The New York Times Magazine cover story this week is about college fraternities and the efforts to ban alcohol from the houses. This one should be required reading for anyone who has ever had to fend off questions about an "Animal House" culture.
It is an important piece, not so much for the content, which we have seen in various articles over the last several years, but for the placement as the cover story for the NYT magazine. That placement gives the story credibility and a wide audience.
The good news from the article is that they seem to at least be trying to aknowledge the efforts of Fraternities to "clean up". The mentions of Sigma Phi Epsilon are mostly positive. The closing pargraphs are particularly heartening:
Before spending time with the Sig Eps, I was skeptical of the Balanced Man Program. Fraternities often coin new initiatives that, in practice, mean very little. But I left feeling thoroughly impressed. More than any fraternity boys I visited at Northwestern, the Sig Eps seem to be, well, balanced men. And they're proof that a wet fraternity doesn't necessarily mean an unruly one.They're also proof that there are other ways, besides outlawing liquor, to redesign the American fraternity. Going dry may be a necessary step for some chapters, but the more I hung around Northwestern's fraternity boys, the less I saw regulating alcohol as particularly relevant to the health and personality of fraternities. For me, the ideal fraternity would somehow combine the strengths of Northwestern's Sigma Chi, Sig Ep and Phi Delt chapters. It would stress integrity, character and leadership. But it would also be a place where fraternity boys are allowed to be fraternity boys, however unseemly and absurd their choices may appear to the rest of us. Without that, the redesigned American fraternity may be no more balanced than the one that was scrapped in the first place.
With the CLAs hard upon us, lets hope that some of the issues from this article can be incorporated into the programs.
There is a profile of the author (Benoit Denizet-Lewis) and a short e-mail interview on "Gawker".
UPDATE: Here is a direct link to the PDF file on the author's site.
(Thanks to Alex for pointing it out.)
