May 1, 2019

"Swarthmore College’s two fraternities announced Tuesday that they are disbanding after weathering intense criticism over leaked documents that contained allegations of a 'rape attic'..."

"... as well as homophobic, racist and misogynistic language. In statements posted to Facebook Tuesday night, members of Phi Psi, which is not nationally affiliated, and Delta Upsilon wrote that they had unanimously decided to dissolve their fraternities and give up their houses. In April, a redacted version of a 116-page document that reportedly contained Phi Psi’s old meeting minutes and details of pledge tasks was published by two campus publications, revealing troubling details about the culture within the selective Pennsylvania college’s fraternities. The documents feature graphic descriptions of members’ sexual encounters, including a reference to an alleged 'rape tunnel.' It also describes their conversations about women, minority groups and sexual assault that often contained offensive language, such as homophobic and racial slurs.... 'We cannot in good conscience be members of an organization with such a painful history,' the members of Phi Psi said in Tuesday’s statement. 'Since the start of our membership, we made it our mission to improve the culture and perception of Phi Psi. Unfortunately, the wounds are too deep to repair.'"

From "Swarthmore fraternities disband after outrage over leaked documents joking about 'rape attic.'"

64 comments:

Bay Area Guy said...

Kinda surprised Swarthmore even has fraternities.

What sane parent sends their little snowflake to Swarthmore?

Yeah, college kids say a lotta stupid and dirty stuff. Probably, a real bad idea to write down stupid and dirty stuff on paper or, worse, to be videotaped saying stupid and dirty stuff.

Most sane people can discern between stupid and dirty stuff being said, and, well, actual rape allegations made by actual victims in the actual attics of actual fraternities at Swarthmore.

rhhardin said...

Woke fraternities don't throw stereos out of the third floor windows either. At least I suppose not.

Nonapod said...

Elite is right. According to Wikipedia Swarthmore has a $2.116 billion endowment with only 1600 students and is considered one of the "little ivies".

rhhardin said...

Skull and Boners.

Hagar said...

Their lawyers told them to cut and run and wrote up a nice capitulation and farewell statement for them.

Ann Althouse said...

I first heard about Swarthmore from The Mamas and The Papas — "Creeque Alley":

When Cass was a sophomore, planned to go to Swarthmore
But she changed her mind one day
Standin' on the turnpike, thumb out to hitchhike,
"Take me to New York right away."


According to the annotation at the link, "Mama Cass had an IQ of 165, started but never finished college (American University In Washington DC) and chose a singing career. She actually thought of going Goucher College in Maryland, but Swarthmore rhymed better…"

Mama Cass had an IQ of 165? Well, let's assume she did. Notice that she considered going to college, but she changed her (genius) mind.

And don't tell me if she was so smart why did she choke to death on a ham sandwich.

Mama Cass did not choke to death on a ham sandwich.

Mama Cass died of “'fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity' (i.e., a heart attack brought about by fatty degeneration of the heart muscle fiber), and nothing was found to have been blocking her mouth or throat."

Ann Althouse said...

"Notice that she considered going to college..."

I mean, she went to college and got the hell out.

Tommy Duncan said...

Where's the "That's not funny" tag?

Mike Sylwester said...

Both fraternities voted unanimously to disband because of this?

Did not even one member of one fraternity defend his fraternity experience as beneficial?

Achilles said...

Bay Area Guy said...

What sane parent sends their little snowflake to Swarthmore?

It is a finishing school for the wealthy.

It is hard to get in but once in easy to graduate. No real skills transfer required. 4-6 years of parties and wokeness.

Then you have a ticket to a government sinecure.

It is the function of the finishing school to provide a path for the aristocratic class and keep the deplorables out of their rice bowl.

tim maguire said...

'We cannot in good conscience be members of an organization with such a painful history,'

Paywalled--I wanted to know when these problematic meeting minutes were written. Every long standing institution has a "painful" history. All of them.

Never mind that every single person involved in the painful behavior has long since moved on. What about the ideals of the fraternity? Did it have any?

Michael K said...

It's interesting not see how fraternities have changed. My fraternity would have nothing like that sort of stuff in records. In my college years, fraternities were the cheapest place to live and came with a social life. We did stuff like throw water balloons or even potatoes with cherry bombs inside. No drinking was allowed in the house but that was frequently ignored. Girl's dorms had closing hours, midnight if they had a B average,. It was the age of "in loco parentis."

daskol said...

At least at Wesleyan, the admin effectively banned the frats, slowly but surely eroding them over several years by requiring that they house non-frat students, go co-ed and then just phasing them out. In a more totalitarian move, Swarthmore "community" appears to have made the frats ban themselves.

