No One Will Say the Obvious: Ban the Frats. All of Them.

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I went to a frat school. Dartmouth was—and still is—almost incomprehensibly Greek, something like two-thirds of upper classmen were affiliated. Students routinely said that they had never considered themselves joining—until they ended up in the middle of the woods for college.

Because that was the long and short of it: In the tiny college town of Hanover, New Hampshire, what else were we going to do? I’d picked Dartmouth in spite of its Greek life, not because of it, and I too ended up pledging. For a time, I thought frats and sororities were just a good answer to our isolation. Genuinely! By the time I graduated, I took pride in being “fratty,” which I think I masked as meaning things like I could hang and was good at pong (a variation on beer pong, played with paddles that have no handles. See: isolation in the woods). What I realize it really meant, now, was that I could hang with the boys.

Because no matter how you cut it, Greek life as it exists at most colleges empowers men and harms women.

I still remember the conversation that crystalized my understanding of this. It was my junior year, and the Hanover police were cracking down on underage drinking—specifically, they were trying to crack down on frats and sororities for giving alcohol to minors, because that’s where most underage drinking was happening. The threat was that any Greek house that was found guilty of serving minors booze could be criminally charged and fined up to $100,000. Everyone was up in arms about this, but the houses that hosted parties were freaking out about the risk. I was talking about it with a friend who served as the treasurer of his frat. A $100,000 fine would end my sorority, I lamented. And here is what he said in response: He told me that for his frat, it just wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

This shocked me, until I thought about it. We often hear that frats benefit from the old boys’ club—you know, that graduates help brothers get high-paying jobs, and they all clap one another’s backs in business suits and donate some money back to the house where it all started. Sure, that’s true enough, but that doesn’t even begin to capture the inherent structural disadvantages that are at play on most college campuses when it comes to fraternities and sororities.

Think about it: Most of America’s colleges and universities started as all-male institutions. They famously went “coed” in the 1960s and ’70s. What that meant, at my institution specifically, for example, is that fraternities had decades and actually nearly centuries on any of the sororities that eventually came to campus. This made a big difference in terms of assets. Forget the good ol’ boys network—by the time I was a student in the late aughts, frats had multiple generations of members who had died and left money to their houses. Sororities’ oldest alums were our parents’ age.

Fraternities also owned their houses. They owned the “physical plant” as we called them, but they also owned the land on which the houses sat. And these plots were completely central to campus life, which had expanded around them. By the time sororities came around, there were slim pickings. Actually, there were no pickings: All of the female “houses” on my campus were actually housed within buildings owned and run by the college itself. This generations-long head start meant many things, including that the men had way more options when it came to what house to pledge, smaller class sizes, and more cohesion within their brotherhood. But it also meant that they had more resources in every sense of the word: real estate, history, money, alumni. The playing field was laughably uneven. That’s why two frats that had previously been banned from campus—one for hazing, one for circulating an incredibly sexist newsletter about “loose” women on campus—were able to come back during my time there. Before they returned, they were just ghost houses taking up valuable real estate. The fraternities, of course, weren’t going to cede their territory.

I’ve been thinking about all of this in the wake of the news blizzard that is the “Cornell Seven” case. I’ve been thinking about the awfulness of every single thing Jane Doe says she experienced, which I believe includes a weekslong period in which she tried to convince herself that what happened was fine until she realized it was not; Jane Doe arrived home from the frat party where the alleged assault occurred on Oct. 20 and didn’t request a rape kit until Nov. 7. I’ve been thinking about the fact that, yes, perhaps she realized that what had happened that night was not fine when she learned that it was she who would be barred from the fraternity where she was assaulted, not the men she alleges did the assaulting—and that this would be used as a point against her, as evidence that she was just salty about not being able to go to a Halloween party. And I’ve been thinking, perhaps because this is the first major sexual abuse case that has taken over the news since I became the mother to a son, about the boys—the boys who were in the room, yes, but the boys who saw the messages their brothers sent about a woman as an available body and didn’t do anything.

I think it is the brazenness of the boys’ actions that has shocked the public the most. Writing for New York magazine as a representative of Gen Z processing their first major sex-politics scandal, Zoe Yu wrote: “For all my understanding that drunken encounters are complex, and college students are still figuring out their sexual preferences, and the old view of evil men is misguided, I have no answer to what happened at Cornell—what might compel a man to text his frat brothers, ‘Free pussy,’ and for the men in the group to respond with enthusiasm.”

