Fraternity Parties Research Articles

Briefings

University of New Mexico shooting kills one, injures another University settles over deadly officer‐involved shooting HBCU bomb threats work of one minor University suspends fraternity parties after Rohypnol usage, assault reported

Did court dismiss student's pre‐assault Title IX claim?

A female student at the University of California, Berkeley met John Doe at a fraternity party. They “engaged in light sexual activity,” but John Doe became aggressive with the female student. The female student was allegedly able to end the encounter by claiming her friends were looking for her.

Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933–1943

Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933–1943

Girls and Rape Culture

In 1983, Andrea Dworkin addressed the Midwest Men’s Conference in Minneapolis. She discussed the rape culture in which we live, noted the similarities between rape and war, and, following the title of her talk, asked for a “24-hour truce in which there is no rape.” And she asked why men and boys are so slow to understand that women and girls “are human to precisely the degree and quality that [they] are” (n.p.). Every sexual assault begins with the dehumanization of the victim. And sometimes, after the violation, after the pain and the fear, comes the institutional dehumanization visited upon the victim who seeks medical or legal help. Two recent memoirs bring to the surface rape culture, evident in the young men who raped these girls and the systemic dehumanization they suffered when they sought justice. Chanel Miller’s Know My Name (2019) describes the aftermath of being sexually assaulted, when she was just out of college and still living at home, by someone she met at a fraternity party. Although the case against her rapist was as strong as possible–there were eyewitnesses and physical evidence was collected immediately–he was sentenced to only six months in the county jail, and she was repeatedly shamed, her humanity denied by the judicial system. Lacy Crawford’s Notes on a Silencing (2020) describes the aftermath of being sexually assaulted, when she was 15, by two boys, students at her New England boarding school, including an account of how school officials refused to do anything other than label her promiscuous and protect the boys. The ways in which she was silenced by St. Paul’s, which disregarded her health and future, and denied her humanity because she was only a girl, were profound. In both cases, the promising future of the perpetrators was prioritized over the humanity of the girls by many institutions, including the judiciary and the press. Crawford was raped just seven years after Dworkin made her plea to that men’s conference, but Miller was assaulted twenty-five years after, making perfectly clear that rape culture has become only more entrenched.

Mock Jurors' Perceptions of Sexual Assault on a University Campus.

The purpose of this study was to examine how defendant gender, victim gender, location of sexual assault (professor's office vs. fraternity party), and whether the defendant was intoxicated influenced mock jurors' decisions in a sexual assault case. Mock jurors (N = 503) read a mock trial transcript depicting an alleged sexual assault and were asked to render a dichotomous verdict, continuous guilt rating, and rate their perceptions of the victim and defendant. There was no influence on mock jurors' dichotomous verdicts. However, the presence of intoxication did influence continuous guilt ratings; intoxicated defendants elicited higher guilt ratings compared to sober defendants. Whether the defendant was intoxicated and the location of the crime were found to impact mock jurors' perceptions of the defendant (e.g., believability, credibility); whereas the gender of the defendant affected the perceived control the defendant had over the situation. Victim gender was found to impact mock jurors perceptions of the victim, such that female victims were perceived more favorably than male victims; this may support the idea that male victims of sexual assault are generally perceived more negatively than female victims. These results, and more, are discussed in terms of the current study and the larger implications.

Was a university liable for assaults at off‐campus fraternity?

Kansas State University student Sara Weckhorst attended a KSU fraternity party in 2014 at an off‐campus location known as “Pillsbury Crossing.” After she became extremely intoxicated, a fraternity member allegedly raped her, transported her to the fraternity's off‐campus house, and raped her again. In addition, another fraternity member also purportedly raped her at that time.

Individual, Behavioral, and Situational Correlates of the Drugging Victimization Experiences of College Women

Interest in “drugging” has increased, with much focus on drugging victimization within the context of sexual assault and particularly among college students. This study uses data from the Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) Study and the Historically Black College and University Campus Sexual Assault (HBCU-CSA) Study to explore college women’s drugging victimization experiences beyond those limited to drug-facilitated sexual assault. We draw on a lifestyle-exposure/routine activity theory approach to personal victimization integrated with scholarship on gendered opportunities and the campus party culture to examine the individual, behavioral, and situational characteristics embedded in the campus environment that place college women at increased risks of being drugged. We pay particular attention to cultural and institutional differences shaping experiences and risks at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Findings show that 5% and 4% of women at PWIs and HBCUs, respectively, report drugging victimization and that exposure to risky situations (e.g., fraternity party attendance) is a risk factor primarily for women at PWIs.

