“WE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT! DO WHAT YOU WILL! AND FUCK WHO YOU MUST!”
“Fuck who you must.” That was the advice delivered to a room of cheering men before a fraternity party at USC last November. A video, which documented the speech and the party that followed, was viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube and Total Frat Move before completely disappearing from the Internet (along with any mention of the company that professionally produced it) in the days before this article was published.
This story examines the culture of aggressive philandering displayed above, and the dominant culture that allowed that video to remain on YouTube undisputed, unchallenged, and unspoken about by anyone, including USC officials who repeatedly refused to comment on the video’s existence. It also suggests several solutions.
In a series of wide-ranging questions for this article, I asked USC’s Media Relations Department: “How does the university respond to such disturbing details [in the video]? What was the reaction in the Provost’s office and what if any action took place when the video was made public several months ago? Has USC punished anyone in connection with the video?” Those questions were explicitly ignored.
Last month, results were released from of one of the largest college sexual assault studies ever undertaken. Sponsored by the American Association of Universities, 150,000 students at 27 universities including USC and every Ivy League school (except Princeton) participated.
Dr. Ainsley Carry, the Vice Provost of Student Affairs, announced the findings in a conference call with USC’s media organizations.
“We are within the national averages on everything,” he said. “We are not an outlier on any side of the points I will mention here today.”
Except for one of the largest segments of the study: the prevalence of sexual assault, defined by the study as nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching. At USC, 29.7 percent of female respondents reported being sexually assaulted since enrollment. Contrary to Carry’s statement that USC is “well within the national averages,” USC had the second highest rate of sexual assault for undergraduate women among the 27 participating universities.
The national average was 23.1%, and to say USC isn’t an outlier is at best misreading the data, and at worst completely dishonest.
This is not a post-crisis story. It is the story of an ongoing epidemic of sexual assault at USC. Francesca Bessey, who graduated from USC and now works at USC’s Center for Women and Men, which provides therapy services for victims of gender-based violence, summarized the progress this way in recent Facebook post:
“At USC, we have seen change, most of it hard fought for and won by students. We’ve seen policy updates, better investigations and training of our campus security staff. With student help, clinicians at our crisis and advocacy center have launched an amazing outreach program on sexual and gender-based harm. But sexual assault is still happening at an alarming rate in campus communities.”
Any rate of sexual assault on a campus is too high, especially when it is supported by backwards-looking administrative policies that seek to minimize financial damage to the institutions that stand to lose money and prestige from forcefully confronting these crimes. Nowhere are these policies more present than at the USC, where a misleading reading of survey results is only the latest milestone in a tradition of ignorance.
Take, for instance, the 121-member California Delta chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, the host of the party where a fur-clad man told a room of nearly 100 people, “Fuck who you must.” They provided Neon Tommy with the following statement:
After 15 minutes of Google searching, I had more questions. First, I was able to access the video of the party until October 25, 2015, almost 11 months after Dalton said it was removed from YouTube.
Second, Dalton said the individual, whom several people familiar with the fraternity identified as Alec Fisher, was never affiliated with the chapter and had been banned from attending any future chapter events.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Fisher has been in Phi Psi at USC since August of 2013, and for at least a year was the budget manager of the entire chapter.
Fisher also began his speech by saying, “Sons of Phi Psi, my brothers…”
I called back Dalton and asked him to clarify the details. He said:
“The man in the video is Austin Fisher. He is Alec’s twin brother. He has never gone to USC and is not affiliated with Phi Psi. The video has been taken down since November to my knowledge.”
-Duke Dalton, President of Phi Kappa Psi, October 28, 2015
Austin Fisher did not respond to several requests for comment about the video. In another video released this September and produced by the same company that made the video of the Phi Psi party, the Fisher brothers appeared again.
Titled “The Running,” the video captured this year’s “Bid Day,” an annual event in USC’s Greek system where women who participated in rush are told which sorority selected them and run the several blocks from campus to USC’s Greek Row. At one point, someone in the video refers to the day as “the running of the bitches.” The video also disappeared from Youtube on Oct. 25, 2015, the same day the video from Phi Psi’s party vanished.
As for Dalton denying the video’s existence on Youtube for the last ten months, denial is the norm when it comes to dealing with sexual violence at USC. One frat’s actions are a single piece in a much larger puzzle.
