As someone who was really fond of a co-op that was pretty frat-like in structure aside from being coed, while I think you're right that age segregation is a good thing, I think there's also just a lot of organizational norms. You can take a couple of dozen late-teenagers/early-twenty-somethings and turn them either into bloodthirsty assholes or warmly supportive hippies through peer pressure -- it's all about the expectations of whoever ends up socially running the place.
Literal fraternities seem to be purposefully aiming for bloodthirsty-assholedom, and keeping themselves right on the line of not doing anything illegal that can't be kept under the rug. But I don't think that's necessarily true for a houseful of kids that age, it just sort of happens to be true for historical and social reasons.
People from New York keep looking to Pennsylvania for cheap housing, easily available guns, and places to commit murder.
We don't have legal fireworks. It's all sparklers and worse. You must be going to PA to buy something smuggled from West Virginia or something.
Age segregation is a function of college, not a function of fraternities.
Huh. I could have sworn there were just-over-the-Jersey-border signs for fireworks. I've never actually bought a firework, so I wouldn't know for real.
Plus there are plenty of violent families, which by design span diverse ages. I'm walking it back already.
I looked it up and apparently PA stores are allowed to sell fireworks that are illegal to use in PA, but only to people from other states.
That's almost as good as the PA liquor laws. Which I don't understand, but back when Dr. Oops was living in Pittsburgh, buying a sixpack seemed to be like managing a drug deal.
That's why I started going to bars.
It is moderately easier to buy a six pack now than it was ten years ago. A few grocery stores have them. There are a couple of pizza shops that will now deliver six packs but I expect they'll get stomped on sooner or later.
It's mostly stupid expensive to buy a six pack compared to 1/4 of the price for buying a case because they are buying (at a small discount) the case from the same place anybody else can buy a case.
7: I wouldn't walk it back too far, I think you did have a good point. Violence is really disproportionate in the, say, 15-25 age bracket, and people outside that bracket are plausibly going to calm things down.
Speaking of confusing laws, I should write my state rep and urge him to legalize selling pot, but only to residents of other states. That might pass and would be good revenue for the state.
"Harold and Kumar Go To Allentown."
Are frats even all that bad? Certainly that frat that killed that one guy wasn't making good decisions, but a 0.6 per 100,000 hazing death risk isn't crazy risky compared to other risks like the 10 per 100,000 auto death rate.
My brother bought some of those PA fireworks. Apparently neighbors pool their money and then someone drives up to get them. It is a firework Co-op.
On an entirely different subject, but still in the original post so I'm not violating the 40 comment rule, this:
realizing that people who are decades older than you expect you to treat them in a friendly, courteous, non-authority way.
When I think of what went wrong with my education (oh, so many things), it's that this particularly -- interacting with professors as human beings rather than the way an eight-year-old interacts with a grade school teacher, never clicked for me. When I think of what I like about the school Sally and Newt are in, a huge part of it is that they seem to be able to relate to their teachers from a position of respectful (sort of) human equality in a way that I think is going to be really useful in later life.
But I'm not sure how you purposefully set up a school, or a kid's other experiences, to teach them that.
15. People take the risk of automobile accidents because they have to get around or society would cease to function. You could restructure society so that nobody was ever required to ride in a private car or truck, or walk or cycle on roads used by private cars or trucks, but it would take decades. Running half the risk of a fatal car crash in order to participate in a violent culture which adds nothing to the sum of civilisation sounds to me like a poor deal.
Not half -- 6% of the risk, if the numbers given above are accurate. You dropped a decimal place.
Sex segregation is the more immediate problem in fraternities. This sort of dumbassed, predictably lethal hazing goes way down in mixed groups.
Plenty of people get in fatal brawls at regular old bars, around people of all ages.
Is that true in Texas? Here, even a non-fatal shooting or stabbing and they try to shut down the bar.
Yeah, your college thing was a literal frat, just a coed one, right? And it sounds as if it was very pleasant, if you liked that kind of thing (possibly slightly more fun than I, personally, enjoy).
I've lived in both male-only and mixed college accommodation, but that was in the UK context, so nothing like a frat. To be honest, I think a lot of the unpleasant things about frats are culturally specific. The male-only flat I lived in was maybe a bit more boisterous, but it wasn't an unpleasant or hostile or excessively macho environment.
The problem is Greek culture! That's why their economy is such a mess!
