education
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In the wake of the Cornell 7 news, its worth reading Caitlin Flanagan’s longform expose from 2014 on the history of social college fraternaties and the extremely dependent relationship American universities have with them.
While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies. To begin with, the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit…Moreover, fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students, most of whom are not applying to ivy-covered rejection factories, but rather to vast public institutions and obscure private colleges that are desperate for students.
There’s much, much more, including insane details about how unsafe, structurally, frat houses are — half of them don’t even have fire sprinklers, Flanagan reports.