Inside this complex web of organizational failure lies a deep, dark form of cultural bankruptcy that minimizes accountability at the institutional and individual level. It’s a “go with the flow,” “that’s the way it has always been,” “our organization will survive this” approach to sexual assault. It permeates universities, it breathes in fraternities and sororities, and it flourishes because of its deep roots in our culture. And it has to stop.
College serial rapists are perpetrators of sexual assault or rape who are guilty of more than one offense during their college years. A substantial body of research, pioneered by David Lisak, a nationally recognized forensic consultant and clinical psychologist who trains law enforcement agencies and universities on sexual assault cases, suggests over 90% of college rapists are serial in nature. Each offender in college commits six rapes on average.
Lisak explained to me why that matters for campuses seeking to tackle the problem:
“There is no question that serial offenders are a very significant part of the problem,” Lisak said “There are sex offenders in universities, and some people in universities are still really quite resistant to acknowledging that.”
SEE ALSO: The Price of Sex At USC
Including administrators at USC. When he was asked about serial offenders during the AAU conference call, Dr. Carry said, “We don’t have a special intervention for repeat offenders, other than that when we get these reports, we take them all seriously. When we receive multiple reports on an individual student, we will intervene.”
Administrators like Carry, as Lisak observed in an earlier interview with The Star Phoenix, “think of rapists as the guy with the ski mask and a knife who jumps out of the bushes.”
That USC is not targeting serial offenders is just plain abysmal, considering the approach is central to President Obama’s Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault. At a conference at Dartmouth University last fall, a member of that task force told several hundred college administrators, “We know that the majority of rapes are committed by serial rapists, and those folks are very unlikely to be reached by any prevention messages that we’re going to be sending out or education about rape…”
The problem begins with a failure to recognize the prevalence of sexual assaulters and serial offenders. It continues through financial and emotional costs to victims. The huge dollar figures faced by survivors begs the question: why should so many victims have to face that cost? Moreover, what can schools do to make sure that cost doesn’t become an unbearable burden?
I interviewed Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan who coauthored the book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. She explained that universities “are always juggling solvency, a moral vision of community and ethics, and a search for status.” In short, when confronted with the dual interests of protecting the bottom line and seeing to the needs of students don’t align, universities face a dilemma.
Which is totally bizarre when it comes to sexual assault. University brands suffer exponentially more if sexual assaults are mishandled and avoided instead of tackled head-on. Recently, the University of Oregon’s credibiilty took a big hit when it turned over a student’s private counseling records to its lawyers. The lawyers were defending the school from a lawsuit filed by the very same student alleging that U of O violated Title IX by recruiting a basketball player with a known history of sexual assault, who then assaulted the student. The basketball player was a serial offender.
Lisak said that the financial juggling act performed by universities is mind-boggling.
“I feel like a broken record sometimes,” he began. “What’s the moral cost of not taking responsibility for this and showing the rest of society that you can really take this on as a community?”
Dr. Astrid Heger, the executive director of the Violence Intervention Program at the LAC/USC Medical Center, and a professor of clinical pediatrics at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, put it this way: “We all want to be in denial that this happens on any campus, and the USC family is no different than any campus in the United States. They don’t want to deal with this as a growing problem.”
Dealing with sexual assault as a growing problem is long overdue. Universities, particularly USC, can tackle the issue head-on in the following ways.
- Pull the sheet off the lawsuit boogieman.
Universities seeking to avoid costly lawsuits frequently cite the mishandling of false accusations that open them to serious legal damage as a reason for treading carefully in sexual assault investigations, especially if they humiliate the accused or cause them to go through unnecessary and burdensome processes.
Heger said it doesn’t have to be that complicated.
“There is always a paranoia about lawsuits when it comes to interpersonal violence on campus,” she began. If schools adopt a zero-tolerance, aggressive response policy, she continued, “I don’t think you need to be afraid of lawsuits if you have done the education and intervention that you need to do.
Armstrong explained why universities are often afraid to adopt this policy.
“The presidents believe this stuff, but at the same time they have a general counsel hired to look out for the bottom line, and they get very, very talented, sophisticated lawyers whose job is to protect the university’s financial interests.”
But a review of the data shows that universities might be overly paranoid of being sued for mishandling false accusations: a National Sexual Violence Resource Center study shows false accusations are rare, making up just 2–8 percent of cases. That’s less than the percentage of people on death row, 10 percent, who have been exonerated since 1973. Moreover, statistics for false accusations often include survivors who drop their case for any reason, including to avoid social stigma, or because of mishandling from their administration in the first place.