But I do. When I took pride, as an undergrad and twentysomething, in being “fratty,” what I meant at the time was that the choice I made while being in such close proximity to debauchery in college was to embrace it—to show that I could handle it, revel in it, love it . But what I mean now is that I feel as though I witnessed and metabolized a way of being that devalues humanity. I don’t think that this is necessarily something that is inherent to being male—but I know that it is something that envelopes men in their teens and 20s in particular, because of how society functions, because of culture, because of the ways that our institutions have been set up to enable men to be whatever they want with no consequences. Frats offer this way of being a powerful feedback loop, in upperclassmen indoctrinating new pledges and alumni coming back to revel in the old ways for a weekend.

What happens inside frats is often shocking when viewed from the outside world. The year after I graduated Dartmouth, a student broke ranks and penned an op-ed for the school newspaper about the hazing he had experienced. “We attend a strange school where a systemic culture of abuse exists under a college president who has the power and experience to change what can only be described as a public health crisis of the utmost importance: the endemic culture of physical and psychological abuse that occupies the heart of Dartmouth’s Greek community.” While he cites sexual assault as one of those abuses, much of the uproar that followed focused on the experiences he had: “I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to: swim in a kiddie pool full of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beers poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks; and vomit on other pledges, among other abuses.”

None of this surprised me. Dartmouth’s most famous frat had troughs around the basement where the brothers pee, not just during gross hazing rituals, but during parties. Booting and rallying (throwing up and then going back out) was so routine for the students who “went out” that it had that nickname. The op-ed went on to become the basis of a Rolling Stone feature (“Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy”); to the outsides world, it was cover story–worthy news. But I had not been surprised at all when I first read about the vomlet.

When people wonder how the men at Cornell could possibly have dehumanized Jane Doe so disturbingly, the answer is right there: As frat brothers, they had probably already dehumanized themselves. It’s just what happens inside of these institutions. Sometimes it spills out into the public, into the normal people, and shocks.

Why don’t frats go away? There are a lot of reasons, but I think the main one is that the students like them and the administrations are too scared to stand up to a student body that has become the customer. (Tuition for Cornell for the 2026–27 school year, with room and board, is nearly $100,000.) It would take a lot of effort and reform on the parts of the administrations, and frankly they don’t seem to be up for it, at my alma mater at least.

Since the Cornell story broke, I’ve been chatting with friends about what should happen to Greek life. About five years after we all graduated, I would say that most people I knew from Dartmouth had essentially realized that the system that had raised us was pretty insane, and that there were obvious ways that it could be improved. The first step, honestly, might be to insist that these institutions become coed, which I think would limit some of the most egregious behavior (there’s just something grosser that happens when boys are left to their own devices than when girls are) and would also have the side benefit of leveling the playing field of assets (money, houses) overall. But in my more recent conversations, all of us well into our 30s, the consensus is much clearer: that, yeah, there’s really no reason for a frat.

Multiple former brothers noted to me that college students are going to party no matter what. If not at a frat house, it will happen somewhere else. I think the “it” they are referring to there is binge drinking, which leads to all kinds of other debauchery. And I do agree—binge drinking would still happen elsewhere, it already does (and also, college presidents should pick back up their effort to lower the drinking age to 18, which would help). But I also think that there is something uniquely toxic that occurs when this kind of behavior happens inside of a house that is segregated by sex, and owned by a powerful entity that has proven itself irresponsible, and that something is sexual assault. And that’s not good for women on college campuses—nor is it good for the men.

In the immediate aftermath of the assault, Cornell banned Chi Phi, kicking the frat off campus. Tuesday, Cornell took it a step further and announced that parties at Greek houses would be banned for the rest of the academic year. “The moratorium, which comes days before homecoming weekend, will allow for a thorough review of fraternity life at Cornell to determine whether it can safely resume,” according the New York Times.

I’m not holding my breath. Cornell has almost certainly never faced such widespread backlash to its Greek system, and yet all the university can promise is a moratorium as it conducts a review. This happens all the time. When I was a Dartmouth undergrad, two banned frats returned to campus, thanks to support from a few middle-aged alumni who apparently cared that much about reliving their glory days. Soon after I graduated, two other frats were banned from campus—the one with the trough for pee and the one that served the vomlets—both for hazing. Both houses are in the process of being rerecognized by the college. That’s what happens: Greek life is exposed for what it is, the public reacts with a wave of disgust. But the adults in the room don’t do what’s actually needed, and every year, a new crop of men and women appear on campus, and end up pledging.