Michael K said...

"to see how..."

Kevin said...

I had a feeling we'd find that Mama Cass was only considered hugely fat by yesterday's standards and not today's. It says she was 5'5" and 238 pounds. Which ain't anorexic by any stretch but back then she was such an aberration that she was famous for her weight above all else, and it definitely would not be the case today.

jaydub said...

If today's standards for college behavior were applied to my fraternity in the 60's we would probably have all been expelled, including Mitch McConnell who was the fraternity president my sophomore year. Not that we were all that bad, just that the rules have changed. The coeds from then couldn't even have survived today's priggishness. Most of them were trying to get laid, too.

bagoh20 said...

I never understood why a bunch of grown men would want to live together. I spent my college days sharing a house with 4 guys and 4 girls. We all got along great, although I was raped more than once.

Bay Area Guy said...

After disbanding the fraternities at Swarthmore, they should give serious consideration to disbanding Swarthmore itself.

Let the poor, common folks of Southern Philly live at Swarthmore!

buwaya said...

Fools.
They should take a lesson from the Japanese monarchy.
It does not matter how many sins lie in an institutions past.
With enough ceremony anything can be overcome.

Wince said...

I didn’t know Bernie Sanders went to Swarthmore.

Shouldn’t he have to “disband” his campaign?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bernie-sanders-essay/

Jack Klompus said...

"Let the poor, common folks of Southern Philly live at Swarthmore!"

Don't even have to go that far to find some deserving "marginalized" communities of color when Chester City is practically next door. Try walking around THAT town at night alone.

Fernandinande said...

The leaked archives contain graphic depictions of sexual encounters, rape jokes, pornography, and photos and videos of urination and other disturbing acts.

Here are all the mentions of "rape" in the linked archives:
"Also how embarrassed would you be if you were in DU right now? Your parties suck, you have both a rape tunnel AND a rape attic (gotta choose one or the other), and you lost the pong tourney after winning all but one opening round matchup."

The strings "gay" and "homo" don't appear.

Shane said...

Annual tuition at Swarthmore? $52,588 USD (2018)

Achilles said...

buwaya said...
Fools.
They should take a lesson from the Japanese monarchy.
It does not matter how many sins lie in an institutions past.
With enough ceremony anything can be overcome.


There is an interesting dynamic here.

The United States and the defining characteristic of it's founding was the primacy of the individual.

But there is always a social fabric. Common experiences that hold people together.

Americans don't have the same natural institutional adherence because of that core support for individuality.

For example I believe you are Catholic. The institution of Catholicism when it is the foundational institution of a society corrupts that society and it becomes almost feudal and tends toward socialism. But in the US where the foundational institutions were a distributed protestant churches the Catholic church does a lot of positive work.

Seek meaning in paradox.

Rick said...

Here are all the mentions of "rape" in the linked archives:

The whole thing is underwhelming. It's a bunch of juvenile kids cracking about events which might be offensive if only they were true monitored by a group of even less mature kids trying to find something...anything ...to justify the outrage they so desperately need to give their lives meaning.

Ralph L said...

Better the attic than a glass coffee table.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Rape-rape, or Rolling Stone rape?

Oso Negro said...

I think all current and past fraternity boys from Swarthmore must be publicly named, and hounded from any jobs or public offices they may hold.

Anonymous said...

I took my own "fraternity" with me when I went to college--a bunch of us from the same school, stage-crew geeks for the most part, smart misfits likewise. All successes, some very much so.

No real fraternity would have given me a second look, and the feeling was mutual. Ironically, some of the friends I made on campus were in a fraternity, but it was Animal House before the movie and as far as I know none of them keep up any frat contacts.

Narr
Is Lesbian Until Graduation still a thing?

Fernandinande said...

It says she was 5'5" and 238 pounds.

According to the google BMI calculator her weight was OK but she was 2 feet too short.

Fernandinande said...

The whole thing is underwhelming.

I think the correct term is "fake news". Shocking.

Not Sure said...

Mama Cass died of “'fatty myocardial degeneration due to obesity' (i.e., a heart attack brought about by fatty degeneration of the heart muscle fiber), and nothing was found to have been blocking her mouth or throat."

Choking to death on a single ham sandwich is a sad accident. Dying from the cumulative effects of vast quantities of ham sandwiches is something else entirely--but it's not evidence of a high IQ.

Lewis Wetzel said...

So no crimes were revealed? Just bad think?

Bruce Hayden said...