What Constitutes Sexual Harassment and How Should Administrators Handle It?

Gender discrimination and sexual harassment persist on college campuses across the United States. This seems especially obvious at the beginning of the academic year when many freshman women and their parents are welcomed to campus with sexually explicit signs displayed on all-male residences. But, sometimes, sexual harassment and gender discrimination takes a subtler form, creating unique challenges for administrators. This article presents the true case of a professional fraternity party gone awry, testing the leadership skills of several college administrators. The case provides a platform for educational leadership students to apply the theories they are learning in their preparation programs to real-life situations. This case is important and timely as educational leaders across the p-20 pipeline struggle to navigate the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights’ 2011 directives concerning defining and responding to allegations of sexual assault and harassment.

Fraternal foreign policy transfer? Evaluating the case of Australian Labor and British Labour

ABSTRACTThe literature on policy transfer and policy diffusion is vast, but analysis of how this operates in the domain of foreign policy is limited. Is there evidence that policy-related knowledge and ideas in the foreign policy realm are transferred between jurisdictions? This article addresses this question in the context of the relationship between two fraternal social democratic parties – the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party. It focuses on the period between 2006 and 2010, which covers Kevin Rudd’s assumption of the Labor leadership and his first term as Prime Minister and the transition from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown in June 2007. Kevin Rudd’s Prime Ministership was terminated in a party room coup in June 2010 while Gordon Brown led the British Labour Party to electoral defeat one month earlier. The article investigates three prominent areas of foreign policy – regional engagement, climate change, and aid and international development – to evaluate the extent of policy transfer and diffusion between the Rudd and Brown Governments. Using the ‘degrees of transfer’ framework outlined by Dolowitz and Marsh, it finds that emulation, policy combinations, and inspiration all featured but that there was scant evidence of complete transfer.

Performativity Double Standards and the Sexual Orientation Climate at a Southern Liberal Arts University

ABSTRACTThis study employs quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how heterosexual, bisexual, and gay students rate and describe a Southern, religiously affiliated university’s sexual orientation climate. Using qualitative data, queer theory, and the concept tyranny of sexualized spaces, we explain why non-heterosexual students have more negative perceptions of the university climate than heterosexual male students, in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Although heterosexual students see few problems with the campus sexual orientation climate, bisexual men and women describe being challenged on the authenticity of their orientation, and lesbian and, to a greater extent, gay male students report harassment and exclusion in a number of settings. These distinct processes are influenced by broader heteronormative standards. We also shed much-needed light on how gendered sexual performativity double standards within an important campus microclimate (fraternity parties) contribute to creating a tyrannical sexualized space and negatively affect overall campus climate perceptions.

“Cool” Party, Bro: The Fraternity Use of Party Structure as a Mechanism for Control over Female Status on Campus

ABSTRACTThis conceptual article examines how existing institutionalized sexism constructed within fraternity party structure is used as a mechanism for categorizing women on college campuses. While these social gatherings provide an opportunity for interaction and new relationships, the environment is often constructed in a manner that reinforces traditional gender roles and increases the overall risk of sexual assaults. For some females, the attainment of status and social acceptance appears to be more important than the risk involved with attendance. The descriptive model presented focuses on the categories of relationships and the risk associated with assimilating into the fraternity party culture.

Social Psychological Processes that Facilitate Sexual Assault within the Fraternity Party Subculture

AbstractRape on the college campus has gained increasing amounts of attention in higher education, mainstream news, and public policy. The prevalence rates of rape are especially high among students who frequent campus parties, such as those hosted by fraternities. Researchers have described this increased risk by focusing on individual attitudes and behaviors of fraternity members or on the organizational norms and practices within the fraternity party subculture. To incorporate these studies into a single theoretical framework, this essay uses a social psychological approach to connect individual‐level attitudes, (sub)culture, and behavior. I describe and apply identity theory and affect control theory, two structural symbolic interactionist theories, to explain why certain men are drawn to high‐risk fraternities and how membership reinforces hostility toward and abuse of women. In doing so, I suggest several avenues for future research that would increase social psychological understanding of the heightened prevalence of sexual victimization within the fraternity party subculture.

