Fraternities

When the NAACP's conference ended here last week, civil rights leaders left behind a portrait of black men in crisis. Too many young black men, said the civil rights group, are underemployed, alternately feared and reviled, and living at risk. Now come the men of Sigma Pi Phi, a once-secret black fraternity that celebrates the professional and material success of black men.

A rally for the transgender community echoed from an unexpected corner of the country this week: a Boston fraternity. Members of Emerson College's Phi Alpha Tau fraternity made national news by raising money to pay for Donnie Collins' gender transition surgery. The 20-year-old visual media arts student, who was born a girl, figured there was only one group that could make his $8,125 female-to-male breast surgery happen: his insurance company. Then came the dreaded phone call.

The route from USC's fraternity row to the 901 Club on Figueroa Street is marked by broad painted stripes running three blocks, a symbol of the bar's importance to the social life of the campus' affluent "Greeks." The "9-Oh," as the raucous college bar is affectionately known, is where inhibitions, like IDs, are checked at the door. For one fraternity--the prestigious and well-connected Alpha Tau Omega house--it is a path well traveled.

DURHAM, N.C. -- The Duke University fraternity that threw a party mocking Asians has been suspended by its national office for "inappropriate and insensitive" behavior. Photos from a Feb. 1 party hosted by Kappa Sigma fraternity were posted on Facebook, showing partygoers dressed in Asian gowns and conical caps, some with chopsticks in their hair.  An invitation emailed to Duke students was addressed, "Herro Nice Duke Peopre!!" and closed with, "Chank You. " Mitchell B. Wilson, executive director of the national Kappa Sigma fraternity in Charlottesville, Va., said in a telephone interview Thursday that the Duke fraternity, known as the Eta Prime Chapter, had been ordered to cease all activities.

Your front-page feature article (March 10) on fraternities is dismaying and whereas the author attempted to weave fraternity history with contemporary attitudes, the article is woefully short of recognizing that the fraternal system in colleges throughout most of America is robust, and gaining strength each day. The attack being made by educators is nothing new, as the system began as a threat to faculty dominance over students whom they physically...

Re "Fresno hazing death probed," Oct. 11 Too many hazing incidents at college fraternities end in tragedy (such as the recent death of a student at Fresno State University) due to the presence of alcohol. Why won't fraternities adopt the position of Phi Delta Theta? Ten years ago, my fraternity banned the presence of alcohol in chapter houses. The decision was met with apprehension. Active members and alumni worried that we would suffer poor recruitment. Instead, membership is growing.

"No means yes, and yes means anal!" That was the chant of Delta Kappa Epsilon pledges as they marched past dorms housing freshman women at Yale University last October. As a result, the fraternity was recently banned from all campus activities for five years. The hazing ritual was in poor taste, certainly. But did the fraternity really deserve to be suspended? Weren't the "Dekes" guilty of, at the very worst, the kind of offensive speech protected by the 1st Amendment (or in Yale's case, by the university's 1975 codification of rights of free speech and expression on its campus)

Acting on complaints of hazing and forced alcohol consumption, Loyola Marymount University officials barred a fraternity from operating on the Westchester campus until 2000. The fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, was suspended last week after an investigation into allegations by fraternity members about drinking and hazing during pledge activities, said Patrick Naessens, assistant to Loyola's vice president for student affairs.

A campus fraternity in Pomona has been suspended while the school investigates claims that a student was burned during an initiation. Cal Poly Pomona announced Wednesday that it suspended the local chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon and nine fraternity members. College spokesman Tim Lynch said the school is investigating an alleged initiation in which 14 students were blindfolded, driven to the high desert in March and placed around a bonfire.

I am a Cal State Northridge graduate who spent three years as a little sister for the Sigma Nu fraternity and never witnessed any racism in the Greek system. ("Frat's Suspension Ignites Racism Debate at CSUN," Times Valley Edition, Nov. 15.) There were no racial slurs and nothing happened at parties that would be considered racist. However, I had to take a Chicano studies class to satisfy a graduation requirement. I was one of maybe five or six Anglos in the class and the professor actually taught hate, taught all of the Chicano students to hate us. It was torture.

