensive the second I meet them. Certainly not enough to piss me off by putting a question on the first quiz that featured a fill-in-the-blank syllabus where I lost some points for not getting the wording exactly correct despite the meaning being literally the same.
(Yeah, I know. Ranting. Sorry.)
I really didn’t get the best out of that school while I was there, and now I’m sad to find out that it’s all going away.
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I have no idea where you pulled that list, but it’s hard to take someone seriously who’s claiming that their daughter would be choosing from such an extreme range of schools. Some I even had to look up, which is not a good sign, and yet you thought they were worthy of listing with places like MIT and Stanford.
So yeah, I assumed you meant that you, literally, were the kind of person who would not LET your daughter do X. Especially since you were responding to my post which clearly said it was my daughter who was setting the limits she felt were appropriate.
It reminded me of a college which has been sending a mailing approximately once per month for the past 6-8 months, addressed to the “parents of Lovely Daughter”, explaining why parents would want a son or daughter to go to their school (because religion, in case you were wondering). I finally called them up and explained to them that they are the ONLY school sending such mailings to the parents instead of the students, and that alone was enough to indicate their school wasn’t in the same ballpark as other colleges. They’re only interested in the kind of family where the parents do the choosing for their (young adult) offspring.
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What a great bunch of guys. Let’s get a round of chemical castration for the whole gang, on me. Rascals…
yeah, Becker has really scuttled what GSU had to offer… we really were on the way to being a decent research institute, and they’ve essentially cut the heads off the departments, worked to centralize tons of stuff, and tried to just be another UGA… but fuck that. They should work with the strengths the school already had, being smack dab in the middle of Atlanta, the most diverse uni in the state, and gone from there. It’s depressing to see.
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