Is that true in Texas? Here, even a non-fatal shooting or stabbing and they try to shut down the bar.
In Texas a bar will get sneered at by the locals if the shootings and stabbings are non-fatal. Real Texans would finish the job.
Right, the closest things I've heard about in the UK are college clubs for insanely rich people that do things like wrecking restaurants? It'd be as if that kind of thing were a standard form of housing for a fifth of the undergrad population.
The Bullingdon Club. That's what I was thinking of.
re: 27
Yes, I knew some people in one of those clubs, specifically the famous one.* I'm not a big one for genocide, but I'd happily wipe them all off the face of the earth. Really vile people.
* I went to the same college as David Cameron, et al.**
** not at the same time.
27 is a chilling, nightmarish vision. Bullingdon Nation.
I mean, #notallfrats . Probably of the houses that are organized as fraternities, a sizable percentage aren't nightmare dens of hazing and vomiting. But some are.
Yeah, ours went coed in the 70s. I don't know how much hazing goes on in sororities, but groups of young, drunk men frequently get stupid and violent the world over.
Is that true in Texas? Here, even a non-fatal shooting or stabbing and they try to shut down the bar.
I have exactly one ludicrous old-timer in my FB feed who is still waxing on about the injustice of the Waco biker brawl. I'm not sure what the injustice, exactly, but people involved should be freed.
They had guns, but at least they didn't have a clock.
I don't know how much hazing goes on in sororities
I believe there is an entire sub-genre of porn that deals with this question, but that might not extrapolate perfectly to the real world.
24
Also, didn't they have to ban cleavers and shut down your pubs early to prevent everyone from knifing each other? It seems like a big difference is in the US we've concentrated our young male violence into mostly class and race segregated groups (frats, gangs), whereas you've distributed it throughout the population at large.
36
I know you're joking, but I once read an actual academic article claiming that carbs and dairy drug our brains and have sedated us enough to allow us to live in close proximity in urban settlements. The real argument should be that Atkins diet --> returning to our violent paleo human roots.
The ultimate peacemaker: aerosol frosting cans.
A low-carb society is a polite society.
39
I see a successful proposal for frosting drops over the Middle East.
36 is clearly wrong. The parasites just happen to be carb fiends.
Switzerland had 500 years of cheese and bread and peace, and what did they give the world? The cuckoo clock.
No wonder the Nazis gave them a wide berth; on every mantelpiece a bomb.
Age segregation is an issue. So is gender segregation. A student at my previous institution was defending frats to me once, and he said that there were things you can do in an all-male environment that you can't do around women. He refused to specify what these things were. I said he either doesn't know the right women, or he is doing something he really shouldn't be doing.
(I didn't say, "So its all gay sex all the time, then?" although maybe I should have.)
41 they've got more than enough already https://instagram.com/p/5wxFvxGLOE/
Anyhow, as I've said here before, I actually dropped out of a frat because of hazing. Not because it was violent (I can't actually remember any violence to property or person) but it was hierarchical and stupid and annoying, and I found that I could be just as drunk and stupid with different people outsode the frat. Most of the violence I saw in college (to which I was generally at most an accessory after the fact) was post-frat, and came mainly from my jovial, insane housemate who liked to do things like pick fights with entire fraternities and then stride into their main entrance rooms swinging a sock filled with pool balls, breaking things.
Reading the rest of the thread, I see that Apo already mentioned gender segregation, and Tigre has a strange definition of "jovial."
The problem with schools in general is age segregation. Teaching and leading younger people are incredibly valuable skills only attainable through experience, and socialization can only benefit from being around older less monstrous kids.
No, he really was jovial. Jovial+drunken, beserker-style violence is a type.
Can't believe I misspelled "berserker."
I think _Why So Slow?_ claims that, while almost all poor-impulse-control young men have high levels of testosterone, many young men with high levels of testosterone are fine, and the latter are vastly more likely to have been responsible for looking after younger children while young themselves. So, mixed-age groups, but it might not be the adults who are helpful.
The Swiss troops were so fearsome for that 500 years that Machiavelli was afraid they would decide to conquer Europe. Maybe the effect only extends to those you actually break bread with.
1 etc.: while I think you're right that age segregation is a good thing
I must have been misreading the OP, as I thought the suggestion was that age segregation was a bad thing. And gender segregation.
