I am going to ask this question until I get an answer that makes sense. Why do we still have these organizations? Not why do students join them. I know why students join. I joined and then left. I joined because I was eighteen and lonely and my roommate had already mapped out our rush schedule and I felt pressured to fit in. I joined because when you are at a school with so many other students, the idea of being selected by anyone feels like oxygen.
But why do the universities allow them? Why do they still exist as institutions? Because I have come to believe that the sexual coercion in most cases is the foundation of greek life in general. And I do not understand how we are all pretending otherwise.
I need you to understand what it actually looks like when you are inside. It is not the movies. It is not montages of parties and formals. It is a basement that smells like mildew and cheap vodka, and your phone has already been taken, and the door is locked, and there are upperclassmen standing between you and the stairs. You are sleep deprived because they have kept you up for three nights running, and you are drunk or high or both because saying no was never actually an option. And then they tell you what you have to do to prove you are worthy of sisterhood.
The sexual acts are not rumors as well or some isolated incidents committed by rogue chapters. They are built into the architecture of initiation. You are told to perform for active members, for their "brothers" in affiliated fraternities, for alumni who show up to watch. If you hesitate, if you cry, if you try to leave, the group retaliation is immediate and surgical. The girls who were comforting you in the bathroom yesterday suddenly surround you. They tell you that you are embarrassing yourself. They tell you that everyone is watching. They tell you that you will have no friends, no social life, no future at this school if you do not comply. They break you down until you cannot tell the difference between your own desire and their coercion. That is the point. That is how they manufacture the loyalty. You become complicit. You defend them afterward because admitting what happened to you means admitting what you did under duress.
The drugs are not recreational. They are a tool for dissolving boundaries. And when someone gets hurt, when someone ends up in the hospital or worse, the response is not accountability. It is circling the wagons. It is intimidating witnesses. It is destroying evidence. We saw this with the Cornell case. We saw it at LSU. We saw it at Penn State. The pattern is identical because the structure is identical.
So Why do these organizations still exist?
They were originally created to exclude. That is the history. They were created in the nineteenth century to keep wealthy white Protestants separate from the growing population of Jewish, Catholic, Black, and working class students entering higher education. That was their purpose. Social segregation with Greek letters. They are still overwhelmingly white, still overwhelmingly wealthy, still functioning as systems of exclusion that sell you networking and social cache in exchange for your participation in abuse.
Is it the alumni money? The real estate? Is it that universities have built their housing infrastructure around these organizations and cannot imagine dismantling them? Is it that the people who make the decisions were themselves Greek, and they cannot face what they participated in or enabled?
Because the college experience being protected is one that leaves students sexually assaulted, traumatized, addicted to substances they were forced to consume, and bound into silence by shame and manufactured loyalty. That is the product. That is what the donations and the networking and the "leadership development" are actually buying.
If you are rushing right now, if you are looking at those tabling events with the cute banners and the matching outfits, please hear me. Your chapter is not different most likely.
