It’s the latest and most visible example of a frustrating trend in campus culture, in which elite universities pander to a small minority of progressive students at the expense of the students who simply want to enjoy a normal college experience, which involves things like frat parties, university traditions, and joy, and have found their social lives increasingly restricted at every turn.
At Cornell University, a third of the student body (including my own brother and cousin) belongs to Greek life and frat parties are a major part of the social scene, largely because there is effectively nothing else to do in Ithaca, New York, on a Saturday night. But their social centrality means little to the university administration, which has been waging a determined war on frats for years, wielding an arsenal of nitpicky, draconian, and sometimes openly unfair policies to keep many fraternities in a near-perpetual state of punishment.
At Cornell, the school uses an anonymous reporting system in which anyone can submit a complaint against a frat, even people who don’t attend the university—which can then become near-immediate grounds for a formal investigation during which the fraternity may very likely be suspended. This happened as recently as February, when Cornell’s Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards (OSCCS) received “an anonymous incident report” making unspecified allegations against at least 10 fraternities. By 9 p.m. the same day, OSCCS emailed every new member of those fraternities encouraging them to come forward with their own reports; three days later the school began suspending the accused chapters. The frats were prohibited from all social activity during the investigation, which included banning new members from eating at the house, even though they were paying for the fraternity meal plan, and limiting events at campus apartments occupied by graduating seniors, some of whom even had to cancel their birthday parties. I talked to one senior who wrote to the university, explaining that their guidelines were making it impossible to hold even small gatherings among friends and asking for additional clarity so seniors could find approved ways to enjoy their final days as students—especially since the anti-Israel protests were making campus life notably unenjoyable.