Inside Greek U.: Fraternities, Soroities, and the Pursuit of Pleasure, Power, and Prestige

by Greg Beatty

In Inside Greek U. Alan D. DeSantis provides readers with a valuable guidebook to an often alien and confusing reality: the Greek system. Anyone who teaches at a college where fraternities and sororities are active should read it; anyone who wants to better understand how higher education really works will want to read it.

Inside Greek U. is not perfect—more on that below—but it is extremely useful. Much of that utility comes from the author’s particular identity and position in relation to the Greek system. As DeSantis notes repeatedly, frats know it isn’t cool to study too much, or to pay too much attention to grades. However, DeSantis is not just an academic, and not just a professor who serves as advisor to fraternities; he is a former fraternity brother himself, and is thus “bilingual,” speaking both fratspeak and academese. Given the high-minded and humane concerns he articulates throughout the text and especially in the conclusion, one might suggest that the dominant language spoken throughout is a third dialect: that of the responsible adult citizen.

This combination positions DeSantis perfectly to be trusted by the hundreds of fraternity and sorority members he interviewed for the raw material of this study. What’s more, DeSantis lets his honest and at times startled reactions to their accounts to emerge at times. Sometimes he does this directly, as when he compares the fraternity code of honor during violent combat to the one he’d learned growing up; sometimes he does this indirectly, as when he records how sorority girls laugh at his expressions or play off something he’s asked. This seems both valuable in itself, providing accuracy rather than a faux objectivity, and useful as a kind of anthropological marker. If a former frat boy is startled by some of what he hears, an instructor who has never set foot on Greek row may well be stunned.

On the other hand, much of what DeSantis does is map territory that is probably somewhat familiar to the outside observer, namely the gender identity and dynamics of fraternities, sororities, and their interaction. DeSantis opens his investigation into the Greek system by discussing gender broadly, putting the topic in theoretical context. He discusses the gender ideals of the Greek system, then moves smoothly into discussing how these ideals play out in practice. He’s careful to identify where the fraternities and sororities operate independently from one another, as well as where and how their practices align. DeSantis describes the dating codes, expectations for behavior (sexual, social, academic, and conflict-related in particular), the expectations this system establishes in its members for the future, and how these expectations do or don’t play out. Along the way, DeSantis occasionally sketches out some ways in which the Greek system interacts with the larger non-Greek elements of the college, but these are quite brief (and one of the book’s minor failings).

You can’t have taught at a school with a Greek system and not glimpsed some of this. Shoot, you can’t have driven through a town with such a school at the start of fall semester without seeing some of the rush activities, or read a newspaper from such a town without seeing reports of injuries or even deaths from drinking (or even from the now banned but still practiced hazing rituals).

What DeSantis does to this semi-known territory is document and contextualize it. He provides composite studies and extensive quotations from his interviewees that show in detail what sorority girls want in a man, from life, and in a new sorority sister, and what fraternity brothers want in a job, a woman, and a bro. Those he talked to were just as clear about what they did not want, but some of the most touching sections of the book address a dilemma. Many in the Greek system, and especially in sororities, can articulate its painful flaws…but they seem to accept these flaws as just the way things are, or even their own faults. This accounts move into the area of social tragedy when the young women talk about being raped by men in the Greek system—then blame themselves for what happened. Almost as sad are the sections on body image and eating disorders, when the women report the incredible emphasis on being thin, how frequent anorexia and bulimia are in their system—and how they’d be willing to use cocaine and heroin to stay thin without hunger…if the drugs didn’t carry legal penalty and social stigma. At these points, many readers will recognize that they didn’t know the Greek territory at all, and may wonder that such pain could exist in their own classrooms.

Almost as startling as these personal voices are the quantitative frameworks DeSantis provides. It provides a useful perspective to know that the average fraternity brother spends more time each week lifting weights (16 hours) and partying (15 hours) than in other activities. Homework gets only 12 hours, and attending class only 14…the same as television (pp. 139-140). Since these boys lift weights with their “bros,” and also have formal meetings and informal bull sessions, it should be clear that they are continually being educated in their identity through fraternity activities, and in a far more intense and immediately rewarding fashion than through studying. Studying will only get them a grade. Studying too much will get them teased. Lifting weights will get them praised…and laid. Another startling number was that serious sorority competitors may spend 50 to 100 hours rehearsing for a Greek Sing competition (p. 108). Compare that to the 3 days a week, 1 hour per day that students spend in a semester long class, which yields 48 hours total class time (a generous tally that assumes classes last an entire hour, start on time, lose no days to holidays, etc.), and you’ll see that these young women too are bathed in a communal, multi-sensory identity reinforcement far more extensive than their formal education. If teachers want to reach these students, they need to acknowledge the challenging terrain upon which their educational forays take place.

As noted earlier, Inside Greek U. is not perfect. I will address the three main ones here. First, while DeSantis notes how many presidents and corporate leaders moved through the Greek system, he does not really explain why this is. Does the Greek system gives its members increased skills in interviewing, leadership, and handling people, as various members claim throughout the book? Or is it an old boys’ network combined with entrenched sexism? Second, DeSantis closes the book with a call for reforms in the Greek system, making specific suggestions for administrators, professors, parents, and present and former Greek members. His dedication to the system is evident, and his concerns clearly heart-felt. However, his suggestions seem destined to fail. The bonding experience he describes is clearly so intense that these well-meaning suggestions must fall on deaf ears; they offer intellectual responses to a transformative experience. To be more specific, his descriptions of hazing make it clear that it functions ritually, as a liminal stage during which the pledges’ identities are reshaped and reoriented. In a society bereft of meaningful ritual, asking Greeks to surrender this is asking for collective psychic suicide. Third, and related to both of the points above, while DeSantis explores how fraternities and sororities function as systems, he largely overlooks a simpler explanation of their power: these may be the most coherent communities to which these students may ever belong. Flawed as fraternities and sororities are, they provide round the clock community identity that is found few other places in American life.

Most of those objections, however, are me asking Alan D. DeSantis to write a different book than he did, and a much longer and probably less focused one. It might still do that, some other time. For now, in Inside Greek U., DeSantis has given readers an exceptionally useful guide to a powerful and often mysterious community.