Fraternities, Sororities Regain Favor : ‘Greek’ Renaissance Emerges on Nation’s Campuses

The pendulum has swung back. Soon, they may be swallowing goldfish or stuffing themselves into phone booths.

Fraternity brothers and sorority sisters have come home again to America’s colleges. Across the country, the playful pranks, the privations and humiliations, the boozing and sacred pledging rituals offered in sweat and keggers are back like never before.

So are the devilish initiations of “Hell Week,” the rushees drunk with conviviality at brotherly beer binges, the gushing communion of sororities as they perform the pinning ceremony.

America’s campus Greeks--from Alpha to Omega--are partying again.

Their hair is shorter now, they’re predominantly white, their politics lean to the right and making money is their primary goal.

Rules and order amid a chaotic world. The need to be accepted. Inexpensive housing on or near campus. Secrecy, exclusivity and time-honored bouts of debauchery.

And the long collegiate bash rolls on, full of caretakers of a tradition that began in the early 19th Century--as American as John Wayne (Sigma Chi, USC), Beaver Cleaver (Chi Psi, University of California, Berkeley), or Johnny Carson (Phi Gamma Delta, Nebraska).

At Berkeley, where the symbol of brotherhood 15 years ago was a raised fist on tear-gas-filled Telegraph Avenue, there is a store today devoted to selling beer mugs, shirts and jewelry emblazoned with the sacrosanct squiggles of the Sigma Alpha Epsilons and Kappa Kappa Gammas.

“They’re back for the same reason that the junior prom is back, that Ronald Reagan is President, that there’s a religious revival and a rebirth of patriotism,” said Jack Levin, a sociologist at Northeastern University, who last year completed a lengthy study of the Greek system.

Pomp and Ceremony

Back too, Levin added, is the renewed fascination with pomp and ceremony, recalling a strange sorority rite still in vogue at the University of Georgia in Athens.

“When one of the sisters is going to get married, her sorority house will have a candlelight ceremony,” Levin said. “They pass the lighted candle around a circle a few times and the one getting married blows it out.

“Then she has to go rescue her fraternity boyfriend, who has been tied to a tree by his frat brothers, stripped naked and squirted with shaving cream.”

“That’s nothing,” laughed former University of Illinois graduate James Lee. “At my initiation (in 1975), everyone had to get naked and lay in the snow and they poured hot candle wax on us. . . . It was hell, but once you make it through, everyone becomes true blue with each other.”

Today’s membership in all-male Greek societies is double the 125,000 recorded in the early 1960s--a period considered the peak of fraternity popularity--and could hit 300,000 strong by the end of the year, according to Robert Marchesani Jr., assistant executive director of the National Interfraternity Conference in Indianapolis.

The National Panhellenic Conference, representing 2,427 sorority chapters, reports that since the early 1970s, its membership has swelled every two years by 6%.

During the protest days of the Vietnam War, Greek membership dropped by more than 30%--a time for Greeks nearly as bad as the 1940s, when many chapters broke with national organizations over the admissibility of blacks.

Things are much different today. At USC, nearly 1,000 students went through rush this semester. Last year, 400 did.

Until 1983, fraternities were virtually non-existent at State University of New York at Albany. Now, there are 13 and there are plans for additional chapters next year.

The renewed commitment to Greek life is clearly evident at the University of Virginia, where $200,000 to $300,000 has been raised to renovate the stately, but long neglected, frat houses in Charlottesville.

‘It’s Cool These Days’

“The truth is, it’s cool to be in a frat these days,” UCLA sophomore Roger Lennard said. “It’s like having a family around all the time.”

Five new fraternity chapters were formed at Michigan State University this year. More than 50% of the students at Dartmouth belong to a fraternity or sorority, and three out of every four students at DePauw University in Indiana are Greek, and proud of it.

“Fraternities and sororities have always been a center of social life on campus,” said DePauw’s Patrick Aikman. “There’s a certain glamour in the minds of some people in belonging to a fraternity or sorority.”

Being Greek has become such a focal point of student life that competition is keen to keep step with these campus kings and queens.

At Indiana University, about 2,000 women have been going through sorority rush the last couple of years, but only 600 can make the final cut since there are not enough sorority houses to accommodate such numbers.

Birds of a Feather

“You kind of want to be around people who are like you,” said Kandi Peterson, a pledge at USC. “And I like the fact that we can find the most desirable people to be with.”

But the Greek rebirth in the 1980s has not been without it dark edges.

From the University of Vermont to California State University, Fullerton, charges of hazing, racism, sexism and potentially deadly initiations have impatient college administrators clamping down on Greeks, and, in some cases, banning fraternities from campus.

Discipline problems at Amherst, including numerous incidents of vandalism and sexism, prompted its trustees to abolish the liberal art school’s 148-year Greek tradition. More than one-third of the campus population was Greek.

Most colleges today feel they are responsible for monitoring what goes on in their fraternities--all year long, not just during rush week.

Maintaining Jurisdiction

The Indiana-based Center for the Study of the College Fraternity found that 334 colleges and universities had some form of administrative jurisdiction over their Greek houses--more than the 58% of the year before.

At the same time, the growing public intolerance of alcohol abuse, coupled with some not-so-funny fraternity pranks, has many Greeks striving for respectability, if not sobriety.

A dry rush was instituted this year at Syracuse University. Alpha Chi Omega was barred last year from serving alcohol at Dartmouth and forced to hold a series of educational workshops to promote “the understanding of minorities.”

There are “study-buddy” programs at UCLA, along with a spring fraternity-sponsored carnival each May to raise money for charities. Fraternity blood drives are common.

Drug, Alcohol Programs

Drug and alcohol programs are in place at UCLA and other schools, and the University of Southern Maine is considering forcing fraternities and sororities to publish the criteria they use to choose members.

The Greeks’ need for credibility, however, was underscored two years ago at the University of Illinois when a member of the Acacia house went to do his laundry and found that a rival house had filled the washing machine with 22 human brains from a lab.

At Texas Tech, a favorite hazing activity is called a “swirlee,” in which a pledge’s head is placed in a toilet bowl and another fraternity brother flushes it.

One initiate at Southern Methodist University broke his ankle during this particular flushing procedure, presumably while trying to escape.

There have been worse cases. Much worse.

Had No Hangover

The morning after an initiation party at the Omega Psi Phi fraternity at Tennessee State University, a 20-year-old member was found dead with five times the amount of alcohol needed in his blood to make him legally drunk.

“You know, a lot of this is done as sort of a shared misery thing,” Jonathan Razee, a Pepperdine University student, said of the more bizarre pledge rites. “Frats figure if we’re all miserable together, we’ll always stay best friends.”

That rationale lost a lot of credence in February, 1984, at American International College in Springfield, Mass., after pledges were instructed to gorge themselves with spaghetti and wine, vomit, then eat and drink some more.

A Zeta Chi pledge died from this form of shared misery.