Reflections

The Challenge of "Self-Regulation" As

Applied to Fraternities and Sororities
This reflection, written in the shadow of the death of a fraternity pledge at Penn
State University that, for me, sadly reprised a similar tragedy at Rutgers, offers
some of my thoughts on the relationship between colleges and universities and
Greek letter organizations. This piece also provides background for the paper
mentioned in the title above, commissioned by ACE but never published.

Reading the news of the tragic and senseless death of Timothy Piazza, a pledge at the Beta Theta Pi
fraternity at Pennsylvania State University, is horrifying. How could this painful lesson of loss not
make me (and you) want to scream?

I want to howl in the face of this searing example of waste: waste of the life of Timothy, waste of
time and talent and attention that could be otherwise focused as the various judicial, administrative,
and other processes grind their way to a conclusion. But these conclusions,
whatever they turn out to be, will never end this story for Timothy's parents and all those involved,
his "brothers," their parents, and indeed all who know all who were involved in this latest chapter in
what is a long story of misplaced trust, flawed judgment, and failed fraternity.

Reading the accounts of Piazzas death, learning of the existence (but not watching) of a surveillance
video of his final hours, and seeing news reports on the first court appearance by those being held
responsible for his death, even from the distance of being on another continent, was as disturbing as
it was almost surreal. A parent can never imagine the loss of the child. Is there anything worse that
could possibly happen?

We imagine accidents, assaults by unknown assailants, terror (these days), or carnage, if we listen to
our President, but do we expect to find that it is our friends, our brothers or sisters, who will
betray us, let us down?

For me, what is reported to have happened to Timothy Piazza at Penn State was a strange
recapitulation of an experience that we had at Rutgers University in 1988 with the death of James
Callahan. That death, following and initiation "celebration" that went horribly wrong, was an
occasion for me to rethink the whole prevention strategy that we had developed regarding the use of
alcohol.
What seemed to be the essential fact in the Callahan case was that the brothers, who on the eve of
his initiation, exposed him to enormous risk, chose not to act after he consumed some 20 or more
shots of a drink called a Kamikaze, failed to get help for him when he was cyanotic, and watched
him dying on a couch, was the fear that they would have revealed that their fraternity had violated a
policy and that the group would be subject to a severe sanction.

As a policy matter, this problem seems like something pretty easy to correct. Some colleges have
now adopted a reporting amnesty policy, for example. No college prefers to deal with a wrongful
death action as opposed to managing a violation of a sumptuary policy.

As a moral problem, however, this kind of situation is much more troubling.

What really got me thinking about our ideas of prevention and our policies on prevention was the
reaction of other students to James Callahan's death. (I should quickly say that I have not seen this
reaction in the reports on the Penn State matter.) In the eyes of his fellow students, what was
profoundly brought to the fore after Callahan's death was that he had done this to himself, he
had drunk himself to death, he didn't know when to say when.

My concern about this widespread reaction (strangely and persistently reified as the tragedy became
known not as the Lambda Chi Alpha incident but the James Callahan incident) caused me to
engage in an inquiry. With some assistance from the US Department of Education, Margaret
Klawunn, then a research assistant in my office, conducted a set of interviews with students to try to
understand how just how and why our "ethic of rules" was getting in the way of what, in her
landmark book, In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan articulated as "an ethic of care." As a result of
this inquiry and again with support from the US Department of Education, Margaret Klawunn and I
wrote and USDOE published The Web of Caring." (More on this is to be found on this website.)

1988 seems to have been a big year for alcohol issues and fraternity deaths. For me, 1988 was also a
year in which I was invited to draft a
Self-Regulation Initiative for the American Council on Education, specifically looking at how
colleges ought to think about their
relationships with organized fraternities and sororities. This invitation, from Madeleine Green who
was a vice president at ACE at the
time who also managed the ACE Fellows program, came following a ACE's publication of a self-
regulation initiative I wrote on alcohol policy and college prevention and management practices.
(More on this can be found on this website.)