For the rest of the OP:
Being forced to be friendly acquaintances with regular adults does a lot to mellow young adults out, and possibly would prevent the frat mentality from getting so much momentum.
I actually doubt it would do much to counter the asshole frat mentality. I haven't known a lot of frat members, but I'm willing to speculate that socialization toward decency needs to happen at a much earlier age.
Isn't it the clubbiness (sp) really the issue? Plenty of clubby organizations do perfectly decent things, but there's still a barrier to entry, sometimes quite mild, sometimes quite demanding. For whatever reason, asshole frats have very demanding, physically demanding, barriers to entry. I'll go with testosterone gone wild + the patriarchy where asshole frats are concerned.
53: You're right, I dropped a 'not'.
If this were an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, I'd advise those kids to do one of Whorf's "calisthenics" exercise routines on the holodeck.
55 -- finally, a workable solution.
Jovial+drunken, berserker-style violence is a type.
Actually, I think I do know that type. That's the way I pictured Don Gately from Infinite Jest when he was still using.
Anyhow, my view, which is utopian (and I think consistent with the OP) is that we should just end college campuses, and the notion of the campus as an isolated, law-free zone. When frat houses are next to ordinary houses, the potential for misbehavior goes way down, and the same can be said for tons and tons of problems "on campus." College kids can still live near schools in student housing or whatever, but the message an overwhelming number of US campuses send to college kids is that they are in a special, protected, isolated zone where anything and everything goes. The rule should be "you're 18, you're an adult, now live on your own like one."
Was "calisthenics" how you say "porn" in Klingon?
Or, that idea may do nothing. Who knows. But it does seem like most of the world treats their 18-21 year old college kids differently, and doesn't have these same problems (though maybe different ones).
"I have exactly one ludicrous old-timer in my FB feed who is still waxing on about the injustice of the Waco biker brawl. I'm not sure what the injustice, exactly, but people involved should be freed."
The waco thing is fishy
They arrested way more people than they needed to:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/waco-biker-shooting-has-long-legal-aftermath-1435862503
Maybe the cops did most of the shooting:
https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/18/what-really-happened-in-the-waco-motorcy
everybody is under a gag order:
Everybody is under a gag order:
Maybe the cops did most of the shooting:
I've been wondering about that.
Anyhow, my view, which is utopian (and I think consistent with the OP) is that we should just end college campuses, and the notion of the campus as an isolated, law-free zone.
This is not as unlikely as you might think. If Obama's proposal to make community college free goes through, you are going to see a lot of people replacing the first two years of school with community college.
The big talk at SLACs is "living/learning communities" but that is really going away from the national trend in education, which is more about having a little bit of college in every stage of life, rather than school as an isolated bonding experience. It is bad for places that depend on institutional loyalty that aren't Ivy League schools, and it is bad for liberal arts education, but it might be a more equalizing change for society as a whole.
College kids living in regular houses near campus, but not on campus, don't seem to have done much for misbehavior any where I've lived.
it is bad for liberal arts education,
You think? I'm not seeing why the residential isolation is educationally important.
58: we should just end college campuses, and the notion of the campus as an isolated, law-free zone
Those are two different things, right? I lived in close proximity to a college campus, and went to the campus daily (for classes, to the library, for meals), and that was fine. But yes: I lived in a regular free-standing house, three stories, in a neighborhood of similar houses occupied by regular citizens. What might be ended is campus housing ... but then again, do we want these wildly experimenting late-teens running wild? It would be like having a bunch of 18-to-20-year-olds as your neighbors, all over the place.
It would be like having a bunch of 18-to-20-year-olds as your neighbors, all over the place.
Seems like this is pretty much how most of the world does it, and it works out OK somehow. Or not!
Moby's 64 says that it's fine. I can say that the house I'm currently living in, right now, was previously occupied by a bunch of boys aged 19 or so, and it didn't go well, according to my neighbors.
There's no problem with college that can't be fixed by making it no longer ruinously expensive and an economic prerequisite. That, and Klingon Tai Chi.
Maybe the neighborhoods need to be more accommodating and understanding. Possibly (white) society is just used to late teenagers being segregated off.
58
I dunno. I used to hold similar views on college shenanigans and the drinking age, and then I lived in Australia for a year and a half. Walking around the city center Friday nights and seeing topless 18 year old girls passed out in the gutter in a pool of their vomit made me reconsider many of my views on these sorts of things.