“I never understood why a bunch of grown men would want to live together. I spent my college days sharing a house with 4 guys and 4 girls. We all got along great, although I was raped more than once”

I went to my 45th college reunion a couple years ago, and noticed that probably 80% of the attendees were Greek, while the student body at that time was maybe 20% Greek. Which is to say that the Greeks were the ones with close enough ties to each other to bother showing up. My school was about the size of Swarthmore, so you mostly kinda knew everyone a little bit. And, in particular, you knew who was in which sorority and which fraternity. We all sat with our houses at the reunion, which was a problem for the couples where each spouse was in a house. Mostly they sat with one house one night, and the other house the next night. Which forced the GDIs to sit together. It wasn’t the least bit weird though, because my fraternity brothers are the ones I have kept track of over the last half century. I probably know something about maybe 50 or so fraternity brothers, some of the other Greeks, and a handful of others who became somehow famous. What we have is a bunch of linked subgroups, with the subgroups mostly sharing either college class and/or pledge class.

Even a half century after joining, the Greeks are the ones who raise the money for the school. When I was in college, I would guess that 90% of the student philanthropy was Greek based. If you wanted to raise money for a good cause, or generate volunteers for some good cause, you went to the fraternities and sororities. When I was president of my house, our house worked with a sorority to set the world record for continuous trampoline jumping (I think that we did maybe 5 weeks). The purpose was fund raising, of course, with us getting pledges of $x per day from everyone we knew for a charity. We all had fun, got to hang out with the girls from what we thought was the hottest sorority, and did good at the same time. This was a big thing even 40 years later when my kid went Greek at a similar sized school, and part of their choice of house to join was based on how much good work they did.

Another facet was social life. Pretty much the only consistently scheduled social events at school were Greek, and probably more fraternities than sororities (given traditional gender roles). We had a social fund that we used to bring in bands, sometimes food, and a little booze. The Betas (living in a house that the wife of one of our founders had donated to the school for us, but they had conveniently burned down their own) would throw parties that would have 1,000 people float through, out of a student body of 1,600. Ours were never that epic, but we did have a band maybe once a month and a really big party once a semester. The GDIs (non Greeks) seemed to mostly sit in their rooms and get stoned on Fri and Sat nights. You would think with that much partying, that all the Greek houses would be verging on academic suspension. Far from it. Every Greek house had a cumulative GPA above the school mean, and some well above. This was one of the places where the houses competed, and that meant nudging some of the underperformers to up their game. My house was usually #1 in GPA, which is part of why we had more graduate degrees than members in my class. Led, of course, by the Bruces, with five graduate degrees for the three of us (the slacker was an MD). I should add that house GPA was something else my kid looked for before deciding what house to join.

Fernandinande said...

Dying from the cumulative effects of vast quantities of ham sandwiches is something else entirely--but it's not evidence of a high IQ.

If anything it's evidence of a low IQ.

Smart people usually die from exposure to the uranium they've been smelting, because it's totally worth it.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Bruce Hayden-
I look at this as another episode of the state destroying alternate focuses of social organization.
"Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

tim in vermont said...

This is a triple bank shot, that like a cannonball in one of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, is going to roll right to the feet of our hero, Bernie Sanders.

Henry said...

Maybe the year of jubilee can include forgiving student stupidity as well as student debt.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Far left liberal colleges like Swathmore really don't want any males on campus unless they are beta males.

Yancey Ward said...

Damn it! Althouse beat me to the Mamas and the Papas reference! It was also my first hearing of Swarthmore- when I first heard the song around age 11 or so, I had to go look it up in the encyclopedia- was surprised to find it was a college.

I still love that song- "no one's getting fat except for Mama Cass". It also makes me sad considering what killed Mama Cass.

Michael K said...

Far left liberal colleges like Swathmore really don't want any males on campus unless they are beta males.<

In one of WEB Griffin's novels, his black character refers to Swarthmore as "Joseph Stalin U" where his sister and brother graduated. Those novels were written in the late 1980s.

I'm Full of Soup said...

"According to Wikipedia Swarthmore has a $2.116 billion endowment with only 1600 students and is considered one of the "little ivies"."

So if you do the math, and they get 5% per year on that YUGE endowment, that would generate $106 Million a year in investment income which equates to $66,125 per student!

That's how we can get free college Senator Warren!

Yancey Ward said...

In defense of Swarthmore, what do you suppose the students pay on tuition and room and board on average? I am pretty sure it isn't the listed price, or even close to it.

Clyde said...

Goddamn! That Mazie Hirono is a real POS.

I'm Full of Soup said...

If they have 400 professors and average comp is 132K each, that leaves $53 Million to cover all other employees and expenses.

mccullough said...