Add to that the mounting pile of lawsuits from victims who assert that colleges pressure them not to pursue the case, and the evidence for overcoming lawsuit paranoia from false accusation cases becomes overwhelming.
In fact, a slew of recent events shows that schools should be more afraid of lawsuits from accusers than they should be from the falsely accused. The University of San Diego is facing a lawsuit from a woman who, according to her lawyer, alleges the school told her if she reported being raped to the police, they wouldn’t help her. Arizona State University, which is on the list of schools being investigated by the Department of Education for Title IX violations, recently settled two lawsuits filed by victims, one for over $850,000, and one that alleged the school’s police didn’t give her a rape kit after she was attacked.
2. Lower the cost of reporting crimes for victims.
In the AAU survey, only 60% of students said they believed USC would take it “very” or “extremely” seriously if a report of their assault was made to campus officials. Of the students who chose not to report a crime, 65% did so because they didn’t think it was serious enough. In the conference call, Dr. Carry called these “mixed results.”
Project Callisto, a mobile-friendly web service, aims to change that. Despite USC’s dismal results on reporting, they flatly ignored our request for comments on signing the school up for the service. Callisto works by giving participating schools their own website, where students can upload testimony, including photographs as evidence, and then choose whether to send the report to their administration, or directly to the police through their mobile phone. Everything is confidential until the reporter decides he or she doesn’t want it to be, removing the pressure of in-person reporting. Schools like the University of San Francisco and the Pomona have already signed up for the project, and some schools, like UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and Hampshire College, have developed similar resources that connect students to survivor-support services.*
Web-based reporting removes a primary disincentive for sexual assault reporting, which is the fear of being the only accuser, or using evidence that will be called into question. Callisto, which can contact authorities “only if another person uploads evidence about the same assailant” (assuming the accuser chooses not to request contacting authorities initially), makes victims feel more comfortable and protected when they report, and in doing so, experts like UCLA Professor Michael Chwe say it will encourage more victims to come out of the woodwork.
Despite poor reporting numbers detailed in the AAU survey, USC didn’t respond to the following question:
“Project Callisto is a mobile app where schools who sign up receive their own website where students can upload testimony, including photographs as evidence, and then choose whether to send the report to their administration, or directly to the police Would USC consider signing up for this service a priority for addressing sexual assault reporting?”
In a statement emailed to me by USC Media relations, attributed to David Carlisle, the deputy chief of USC Department of Public Safety, Carlisle promoted a totally different service, declining to address Project Callisto at all:
“DPS recommends all members of the campus community download the LiveSafe free mobile app because it allows users to initiate contact with DPS for emergencies and/or to report suspicious behaviors or activity….”
My response pointing out that an app for calling the police is substantially different than an app for anonymously reporting sexual assault received no follow-up. As it turned out, Carlisle’s “statement” wasn’t a statement at all: it was mostly copied word-for-word from USC’s webpage announcing the LiveSafe app.
You can voice your support for Project Callisto directly to DPS through their online feedback form, which is available here.
The story that begins with University paranoia and their desperate need to increase reporting numbers now turns to adjudicating the slim number of cases that do result in justice for victims. For survivors who make it this far in the process, many are often disappointed by soft and arbitrary punishment regimes, born out of the same institutional fear of losing prestige that leads many universities to hesitate investigating cases in the first place.
3. Increase the Cost of Committing a Sexual Assault
The Center for Public Integrity won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for its work on sexual assault, in which it detailed several horror stories where students who were found guilty were given mind-blowingly lax punishments. At Indiana University, one student’s assaulter was suspended from classes a semester — a summer semester — which he wasn’t planning to attend anyways. Between 2003 and 2008, 130 schools that received taxpayer money to combat sexual assault only expelled between 10–25% of men who were already found responsible for sexual assault. The rest received minor penalties, which ranged from apology letters to community service to virtually unenforceable “social probation.”
In the last five years, 41% of colleges haven’t investigated a single sexual assault case.
The axis on which this grisly world turns — serial offenders who make up a large part of the problem — is yet again unacknowledged by universities who just can’t come to grips with the fact that their campus, like everyone else’s, might contain some despicable people.
