The College Fix

I’ve never wanted to join a frat. My alma mater didn’t have them, just lame “theme houses.”

I didn’t know what a “kegstand” was until well into my journalism career, didn’t touch alcohol until I was out of college and vastly preferred the fun-loving (and largely sober) Van Wilder in the eponymous National Lampoon movie to his arch-enemy, the frat leader Richard Bagg.

But is it just me, or are frats these days far tamer than the headlines suggest?

In an article for Total Frat Move on “some of the softest hazing allegations I’ve ever heard,” writer Dan Regester is amazed at why the University of Central Florida is investigating its Sigma Chi chapter.

Knight News reports on the findings in the university’s eight-page investigative report:

A pledge was the designated driver for the frat

The brothers he picked up took his phone and asked him to “drink and hangout [sic] with them for a little while” at their apartment

They asked permission to blindfold him and told him to get in a “plank” position

They “screamed” at him and made him count to 100

Someone “threw a basketball or football at him”

He asked to leave several times but they refused to give him his phone, because the “very drunk” brothers “insisted that he stay and party with them”

Apparently still in the plank position, he made an excuse that he had to pick up other brothers and left the apartment

He came back when he got a call saying he’d lose his pledge pin if he didn’t return immediately

He “discreetly shared” the incident with another member, and the frat president got involved

He was offered a week off his pledgeship

That’s it. These allegations are far milder than what passed for debauchery on a notorious male floor at my evangelical school in the late 1990s.

It’s milder than the New Year’s Eve parties I’ve attended in the past few years, where the Santa-sweatered host gets way too excited and strongly encourages me to do multiple shots with him (I’ll meet him halfway just to end the prodding, then search for paper towels in the event he yaks).

Total Frat Move‘s Regester is incredulous that this douchey behavior – in a frat that recruits guys who “live, eat and sleep for the gym” – is being investigated as hazing:

A 90-year-old grandmother with spina bifida could rough it out and plank for 100 seconds, so this should be a breeze for one of those SoFlo juiced up blockheaded pledges they attract.

These kids know exactly what they’re getting into. It’s part fraternity, part workout club. … “Thanks for the sober ride, now plank for us” just seems egregiously tame in my eyes.

Thankfully for the frat, the pledge isn’t pursuing criminal or student conduct charges for … what exactly? Not giving him back his phone? But only because he’s afraid some members “would come after him” and they’re already calling him a “scumbag.”

It appears that Greek life isn’t immune from the special-snowflake syndrome that’s overtaking hordes of students who faint at the slightest challenge to their worldview.

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