Discussion:

Well said. Agreed!

Start booting them out one by one and if there are any decent ones remaining then that is the extent of the frat/sorority association. If they all go, then so be it.

Then its new rules time. There has to monthly reporting, inspections and updates. Every group must prove what they are doing positively and how they are working on a declared mission statement.
Penalties for underage drinking with a zero tolerance policy and the same for the abuse of women. This will likely take an in house task force on every campus.

Every privilege afforded these frats should be earned. They either get their priorities straight or they are no more. Its their call.

The discussion of ‘Fraternities’ - like ‘Fraternities’ themselves - is filled with some validity and much, much nonsense. It does not make sense to paint the all of them with the same broad brush.

There are Academic Fraternities, Service Fraternities and ‘Social’ Fraternities - it is the ‘Social’ that have the spotlight - but even this category has many differences

Many smaller colleges and some larger only have a modest collection of social fraternities on campus and many cases they don’t have a ‘Frat houses’ - (they may have a floor in a dorm), and they function as a fairly open ‘social club’ & often provide a generally positive contribution to the college’s social scene - sponsoring all campus events without being exclusionary - and actually attempting to adhere to some lofty Ideals that they may have written on a plaque somewhere. … The colleges have an eye on them… and to the extent that they are seen as generally beneficial, and contributing favorable to the college ‘experience’ - they are tolerated / encouraged… as the college, for various reasons, is not inclined to take on filling in all of this area of the college social scene … yes, there is a fair amount of silly stupid stuff that kids will do in college - stuff that the college won’t actually sponsor - but won’t aggressively prohibit either .

In other places traditional social ‘Fraternities’ are quasi-cults with quasi-autonomous ‘houses’ of their own and can easily become out of control - cauldrons of demented peer pressure. Group-think … becomes mindless mob mentality - - that then results in ugly and sometimes truly brutal behavior. Here is where serious, serious cultural reassessment is urgently needed.

Penalties for underage drinking with a zero tolerance policy

you could enforce this to the max at the frat houses - but unless you then applied the equivalent level of compliance to every dormitory on the campus, the excessive level of underage drinking that goes on would be hardly touched.
The issue is significantly rooted in the level of compliance that the college is willing to pursue - a huge number of colleges have a sort of ‘don’t-ask-don’t-tell’ approach to drinking on campus - and some dorms are well known as ‘no-enforcement’ dorms.

It’s almost as if organizations founded in the 1800s to socially exclude Catholics admitted to previously Protestant-only colleges have a problem with diversity and inclusion.

Or to put it another way: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature

Bingo. I was speaking of the “social” ones. My wife works as an academic sponsor to two academic frats and they are simply interested only in research and presenting at conferences. They also don’t have “houses”.

You missed Sigma Alpha Mu at the university of Michigan.

I sure hope they are prosecuted for felonious behavior. Then they can go through life with a record.

I see it more as an increasing percentage of young white European-descended male humans having little to no sense of commitment, direction or purpose. Young groups of disconnected male members of a large predatory mammal species can pose as large a danger or larger to their own species than many threats from outside the species.

There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.

Nah. He only knows from supercilious loathing of all things human.

You must have been hallucinating.

I listen to the message. There’s a lot I don’t agree with Maher on.

This happens to be an exception. Agree with his philosophy or not, he was spot on with this comment on frats.

Sure, the colleges themselves have to be consistent. Underage drinking is hardly conducive to higher education as well as the use of drugs.
Its going to happen just like teenage sex, you can’t hold back the tide but an evenly applied, consistent effort can make a big difference.