Lisak admits that “Universities are in a tough position.” But in his words, “Even universities that are really trying to do the right thing are facing really serious challenges. Put yourselves in the shoes of somebody who is adjudicating this: if you’ve got pretty tentative evidence, how secure do you feel in sanctioning that student with something like an expulsion?”
But the Center for Public Integrity also charged that freebie punishments leave a school open to a Title IX violation, citing the law’s requirements that if a school determines an accused student to be guilty, they must end the hostile environment experienced by the victim, prevent the assault from occurring again, and restore the victim’s life. Part of preventing the assault from occurring again is, in the case of some schools sued by victims, making sure a rapist is removed from campus when they commit their first offense. If victims sue and a known offender is still on campus, like the anonymous woman who sued the University of Oregon for recruiting a basketball player with a known history of sexual assault, they have an even better case.
Those punishments have to increase. Again from Heger: “…If that is investigated and you meet that standard, there needs to be an obligatory response the school has established of the consequences to the assailant.” When I asked if she was aware of a minimum punishment system at USC, she responded, “I don’t think they do…”
I asked USC the same question, and they again declined to answer. A review of the USC student conduct code reveals there are no minimum punishments for sexual assault. Section E.8.V of SCampus, the conduct code, outlines punishments ranging from a “warning” or “probation” to expulsion.
My question: “Does USC have a minimum punishment standard for students found to have committed sexual assault? If not, would USC support one?”
In another “statement” emailed to me and attributed to Kegan Allee, Interim Director and Title IX Coordinator, which again turned out to be a mostly word-for-word restatement of parts of section E.8.V, Allee declined to say whether USC would support a mandatory minimum punishment standard for sexual assault. She merely referred us back to SCampus which, of course, contains nothing of the sort.
“Schools that overlook this paradigm are failing their female students,” said Colby Bruno, a managing partner at the Victim Rights Law Center, in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity. “Giving someone a deferred suspension is like giving someone carte blanche to do it again.”
According to section E.8.V of SCampus, a deferred suspension is one of the possible sanctions a student may face for committing a sexual assault at USC.
The story continues. Even if survivors of sexual assault report a crime, overcome administrative obstacles, and achieve a punishment for their attacker sufficient to protect them in the future, they often suffer continuing, severe psychological, financial, and emotional consequences, which USC should remedy in a big way.
4. Help Victims Alleviate the severe cost of being sexually assaulted.
Along with immense emotional and physical toll of being a sexual assault survivor, victims often face financial difficulties stemming from lost tuition, the cost of legal representation, and much more. In one 1998 study, done by the Utah Coalition Against Sexual Assault, the cost to a rape victim was estimated to be $110,000 over his or her lifetime.
Working with the statistic that one in five women will be sexually assaulted before she graduates, and accounting for a 2003 CDC study that revealed victims of sexual assault face an average medical bill of $2,000, even the conservative assumption that one in 50 victims drops out mid-semester puts the total cost of sexual assault at $2 billion per graduating college seniors, per year.
A 2014 report by the Obama administration put the cost of a single sexual assault anywhere between $87,000 and $240,000. Keep in mind — 79% of the financial burden of victimhood is from decreased quality of life.
At USC, when students enroll in classes they automatically receive tuition refund insurance, which, unless they choose to opt out, pays for their tuition if they unexpectedly drop out due to a medical emergency. What about students who drop out due to psychological and post-traumatic stress following an assault?
“If you have somebody that comes forward, you evaluate, and they say, I need to be out of the school…” Dr. Heger began. “…We need to accommodate that, and if they have paid their tuition in advance, I think the university has a responsibility to refund it.”
Currently, USC does not refund tuition for students who drop out from psychological trauma following an assault. Again, USC officials ignored my question regarding if they would consider extending that service.
I asked: Would USC consider extending this service to students who drop out due to psychological and post traumatic stress following an assault?
I wasn’t even given a statement. North-Hager referred me to the insurance company, which predictably has no opinion or expertise on whether USC, one of its many clients, should consider extending the service to victims of sexual assault.
The story of struggle faced by victims and survivors at every stage of the process, and the failure to make progress with USC in making that process easier, takes a few last turns. First and foremost: what about those who aren’t yet victims, but who use reports of past crimes to guide their decisions on avoiding unsafe environments?
5. Report more than the Clery Act.
The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, or “Clery Act” for short, is a federal law passed in 1990 requiring the public disclosure of data on crimes committed on or near every university, public or private, in the United States.
