Close on the heels of the former PSU President's conviction for child endangerment, Penn State's VP for Student Affairs, announced the closing of one fraternity, where a student fell down the stairs and died, and curtailment of alcohol use at all the others.
I'm not questioning the appropriateness of PSU's actions. But I am wondering out loud if they would have been taken in the absence of the Spanier trial and its outcome.
What to do about those naughty Greeks has been a dilemma at least since I was in college some 50 years ago.
At my alma mater --- an all-male institution until 1969 --- with a student body of 1200, supported nearly a dozen fraternities. All but one were located off campus, a few of them quite distant from the college. Consequently, oversight was virtually non-existent.
My fraternity was the college's animal house. At one point, prior to my arrival at college, the frat enjoyed the triple crown: academic probation, disciplinary probation, and national-chapter probation. To get out from under this functional equivalent of "double secret probation," we agreed to have a housemother. We had a bedroom and bathroom built for her on the first floor. And that's where she stayed with the door locked and the TV turned up high, when we had our weekend-long parties.
The only time in my four years at the college when I can recall the dean of students entering our house was the day after we conducted a pitched battle with "the cable guys."
The city was having a cable TV system strung throughout the city. Burly workers came to town to do the job. On a balmy April or early May afternoon, two of the older brothers were sitting on the front porch, imbibing (appropriately enough) May wine. When a truck load of these cable workers rolled by, one of these brothers shouted out, "Alabama a**holes." The truck came to an abrupt halt and the brewsers stormed the frat house. They were met by a hail of empty bottles, as the two brothers beat their retreat indoors.
Heading home from class, and witnessing this phase of the melee, I slipped around back. Everyone in the house at the time headed up to the flat roof, three stories above the street. A popular sunbathing site, the roof was cluttered with cases of empty Coke and beer bottles, which we rained down on the cable crew. They retreated to their truck and took off.
That night, our house became an armed fortress, while the cable guys called periodically with threats of returning after their shift ended the following day. Naturally, word leaked out and on the next afternoon, several hundred students massed outside our frat house, along with the police, the local TV station and, yes, the dean of students. Of course, the cable guys never showed up.
Their employer received fair warning from the city that they had better never show. The cable project ended shortly after that, as did the semester, and the incident passed into the mists of legend.
Such was fraternity life in a time of harsh pledging practices --- I suffered a broken nose, a fellow pledge two broken arms from the rough housing. The soda machine was stocked with beer at 25 cents a bottle. The party started on Friday afternoon and ended Sunday night each weekend. And, remarkably, nobody died.
Some years after I graduated, and women were admitted, the college rescinded recognition of the fraternities. The result was they went underground. What little control had existed became essentially no control. A lot of alumni were angered by the move, while the attempted eradication of Greek life was an abysmal failure. Recognition was eventually restored, and my old frat house --- which had been converted to the college art house --- was restored to its historic purpose.
My personal reminiscence represents the story of Greek life in microcosm. It is a sort of damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't dilemma. It will be interesting to follow the Penn State initiative to see how it plays out.
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