Understand final regs for VAWA amendments to Clery

Recent allegations that the University of Virginia was made aware of the gang rape of a student during a fraternity party but did nothing about it have caused irreparable harm to its image and placed it in a legally precarious position. But the allegations also highlight the need to ensure your campus safety department's policies and procedures for dealing with sexual violence are exemplary. And that requires ensuring compliance with the Violence Against Women Act.

原不二夫著 『未完に終わった国際協力―マラヤ共産党と兄弟党』

原不二夫著 『未完に終わった国際協力―マラヤ共産党と兄弟党』

Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt

Seeing in the Red:Looking at Student Debt Curtis Marez (bio) Currently exceeding $1 trillion, federal student debt in the United States has surpassed credit card debt, emerging as a brutal force of domination in contemporary universities and beyond.1 As Jeffrey J. Williams argues, student debt “is not just a mode of finance but of mode of pedagogy.” It teaches that “higher education is a consumer service”; that career choices should be tailored to servicing debt; that the rule of the capitalist market is “natural, inevitable, and implacable”; “that democracy is a market” which obligates citizens to capital; and finally, that inequality is not a collective but an individual problem.2 To paraphrase from the 2013 American Studies Association conference theme, the contemporary university of debt creates a hierarchy of value in which nonnormative immigrants, unpropertied, illegal, indigenous, marginalized, or queer others are cast as in debt or as “failed” subjects. For these and other reasons, the critique of student debt involves, in the suggestive phrase contributed to the conference theme by Lisa Lowe, “a critique of fidelity to the normative.” In tonight’s address I attempt to center collective dissent to student debt in American studies. At the same time, I outline an American studies version of critical university studies. In his groundbreaking book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson argued that the construction of Black people as racial inferiors was not incidental but integral to the historical development of capitalism. Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism” to refer to “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society” in “racial directions” such that “as a material force” racialism permeates capitalist social structures.”3 Capitalism has been wedded to white supremacy, and anti-Black racism has helped make capitalist exploitation seem not only necessary but also right. Robinson subsequently developed this line of thought in his book Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in the American Theater and Film before World War II, where he argues that racial representations in classic Hollywood cinema constitute a kind of popular pedagogy of Black inferiority that reinforced racial capitalism.4 [End Page 261] Similarly, I argue that the contemporary regime of university debt constitutes a form of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism based on the incorporation of disposable low-wage workers and complicity in the occupation of indigenous lands. The university domination of land and labor, I conclude, is pursued structurally but also ideologically, in film and other media representing campus life.5 I first began thinking about what would become this address in the wake of the mass student protests against budget cuts and increased tuition starting in the fall of 2010 in Puerto Rico, Europe, and the United States. Such protests at UC San Diego, where I teach, were followed in February by protests in response to a kind of blackface fraternity party called the “Compton Cookout” and the larger pattern of structural racism on campus that made it possible. A month later in March, as part of statewide protests against state funding cuts for higher education, students at UCSD in effect reframed the budget crisis as a racial project and the Compton Cookout as partly an expression of the kinds of privatization that further exclude students of color. That spring quarter, my colleague Yen Espiritu, an ethnic studies scholar, organized a team-taught, undergraduate course called California’s Public Education Crisis, and my contribution to the course was to create a digital archive of movies and TV shows filmed on college and university campuses in California, from the silent era to the present, and a companion lecture about the fantasies and desires for education encoded there.6 The result, which remains available on the “Critical Commons” website, is a project situated at the intersection of American studies, ethnic studies, visual studies, and critical university studies, and it is in that spirit that I make the following presentation.7 In 1970 a number of films about the crises in higher education were released, including RPM (or “Revolutions Per Minute”), which was filmed at the University of the Pacific (UOP) in Stockton, California.8 RPM focuses on a conflicted coalition...