Nothing worse than a bunch of disgruntled students who couldn’t get into Princeton.

The fraternity members who are underclassmen now will have to transfer. Hopefully they can find a better college to attend. P

Bay Area Guy said...

In the spirit of Equal Protection at Swarthmore, they really need to stop all the sexist "separate but equal" nonsense, and fully integrate the Fraternities with the Sororities.

It would enhance the masculinity of both organizations.

n.n said...

"Leaked", "allegations" of thought crimes are terms of sufficient cause for a warlock trial or perhaps trial by press.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

12:49 AJ Lynch

dang. Lotsa serious serious money in these elite college endowments. Best to hit up the poor sap working-class tax payer, for so-called "free tuition" instead.

PM said...

"Rape attic." How stupid can you get?

AllenS said...

Soon everyone, there will be no more joking, and no more smiling.

n.n said...

It's not a rape-rape attic, or an abortion-abortion chamber. One is real, and the other is a thought crime. Semantic and social progress in labels and judgment.

Yancey Ward said...

"Nothing worse than a bunch of disgruntled students who couldn’t get into Princeton."

I'll thank you not to refer to Clown College that way.

Richard said...

"We cannot in good conscience be members of an organization with such a painful history,' the members of Phi Psi said in Tuesday’s statement."

They should have given the Groucho Marx response: I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.

Krumhorn said...

Both of my parents went to Swarthmore and so did my sister. It’s a singularly gorgeous campus. My parents were electrical engineers. My mom worked during WWII for RCA developing the tracking characteristics of radar. My dad worked on the Manhattan project. My sister is a pediatrician. Like almost every other small liberal arts college, it is overrun by hard core lefties. The boomers have shit the bed with this stuff. But Swarthmore is a fine school often ranked very high along with Amherst and Pomona.

Kids write, say, and do very stupid things. It’s not the end of the world, but in leftieland, we can count on the Blasey Fords to throw it in our faces 25 years later as if it is the central marker of our character. As Paglia says, any girl who goes to a frat party and then follows some guy up to the rape attic is STUPID.

- Krumhorn

YoungHegelian said...

"RAPE Attic!

I thought you said GRAPE ATTIC!

I didn't think Swarthmore had an AG department, but, still, I thought it was a cool place to put a vineyard.

Now you tell me!"

Anonymous said...

I think my son is made of sterner stuff than these Swarthmore lads. He knows, at least, how to say "Go to Hell, you censorious scolds!" when confronted by censorious scolds.

JAORE said...

Since both frats with the "painful history" were Swathmore frats,how can these oh-so-sensitive people stand the thought of continuing in that college?

Bet there was a "painful history" in the state.... and America..... and the freakin' WORLD!

They should, just to be consistent, resign from all of the above.

Sins of the brothers...

Molly said...

I understand that the fraternities had areas called "rape rooms." But has any female student actually complained about being raped at the fraternities? Is the concern about nominclature, or about criminal activity?

Richard Dolan said...

Fortunately, history is no longer taught at Swarthmore. Otherwise, once they became acquainted with the subject, the students (well, maybe just the cis-gendered, race-privileged ones) would all have to check out of the human race given its unsavory record on so many scores.

Trumpit said...

My only concern is whether the rapes were worthy of the tony Swarthmore reputation for world class rape research. Surely, the fraternities weren't just out to bang a drunk chick, but to publish peer-reviewed research on the topic of Supreme Court Justice Kavanaughty and his love of beer, and co-eds. Rho Alpha Psi Epsilon Sigma should be investigated, however, for their wild parties. Their name is kinda a giveaway.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Make friends with the kids who are active in Hillel. Free booze is everywhere on campus but a good free dinner is hard to find.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if this will raise the admissions to applications ratio. I have a grandson.

todd galle said...

Bunch of Quakers, in both meanings. I agree with Bruce, I went to a similar size PA college 1800 or so students in the mid 80s, and we had 12 fraternities and I think 6 sororities. Ours was basically the history house, where over half of the brothers were majoring. I have great memories, developed live long relationships (including meeting my wife of almost 30 years), etc. We weren't angels by any means, and I suffered the indignity of literally 'double secret probation' by the college at one point. But it was cheaper (and I was working my way through and doing ROTC as well) to live and eat in the Frat. We had a fantastic cook and a commercial kitchen, so ate like Kings. We'd invite different professors over for dinner bi-weekly, to curry favor initially, then because they kept dropping hints that they and their wives would appreciate a re-invite. Got to the point where one would bring a case of wine for the dinner. Very different times, with an entirely different professoriate.