In October of 2013, USC admitted that 13 sexual assaults that should have been reported were kept under wraps in both its 2010 and 2011 Clery reports. The omissions were discovered by a 2013 internal audit. In 2014, USC was also one of 55 schools put under investigation by the Department of Education for possible Title IX violations regarding sexual assault and harassment.
But even when universities do fork over all the data, which USC has a documented history of not doing, how useful is it?
In USC’s 2015 Annual Security Report, released just a few weeks ago pursuant to the Clery Act, the only specifications for a location of a crime like “forcible sex offense” are whether it occurred “On Campus,” in “Student Housing,” “Noncampus,” “Public Property,” or “LAPD.” Fraternity houses are classified not as student housing, but as “noncampus.” Unsurprisingly, most sexual assaults occurred in “noncampus” settings in 2012, 2013, and 2014:
Suppose a member of a specific fraternity is found to have committed sexual assault, and punished accordingly. Following the crime, the Department of Public Safety details the crime, but leaves out the identity of the house — Greek or residential — despite experts who say knowing that information might protect women who would otherwise go there in the future.
“There has to be a way of saying “the such and such” frat has had complaints against it. If I were a co-ed at SC, I would want to know that,” Heger said. But she was quick to point out that an effort like that can be largely student-driven, and often times is. Speaking along the same lines, Lisak said at every campus he visits, “The information starts flowing in seconds” when he asks students about the sexual assault hotspots to avoid. He said for all their resources, universities have done a pretty poor job using that information.
Currently, USC shies away from reporting the fraternities where students have been found to commit sexual assault. This was perhaps the only question USC gave a straightforward answer to. In a statement from Deputy Chief Carlisle (which doesn’t appear to have been lifted from a USC website), he said the only time fraternity and sorority houses are left out of public reporting is “in cases where an investigation could be compromised, or a victim/suspect’s identity would be inappropriately revealed through the release of that information.”
Most of the time, DPS construes a reason as to why publicly reporting the fraternity or sorority can compromise the investigation, and most students don’t find out the name of the fraternity until the members move out and the letters come down.
But as long as the “fuck who you must” mentality pervades fraternity parties, and as long as Universities view sexual assaults as things that must be handled, minimized, and avoided to prevent lawsuits, the policy solutions will always be insufficient, second-best responses. Instead, we’ve got to rip rape culture to shreds.
A culture of zero tolerance and ramped-up punishments for sexual offenses, plastered on admissions pamphlets and rigorously enforced, is necessary. A culture where women are warned about dangerous places and encouraged to report crimes through innovative technologies that make them feel safer is another giant leap. A culture where victims aren’t plunged into debt for dropping out is monumental.
And all of that, when embraced by USC, will send a powerful message that says, “We know the cost of sexual assault is high. And we are doing everything in our power — not because we have to but because we want to — to make that cost as low as possible, not to us, but to you.”
But the message — and the culture, for that matter — must also take a stand against disturbing statistical data about the bastion of social institutions on many college campuses, and certainly at USC: fraternities.
“I have a chart…somewhere in the appendix, that basically showed that the more high status a frat is, the more creepy girls rated it,” Hernandez told to me on the phone.
The charts (there are two of them, published on the last page of his study) are even more eerie than he remembers. As part of the survey, women and men were asked to rank each fraternity by number, with 1 going to the “top house” and 22 going to “the bottom house.” The women respondents were also asked to name how many “sexually aggressive experiences” they encountered at each house, which Sean labeled “creepiness frequency.”
Assuming that fraternity status is influenced at least partly by the amount of financial resources funneled into parties, the chart on the left shows that higher status fraternities, and thus, those who spent more on parties, had a higher reported-creepiness frequency. Add in the chart on the right, and the logical result is that despite having a higher creepiness frequency, the top (and more creepy) frats with the most expensive parties also had more collective hookups.
The stat that really hammers those charts home is that only 76 of the 477 survey participants were men, and only females were asked to rate fraternities in terms of creepiness, so the sliding scale between top and bottom houses is mostly based on input from women, as are the hookups garnered by each fraternity. If the creepiest fraternities also throw the most expensive parties and hook up with the most women, one has to wonder: how many of those hookups are consensual?