David Huddle, A Versatile Author with Deep Roots in the New River Valley

David Huddle,A Versatile Author with Deep Roots in the New River Valley George Brosi Now in his early seventies, David Huddle is a tall, eloquent man, a distinguished professor, and an accomplished author. He has published nineteen books of poetry, stories, and essays. Remarkably, more than two-hundred of his works have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies, in addition to publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, and The American Scholar. David Huddle grew up enjoying the stories his grandfather told in a family that loved books and often read aloud. When the Library of Virginia presented him their award for fiction in 2012, he told the audience, “Among my earliest memories is my mother reading aloud to my brothers and me—Mother Goose, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows. So I experienced books, words, sentences, and the sound of the human reading voice as the presence of love.” Huddle was raised in Ivanhoe, Virginia, a small town located on the New River in Wythe County. His father, Charles Richard Huddle, Jr. (1911–1986) was a manager for the town’s largest employer, National Carbide Corporation, which made carbide for the lamps that area miners used. His mother, Mary Frances Akers (1919–1999) married his father, who grew up practically next door, when she was fifteen and he was twenty. They had three sons: Charles Huddle, III (1939–2005), followed by David in 1942 and Bill in 1944. In his essay, “A Writer’s Credo” in the 1993 edition of the Iron Mountain Review, Huddle wrote, “From both sides of my family I have inherited patience, powers of concentration, and the inclination to work hard and to try to overcome discouragement.” David Huddle’s early work ethic was honed beginning at the tender age of eleven when he became the Roanoke Times newspaper carrier for Ivanhoe. The experience of walking throughout the town every afternoon, like attending public school in Ivanhoe, provided direct contact with a wide array of people to a youngster who had grown up in a well established family. When he was twelve, his father gave David his old Conn alto [End Page 15] saxophone. He later said that playing the sax, “let me find out for myself how work and concentration were the keys to the dream of becoming an artist.” When school consolidation required David to take the school bus into the county seat in 1955, he had to give up his paper route because he had to catch the bus too early to deliver Ivanhoe’s papers. Later Huddle wrote, “About a thousand hours of my adolescence were spent with my butt parked in a school bus seat—and I’m here to tell you that it was positively and negatively character forming.” From the eighth grade to his senior year, Mrs. Arraga Young was his English teacher. She gave him “the nuts and bolts understanding of the American language that has empowered [his] writing life.” Throughout his high school years, Huddle held down a job at Leggett’s, Wytheville’s largest department store, and played his saxophone in a six-person dance band. After graduating from high school, Huddle attended the University of Virginia, following his older brother there, and continued to play the sax in small bands at fraternity parties and other functions. He was an English major, and in 1963 he took a class in the short story. His work in that class won him some praise, and he has mused that perhaps it instilled the idea in him that he could be a writer and wouldn’t need a college education for that. This possibly made it easier, he believes, “to choose the disastrous path of flunking out” of the University of Virginia in January 1964. He kept his job as an orderly at the University of Virginia hospital until July of that year when he joined the U.S. Army. The Army trained Huddle in “intelligence” and sent him first to Germany and then to Vietnam. Years later, he related, “One of the things that I received training in was report writing and essentially typing a lot . . . Every page had to be error-free. If there...

Every Ounce a Man's Whiskey?: Bourbon in the White Masculine South

It is about the aesthetic of drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back ... joy of drinking is not the pharmacological effect of [C.sub.2][H.sub.5]OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime.--Walker Percy, Bourbon (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In a 1975 essay bluntly and beautifully titled Bourbon, Walker Percy asserts that The pleasure of knocking back lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. For Percy, it is Bourbon's aesthetic condition rather than its chemical composition that makes the drink so distinctly appealing. Knocking it back neat serves a transportive function, immersing the drinker in the rich cultural imagery of the American South: woody, sunny, and romantic. hot bite of the sensuously connects the body of the drinker to nation, region, and locale, enjoining his experience with those of imagined, historical bodies, soaking up space and place in the slow burn of what appears an endless southern summertime. For Percy, a southern doctor, author, philosopher, and social critic, drinking serves as an existential, even religious, act which connects the drinker to an imagined history, an act which ultimately provides an evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. (2) Like Percy, I am a drinker of Bourbon. Although I (and no doubt Percy as well) appreciate both its chemical and symbolic capacities, I am primarily concerned with the symbolic, its aesthetic relation to issues of personal and cultural identity. Percy's personal history with began as a child in the Prohibition Twenties in his family's Birmingham basement, as he watched his father age his own product in a charcoal barrel. personal narrative he recounts in his essay binds consumption to episodes of heterosexuality, homosociality, and UNC football games. My personal history with begins much later, in the suburban 2000s, at the parties of Virginia Beach schoolmates whose parents were out of town. At this point, my interests in men like Evan Williams, Jim Beam, and Kentucky Gentleman were primarily physical, corporeal, chemical. I privileged their bodily, pharmacological capabilities over their symbolic and welcomed their presence in my stilted, surreptitious social life with the same wide arms, open mouth, and ready chaser as any gin, vodka, or creme de menthe that we could prize from our parents' liquor cabinets. I trace the first stirrings of my symbolic appreciation of to my second romantic relationship in college, with a white southern man who preferred it to any other liquor. During the time we spent together, I sensed something decidedly self-conscious in his choice of drink and began to conceive of it as a sort of play, a means of both challenging and asserting his place within a specific narrative of white southern masculinity, in which he was at once bound by his North Carolina lineage and excluded by his sexuality. Back then I did not articulate his liquor choice in the same historical, theoretical terms that I do now, but I did see it as somehow ironic, an act that called into question some unspoken rules of who can drink what. In my time with this man, I began drinking as a matter of choice and of taste, although at first I rather disliked the way it tasted. I drank in a spirit of transgression that I could not pin down but felt that, in so doing, I took some nebulous stand against the heterosexist assumption that women and queer men drank from glasses that came with umbrellas, instead of only with ice. As I looked around me, at the fraternity parties I inevitably attended, the dorm rooms in which I inevitably found myself, and the bars into which I inevitably snuck, I realized that the self-consciousness I saw in his consumption was present in everyone's. …