When architect Ana Henton first toured what had been the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity house on USC's Greek Row last spring, she wasn't prepared for the end-of-semester squalor she saw. Leased to another fraternity, the house was in an extreme state of disrepair. “There were bongs and beer bottles everywhere, graffiti from other frat houses defacing their walls, mattresses in the courtyard, and a stripper pole in the main meeting room,” said Henton, principal at Mass Architecture and Design in Los Angeles, who even found party detritus hidden inside the walls.

Re "Fresno hazing death probed," Oct. 11 Too many hazing incidents at college fraternities end in tragedy (such as the recent death of a student at Fresno State University) due to the presence of alcohol. Why won't fraternities adopt the position of Phi Delta Theta? Ten years ago, my fraternity banned the presence of alcohol in chapter houses. The decision was met with apprehension. Active members and alumni worried that we would suffer poor recruitment. Instead, membership is growing.

FRESNO - Fresno police searched a fraternity at Fresno State University as part of an investigation into the hazing death of an 18-year-old freshman, according to newly released court documents. A search warrant filed in Fresno County Superior Court said detectives wanted to search the Theta Chi fraternity after its members evaded questions, leading to fears that they might hide or destroy evidence about the death of Phillip Dhanens of Bakersfield. Police declined to discuss the results of the search.

Written in the late 1980s and set in 1987, Jeff Stetson's “Fraternity,” now in its Los Angeles premiere at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, is a frustrating but fascinating play that has an almost spooky timeliness. The setting, scrupulously evoked by Edward E. Haynes Jr.'s handsome set and Elizabeth Harper's mellow lighting, is an elite black men's club in Birmingham, the gathering place for the city's African American elite. Sen. Charles Lincoln (Roger Robinson), a cocky, cynical political survivor, is running against his former aide, Paul Stanton (Rocky Carroll)

Gunfire echoed once again through a neighborhood bordering USC early Wednesday, unnerving a community still reeling from the double slaying of two graduate students last week. A campus police officer shot and wounded a man suspected of robbing four students at gunpoint as they walked along the university's fraternity row around 12:30 a.m. The students were not injured. The incident comes as the campus continues to grieve the deaths of two students from China who were shot and killed April 11. The officer-involved shooting occurred not more than a block from where a memorial service was held Wednesday evening for the students slain last week.

SAN DIEGO —UC San Diego officials have reached an agreement with the federal government to end an investigation into racial tensions on campus that began after white students held an event laced with racial stereotypes during Black History Month. In a settlement announced Friday with the federal departments of Justice and Education, UC San Diego promised to maintain an Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination to receive, investigate and resolve complaints. Among other things, administrators will offer training sessions for staff and students on the university's policy against harassment, and will make more efforts to interest low-income and minority students in attending UC San Diego, where about 2% of the undergraduate student body is African American.

Leaders of eight national black fraternities and sororities have announced an agreement to eliminate hazing by banning the pledging process. A resolution passed Saturday declared that each organization should develop its own initiation process limited to ceremonial rituals. The leaders said the resolution stemmed from their concern about hazing excesses at some colleges.

Is it possible that frat boys could be so vile and disgusting, so drunk and disorderly, so utterly contemptuous of civility and good taste -- so egregiously out of control -- that their fraternity big brothers would shut down their frat house? For the rowdy lads at Miami University's Sigma Chi International chapter, thumbing their noses at society has finally had consequences. They got the ax this week from the fraternity's national executive committee, which ordered the Miami chapter shut down.

The father of an 18-year-old man who died at a UCLA frat house has accused the fraternity and his son's friends of negligence, saying they essentially left his son to die after a night of heavy partying. Glen Berlin Parrish was pronounced dead Saturday afternoon after consuming alcohol and possibly prescription medications, authorities said. "They found my son hunched over, in the back, and no one had the … decency to call the paramedics," his father, Glen Parrish Sr., told The Times.