“People should be baffled by sexual economics,” Hernandez said. “The fact that universities don’t take more steps to ban fraternity parties in cases where this [meaning a correlation between status, money spent, sex, and creepiness] can be made clear is tremendously confusing.”
Armstrong put it simply: “Fraternities have a domination of the party resources, which basically contributes to sexual assault.”
Several studies have confirmed the Greek system’s disproportionate role in sexual assault. In 2008, a study of USC students found that a higher percentage of Greek students experienced sexual touching, attempted penetration and penetration against their will in greater percentages than non-Greek students who lived in university housing.
These findings were confirmed by a study at the University of Oregon in 2014, which found that 48.1 percent of Greek females experienced nonconsensual sexual contact, compared to 33.1 percent of non-Greek females. The study found that Greek females (38 percent) were two times more likely than non-Greek females (15.3 percent) to experience rape or attempted rape.
The only other question I asked in the conference call with Dr. Carry was about those statistics, and whether or not they were indicative of the need for a Greek system-specific focus in the coming months. Despite the evidence, Dr. Carry said the Greek system at USC is a problem undeserving of extra scrutiny.
“The data doesn’t indicate to us that the Greek community is the only community we need to dive into,” he said. Instead, he suggested more important data sets, such as “On what days of the week do we see more alcohol consumption than other days of the week?”
At USC, scrutinizing what days students do their binge drinking is more important to campus officials than ramping up restrictions on a community that a wealth of research suggests is disproportionately responsible for creating environments where sexual assault occurs.
In the span of seven months, the fraternity I joined my freshman year was broken up and banned — justifiably — after several sexual assaults took place at our parties. It was an eye-opening, shocking event for a college freshman, but it was just the beginning at USC. Since then, two more fraternities at USC — Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Alpha Tau Omega — have been given the axe. Studying what days they did the most drinking wouldn’t have changed that.
Dartmouth University chose to do more than study drinking habits. Incoming freshman in Hanover next year will find a ban on hard alcohol for any student, of any age, on campus, take yearly sexual assault training for the duration of their academic career, and be unable to “pledge” fraternities due to a rash of hazing incidents (California State University Northridge also banned the practice). Students can still join fraternities, but Dartmouth also designed several alternative social programs to deter freshman entirely. Rutgers University banned all fraternity and sorority parties for the spring 2014 semester after a rash of alcohol-related disasters.
As the number of party bans continues to rise, the invention of the modern fraternity party is worth mentioning, because it began when fraternities were in their steepest decline in support.
“The fascinating point that one author makes is that the Animal House frat party is a recent invention — something created to save Greek life from its spiral toward oblivion that has occurring in the wake of the 1960s student movements, when students were rejecting the classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and overall conventionality of these organizations,” Armstrong told me. “The argument here is — and more research needs to be done — is that the frat party in its new contemporary blow-out form, revived a dying organizational form.”
Just what level of blowout are the parties today? I gathered some eye-popping numbers.
Jacob (not his real name), who served as a Vice President for his USC fraternity — I’ll call it ‘I Felta Thigh’ — was happy to clue me in. As it turns out, while frats used to pay for individual parties, new companies with names like “Moment Entertainment” and the hilariously oxymoronic “Extreme Greeks” and “Powerhouse” will hire security, bartenders, and DJ’s for semester-long “package deals.”
“We pay a certain fee, $34,000 for the semester, and they will provide security for all of our events,” Jacob bubbles over the phone with excitement. “This includes an exchange with a sorority, an invite, 2 date dashes, and a register including a DJ. It’s different for everyone, and it depends on what you ask for.”
Just for curiosity’s sake, I asked Jacob how much his frat used to pay per party back in the glory days. He said it wouldn’t be unheard of to shell out $10,000 for each registered party, a party where professional security admits guys who are on the fraternity’s guest list, while any girls who want to attend are funneled en masse through a separate entrance. Jacob added that each DJ, depending on the cost, could add another 10 grand to the total, but the package deal has reduced that.
With dues at $2,100 per semester for people who don’t live in the house, Jacob’s math reveals that each member forks over roughly $310 per month for social and national fraternity fees, which Jacob described as “really fucking hefty.” Jacob said his fraternity has around 140 people, which, subtracting the money paid to lease the house, means $43,400 washes through his fraternity each semester.
It’s an unspoken dogma of the fraternity hierarchy at USC that the more money a fraternity has, the more popular it is on campus.
