In 2024, a 20-year-old woman at Cornell University was allegedly drugged and gang-raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity. The incident has become a national flashpoint, but the structural dynamics it exposed are not new. A 2019 Association of American Universities survey found that a quarter of undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual conduct, with fraternities the most likely setting. From 1838 to 2025, the US has averaged two hazing deaths per year. The catalog of recent incidents is relentless. At Northern Arizona University, an 18-year-old Delta Tau Delta pledge died of alcohol poisoning after a vodka-passing ritual. At Southern University in Louisiana, a 20-year-old died after being punched four times in the chest during a hazing rite. At Penn State, 14 people were arrested for running a cocaine-trafficking ring out of two fraternity houses. At the University of Tennessee, three sexual assaults — two involving suspected drugging — were reported at fraternities in a single notice. At the University of Arkansas, a 19-year-old allegedly raped a woman at Kappa Sigma months after another woman had obtained a protection order against him. The question is not whether these organizations produce harm — the data is unambiguous. The question is why they persist. The answer is structural: fraternities generate social capital and alumni donation pipelines that universities depend on, particularly as declining birth rates squeeze enrollment. As Lucy Taylor, creator of the podcast Snapped, put it: "All the Greek alumni would have pitchforks, and it would be a whole debacle rather than kind of letting this play out in the press and then just going back to business." Daniel R. Schwarz, an 85-year-old emeritus English literature professor who has taught at Cornell for 59 years, has called for abolition of Greek life. His diagnosis is blunt: "The Greek system, in my judgment, supports alcoholism, sexual harassment, bullying under the guise of hazing, groupthink and, of course, the objectification of women." Students have confided in him about harassment. Yet Cornell itself suspended fraternity parties in 2022 after drugging and sexual assault reports — a temporary measure, not a structural one. The North American Interfraternity Conference, the trade association representing fraternities, responded to Guardian questions by calling fraternities "an accelerator for success in college and beyond" and declined to address whether sexual misconduct is pervasive. Their chief communications officer stated that men who commit or are complicit in sexual assault "should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law" — framing the issue as individual failure rather than institutional design. Students join for rational reasons: community, career networks, social status. A Cornell fraternity member said he found a "support system" and alumni connections he couldn't get elsewhere. Jennifer Freyd, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon, notes that family and friends convey that these organizations "bring them power and status." But the initiation process demands humiliation, and the culture normalizes blacking out and sexual coercion. Taylor, who joined Alpha Phi as a freshman, described being shamed for a bikini photo while simultaneously being told not to leave fraternity parties before midnight because "we don't want to seem rude." She alleges she was raped by a fraternity member and left after seven months. The pattern is a textbook extraction loop: the benefits of Greek life — networking, belonging, alumni wealth — flow upward to those already inside the system, while the costs — sexual violence, hazing injuries and deaths, psychological harm, body-image pressure including the reported "Ozempidemic" of GLP-1 drug use in sororities — fall disproportionately on the newest and most vulnerable participants. Universities, dependent on alumni donations, lack the institutional will to disrupt a revenue source. The result is a self-perpetuating structure where harm is a known externality and reform is perpetually deferred.