While I was recognized as having experience and expertise on the college alcohol question, I'm not
entirely sure why I was invited to draft the piece on fraternities and sororities. Part of the
explanation, I suspect, had to do with the success of the first publication. Beyond that, I
think, it may have resulted from the fact that I had given some thought to the role of fraternities and
sororities in colleges, especially in the context of gender equity questions.

The truth is, back then and now, I didn't really think that institutions, particularly state institutions
(and to be sure, there was more reason
then for distinguishing state institutions from the private institutions, as they received considerably
more financial support for their operations in those days as a total percent of the operating costs,
than they do now) had any business engaging in sex discriminatory practices, even though and if the
Title IX regulations had specifically exempted social fraternities and sororities from its non-
discriminatory provisions. If it were up to me, back then I think I would have come down on the
side of figuring out what colleges and universities could effectively do to disengage from
organizations that constitutionally (endemically) promoted the kinds of inequity that Title IX and
other nondiscrimination laws sought to eliminate.

Even though my general inclinations were known to them, the folks at the American Council on
Education believed that I could write a thoughtful, to coin a phrase fair and balanced," analysis that
could be helpful and institutions as a guideline for how they might think about their relationships
with Greek organizations and the policies and practices that should flow from that basic orientation.

What follows here in the website is a late draft of my document. Though I regarded it as balanced
and even charitable to the students in
institutionalized fraternities and sororities, and though it was well received by the senior leadership
at ACE, it never saw the light of
publication. I am not sure if it even got to the phase in development where other stakeholders in
the Washington higher education association establishment participated in the extensive peer review
process that Madeleine had set up to vet these self-regulation documents. I know they never
published a version of my draft and I dont think that ACE ever published a self-regulation
document on fraternities. I was, however, warmly thanked and compensated for my efforts.

So, in thinking about this introduction and the tragedy enacted by the brothers of Penn States Beta
Theta Pi Fraternity, I asked myselfonly partially cognizant of the myriad of work, articles, studies,
judicial opinions, opinion pieces, narratives, etcis what I wrote in 1988 at all possibly helpful now?
Almost 30 years have passed, and James Callahan, had he lived, would have been old enough to have
been Timothy Piazzas father.

I leave the answer to you, the reader, of course. But what sticks with me are still a few questions:
Would these things happen if young women were present? Would these things happen if brothers
(and sisters) thoughtfully and seriously enacted plans to prevent such actions? Would these things
happen if the veil of secrecy that is given to Greek institutions by
institutions that otherwise prohibit secrecy were lifted? Would these things happen if the human
dignity of a person proposed for brotherhood or sisterhood were really respected, or better yet,
venerated? Would these things happen if honesty mattered more than the veneer of respectability?
(Just look at the architectural vocabulary of that Beta house at Penn Stateare families that live in
such buildings so depraved?) Is back-packing a drunken guest the best they have to offer? I could
go on.

Perhaps some of the analyses and recommendations I proposed that ACE make will have some
salience today. No one wanted Mr. Piazza to die. He was a promising young engineer. His so-called
friends threw backpacks next to him on the couch where he had passed out to keep him from
turning over and aspirating on his own vomit.

But in the fraternity's drinking, and in its pack behavior, I get stuck on the story of St. Augustine and
the stolen pears. Augustine, acting with his friends, stole pears from a neighbor and then threw the
pears away--a narrative of waste. Augustine never would have, I suspect, stolen or wasted the pears
if he hadn't been in the company of other boys--they suffered from a pack mentality. As in the
Piazza case, it all happened very fast for Augustine and his friends. They didnt want to get caught.
To the best of our knowledge, Augustines judgment and that of his band of brothers wasnt
impaired, certainly not by alcohol or a willingness to risk sacrificing one of the group in exchange for
not exposing the whole group to a punishment or sanction. Its a deeper story.

Institutions whose claim to legitimacy is based on knowledge of the human condition deserve no
pass for ignoring the facts before their very eyes, facts that have been adduced by the very scholars
resident therein and in the larger communities of academic production.

Self regulation is only the first step on a much longer path we must take to reclaim our honor.

WDB
June 15, 2017