Thunderstorms, some heavy during the morning hours, then skies turning partly cloudy during the afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected..
Tonight
A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Perhaps you saw the video of the fight that broke out at a K-State fraternity pledge basketball game last weekend. It’s gotten a lot of attention online.
This is exactly the problem with fraternities: You throw a bunch of feral young men into a group home, mix in alcohol and other forms of dope and then you expect them to come out the other end as mature men. That is not a great plan. What is far more likely to happen is that they will start throwing punches at each other on a basketball court.
I speak as a dad of three young men who have been or are in fraternities. A fourth might go down that path this fall. One had a great experience. One, terrible. The verdict is still out on the third, but the signs are generally good. (The stepdaughter is in a sorority, a generally good experience, too, but I’m setting that aside for the moment as a separate subject.)
At their best, frats create immediate and lasting bonds of friendship, a brotherhood that lasts through marriages, divorces and funerals. I never had it, and sometimes I feel slighted. My best friends are still my high school buddies; my friends who did went Greek have better college friendships.
That’s all good. They can also help young men learn social skills that they otherwise would lack, and they can direct energies toward philanthropic causes. I get it.
The problem is the collateral damage. This is why membership has shrunk nationwide. Hazing, boozing, fighting, even gang rape. It takes far more effort to keep it from going off the rails – benign neglect will almost inevitably lead to disaster.
What’s to be done? Oh, probably nothing. People have a right to associate with each other, and so you can’t just cancel them. The free market is probably taking care of it on its own – insurance premiums become prohibitively expensive, videos surface of brawls that scare suburban moms to death, membership drops, and suddenly the mortgage doesn’t get paid. The worst ones are likely to collapse first, and so perhaps a winnowing-down will leave stronger ones in place.
The problem, really, is the entire concept. The only way to keep that concept from going wildly off course is pretty tight supervision, which of course is entirely the opposite of what people join for. Nobody wants to be in Alpha Tappa Kegga because of a dress code and study hall.
So we’ll continue to walk along the tightrope, hoping against hope for reasonable self-governance. The brawl that broke out on the basketball court didn’t end up with arrests or hospitalization, so I guess we made it through another weekend relatively unscathed. Maybe this next one – with the first home football game – we’ll roll the dice again without hitting snake-eyes. Cross your fingers.