I talked to another guy, Gus (again, not his real name), who served as the Social Chair for another fraternity, which we’ll call “I Tappa Kegga.” Instead of a package deal, Gus’s fraternity still uses the entertainment companies, but hires them on a per-party basis. Gus told me, like Jacob, that a “typical registered party will cost $13,000,” which he described as a “reasonable amount for a register.” Frats, who purchase their own booze separately shell out over $1500 on alcohol for their biggest parties, according to Gus.
He said his monthly dues (which don’t include paying to live in the house), were $400 per month last year, which includes lunch and dinner five days a week for all members. Not expecting much, I called one of the entertainment companies — Extreme Greeks — for a quote. I was correct to keep expectations low.
“We’re not interested in discussing our client’s rates or budgets,” I was told by a deep voice far too official for a frat party planner. “They guard their budgets very closely…we don’t publicize anything because they don’t want anything getting out.”
But in Sean’s study, three fraternities (those ranked 18, 19, and 20) responded with detailed numbers about their budget that lined up pretty well with what Gus and Jacob told me about their fraternities. Live-out dues for those fraternities for the fall semester preceding the survey were $1875, $1700, and $1400 respectively, with a mean of $1699 — roughly $425 dollars per month. The social budgets for each were $10,000, $45,000, and $17,000 — for a single semester.
In addition to cost and creepiness, a third issue compounding the problem with the price of parties is the massive insurance rates that national fraternity organizations build into their dues structure, something all of the fraternities I talked to acknowledged. In “The Dark Power of Fraternities,” a 14,000-word essay in The Atlantic, author Caitlin Flanagan described the way these insurance premiums are used to protect fraternities –using massive legal forces, and confidential settlements if the plaintiffs even make it that far — from negative publicity when someone gets injured at their house.
So what’s to be done? So far, we know modern fraternity party is firstly, creepy, secondly, expensive, and thirdly, protected from public scrutiny in the case of wrongdoing. Is the task impossible?
Not so: Several solutions present themselves to the problem of costly, solely-fraternity hosted parties, which give serial rapists a bountiful hunting ground for assaulting women.
First, sororities should purchase alcohol insurance that allows them to have parties.
Sororities don’t have large insurance policies like this, mainly because every sorority in the National Panhellenic Conference bans liquor and parties and prohibits boys from staying in the house late at night. Universities can’t change those policies — each sorority’s national offices determine them.
Called an “anti-rape idea” by the New York Times and a potential “cosmic shift in Greek life” by USA Today, the point of this idea is born out of the consequences of giving fraternities a “home turf” advantage over holding parties in their houses. Allowing women to reclaim some of their private space as a social space could protect them from poor environments where they are more likely to be sexually assaulted. At the least, it would give women a choice they don’t currently have.
But it might not be that simple. If the case study that is fraternity insurance is to be used an example, more insurance — and more party venues — might be the wrong way to go — especially if the narrative in Flanagan’s investigation is to be believed.
“I think it’s interesting that fraternities do purchase that additional insurance, because the effect that sororities not wiling to do it shows how stupid it is that fraternities do,” Armstrong said with a laugh.
The second option, knowing that fraternities existed full-well for nearly half a century without the modern day frat party that was only invented to boost enrollment post-1970, is for universities to “sororify” fraternities.
“From this point of view, the solution is not to involve sororities in the risk, litigation, deaths, keg standards, and other ridiculousness, but to make fraternities act like sororities,” Armstrong said. “That is, to hold all parties in public venues with alcohol appropriately and legally dispensed, monitored, etc. Of course this might kill Greek life, but if it does, it only proves that there is no point to it other than boozing.”
Universities might find this a virtually impossible task, given the power of alumni networks, donors, and the recruiting appeal of Greek life for college campuses.
The third idea: inundate parents with enough information to convince them to stop paying fraternity dues.
“Somebody will fall out of another window,” Armstrong predicted with certainty. “We know this is going to happen — we don’t know exactly where, who is going to die, or how many people are going to die. But when that happens, maybe there will be real change here.”
More than a few hopeful fraternity pledges at USC have learned the power of informed parents. A few years back, a member of Kappa Sigma was expelled from USC after photographs and videos surfaced of him having sex with his girlfriend, in broad daylight, on the roof of one of USC’s tallest buildings. Every year, when the parents of a few hopeful Kappa Sigma pledges go on Google (the photos and videos are still in the top five search results for “Kappa sigma USC”), the parental veto is often issued moments later.