Compulsory Bisexuality?: The Challenges of Modern Sexual Fluidity

Although Adrienne Rich once posited that “compulsory heterosexuality” required women to identify as heterosexual to comply with implicit social norms, this study examined the possibility of compulsory bisexuality in light of increasing reports of heterosexual-identified women engaging in homoerotic behavior with other women, usually in front of men and in social settings like fraternity parties, bars and clubs. Forty qualitative interviews were conducted with women of diverse backgrounds to explore women's narratives about performative bisexuality. Although younger women reported more performative bisexual experiences in public, older women reported more pressure to perform as bisexual in private (e.g., pressure for group sex). Further, experiences with performative bisexuality did not consistently predict political attitudes that supported full civil rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer (LGBTQ) community, indicating a disconnect between behavior and attitudes. Implications of performative bisexuality as “compulsory,” as well as considerations about whether performative bisexuality indicates acceptance of bisexuality for women and/or exploitation of women's same-sex desires were explored.

Unsafe at Any House?

Although there has been considerable empirical attention to the problem of dangers posed by certain college party environments, little attention has been given to attendees' perceptions of possible danger cues in party environments, how such perceptions may be linked to concern for personal safety, or variations in perceptions of personal safety at party environments according to gender or party type (i.e., fraternity vs. nonfraternity). This study uses analyses of survey data to explore these issues. The findings suggest that (a) fraternity parties exhibit traits that may indicate greater danger; (b) some of these traits are linked to attendees' perceptions of personal safety; (c) men and women draw on different cues in making assessments of personal safety, but women feel no more threatened than men; and (d) the amount of alcohol consumed by other party attendees is not associated with perceptions of personal safety. Implications for theory and campus policy are discussed.

Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault: Educating Women About the Risks

"Andrea," an 18-year-old college freshman, walked into her first fraternity party with a few of her sorority sisters. As she walked through the crowded house, one of the fraternity boys handed the girls large plastic cups. Another boy circulated through the crowd, filling up the cups of all guests from two pitchers of beer. When he filled Andrea's cup, he smiled and was polite and charming. She thought his act of filling her cup was kind and gentlemanly, and was flattered by his attention. She didn't notice he used a different pitcher for her than he had for her friends. She and her friends continued to mill through the crowd, sipping their beer. About 20 minutes later, Andrea suddenly had trouble focusing her vision. She felt disoriented and "drunk" even though she had only consumed a third of her beer. She started feeling nauseated, and tried to find her friends. The polite boy who had poured her beer asked her if she was all right, and offered to take her up to his room so she could rest. She followed him, grateful to be able to lie down. Forty-five minutes later, her concerned friends searched the house for Andrea. They found her upstairs passed out in a bedroom, lying on her side; she had vomited and her clothes were disheveled. Suspecting only alcohol intoxication; they picked her up, and walked her out of the party. After Andrea slept for about two hours, she woke up and told her friends something wasn't right. She had only drunk a small amount of her beer, and had no recollection after she walked up the stairs with the boy. She burst into tears, stating she feels some vaginal discomfort, and is afraid she may have been raped. Her friends looked at each other, thinking, "How did this happen and what are we supposed to do?"