“If the parents stop paying for the party, the party stops,” Armstrong said. “They are actually lubricating, financially, the very activities that are leading to a decent chance that their kid will develop an alcohol problem, engage in sexual assault, be sexually assaulted, die, fall out of a window, or tank their grades.”
Mr. and Mrs. Simpson (not their actual names), who have two sons in fraternities at the University of Nevada, Reno, definitely understood the risks, but explained the difficult balancing act with their youngest son that they said Armstrong’s statements don’t necessarily take into account:
“He’s 18 and can make his own decisions.”
All of the policy wonk surrounding fraternities and sororities won’t do a lick of good unless the fundamental failure of institutions to address sexual assault culture is rectified. Nothing was more revealing of this than my discussion with the Simpsons, who I, like Armstrong, had deemed squarely responsible for maintaining the system with their money. But listening to them say that even if they don’t like fraternities, they wouldn’t tell their now-adult kids what to do, was a shakeup.
The Simpson’s were the last link in the problem chain. I had pointed the finger first at universities, and if not them, fraternities, and if not fraternities, parents who pay for them. But the finger can always be redirected, resulting in a rabbit-hole style blame game where no one takes individual responsibility, and collectively, no one takes action. After a roundabout of “not my child,” “not my university,” and “I’ll be safe, even though I know the risks,” action-less finger pointing is an outcome no one wants, and that past and future sexual assault victims don’t deserve.
Dr. Heger envisioned a cultural shift that should be supported by universities and vibrantly maintained by their students.
“I think that the students need to also shun fraternities that are known to be violent — imagine what would happen if no one showed up to a fraternity party because it’s a violent place,” she began. “The more you get the school involved in activities like community response to other people and supporting kids that are raped, I think you’ll find that people end up saying, we’re not accepting it.”
On the conference call, Dr. Carry summarized USC’s approach: “What we are also trying to do is shift culture,” he began. “We are trying to change an institutional, environmental, national culture over sexual misconduct.”
False.
For six weeks, USC refused to have an open, frank and honest two-sided conversation on these issues. Institutional culture? It won’t change as long as administrative ignorance clouds USC like the cheap fake fog in fraternity basements, and the Greek system they comprise exists in its current form. Environmental culture? It won’t change as long as USC ignores the undeniable role of serial rapists on a college campus. National culture? It’s already changing, adopting everything from new reporting technology to reformed social programming, and it’s leaving USC, which won’t even talk about it, behind.
Sexual assault is a billions of dollars per year industry in the United States. More than that, it’s a despicable, life-damaging, and sometimes life-taking crime that too many women and men have been forced to endure. This article is dedicated to, and written for, the survivors. USC has failed you.
This article has also been about that failure: the failure of USC to put meaningful words on the record as part of a transparent discussion, the failure of a predominant social system to attend to its gross exploitation of women, and the campus-wide failure to stand up and say, “no more.”
More than a few will label this interpretation of the complex relationship between victims, perpetrators, USC, and the Greek system a crock of shitty, anti-fun gibberish. But the survivors and student advocacy groups like RISE who are dedicated to stopping sexual violence on this campus deserve better.
Our friend in the white fur was right. This web of exploitation won’t go quietly into the night. It will do what it will, and it will fuck who it must, but one thing is clear. The culture that sweeps sexual assault and the struggles of survivors under the rug might be a lot closer to Bovard Administration Building than we think.
Nathaniel Haas is a law student at the USC Gould School of Law, and received his undergraduate degree from USC in 2015 with a double major in political science and economics. His work as a journalist covering sexual assault and national politics has been featured in POLITICO and The Huffington Post. Follow him on Twitter here, and send him an e-mail here.
This article would not have come together without the time and effort of Alan Mittelstaedt, the former faculty advisor for Neon Tommy, and Gabriella Gastevich, the former editor in chief. I was incredibly lucky to have their infinite patience and long hours of work in making this piece the best it could be. The world of journalism is a better place because of people like them. Thank you both.
*An earlier version of this article referred to Project Callisto as a mobile app used by the University of South Florida. Callisto is not an app, it is a mobile-friendly service that still requires a conventional web browser to utilize. It is currently in use at the University of San Francisco, not the University of South Florida. The author regrets these mistakes, and the article has been updated to reflect these changes.