The student population that would attend a free but financially neutral institution would be vastly different. Think scholars living in monastic conditions, practicing mok'bara.
A well maintained gutter shouldn't pool vomit. This indicates a problem larger than college.
68: I wasn't clear. I meant that the misbehavior wasn't curtailed, but rather just that it happened somewhere else. We had kegs and neighbors (too poor to move somewhere less shitty) with school aged children.
Not saying that 71 made me check airfares to Australia, not saying that it didn't.
Maybe the cops did most of the shooting
Reason? Say, isn't that the home of the supercool, leather-jacket-wearing libertarians who attend Burning Man and complain about the nanny state prohibiting the burning of actual men (and children)? They sure ain't our mamas' libertarians!
(76 was sarcasm. The writers and editors of Reason remain the libertarians of our ancestors and, assumedly, our progeny. Flippanter Commenting Amalgamated regrets any misinterpretation while nonetheless acknowledging the farcical speciousness of authorial intent.)
I'm going to argue that living in dorms with one's classmates is very important, especially in the first year of college. My freshmen regularly report on hallway conversations about classes and similar experiences that dorms facilitate. Granted, these are all students living on Honors floors (restricted to students in the Honors program), with at least some overlapping classes, which was my experience as well.
This is what makes me feel conflicted about the model where more/most kids go to a community college for the first two years. Obviously, I prefer that college be affordable and more accessible, but I truly do believe that something is lost without the first year "on campus experience." Low income students deserve that experience, too!
78 seems right to me. I think people usually forget how social an experience school has to be to work - not in the "you need friends not to be insane" sense but in the sense that a certain kind of school culture is important to making stuff work. (See also: why actual in person classes work better than youtube videos and tests, and why listservs never ended up replacing meetings.) If the campus culture is poisonous, and that seems true for a bunch of the frats*, then it's something with a strong influence in the wrong direction. But if it's a healthy one it really makes a very big difference to the success of the college at educating people.
*Although, from what little I know aren't the fraternities usually separated off from campus, effectively? That is, they're near to campus but not university owned housing and, in a lot of ways, basically the equivalent of a bunch of people renting a house near campus, which is what it sounds like people are talking about.
I agree that living with one's peers during the college assimilation process is important. It just doesn't have to be living in actual dorms, surrounded by other dorms. (I myself found that suffocating in freshman year.) The point I tried to make in 66 is that having an on campus experience does not require living in a campus dorm. You can live in the vicinity, with peers, other students.
That's what e.g. co-ops do, at least the ones I've known: it's a student based community, but it's not necessarily located on the campus proper.
79.last: Depends, school by school, I think. I believe on lots of campuses frats rent on-campus houses from the school, but on others they're off-campus and nearby.
Anyway, having not lived in a dorm environment for more than one year -- plus experiencing my then-boyfriend's dorm set-up at another college for about a year -- I should probably not speak about how good or bad it can be. I found it generally bad: a forced community with people you might not like very much.
Frats are, obviously, intentional communities. Apparently the Baruch College frat didn't actually have a house.
Have we considered switching to sodalities?
I had a generally positive experience living in the dorms at college.* But it was at a college where a the (very) significant majority of students lived in them, first year students were distributed more or less evenly throughout the buildings so there was always a range of ages on any floor, etc. It did seem to create a healthy-ish 'deep down people are in this together' undercurrent to the campus overall. If the college is less serious about using dorms/on campus living to create or sustain a general culture I could easily see it turning out less well though, especially if "the dorms are where people live if they can't escape" is the general attitude.
*For four years! I could have probably found other housing at some point but then it and my food wouldn't have been part of the overall tuition/etc bill that my student aid helped cover.
I lived for 2 years in a dorm at the University of Michigan, and while I was probably pretty miserable for most of that time, I have fond memories, and think of it as having been a valuable experience.
My school kicked people out of the dorms after freshman year because they did not have enough dorms. There was student housing off campus but it was basically an apartment building with reasonable sized rooms.
Also, didn't they have to ban cleavers and shut down your pubs early to prevent everyone from knifing each other? It seems like a big difference is in the US we've concentrated our young male violence into mostly class and race segregated groups (frats, gangs), whereas you've distributed it throughout the population at large.
This is adequate trolling, but not great. Maybe throw in a reference to the IRA?
The IRA didn't have as many guns as your average U.S. frat.
88: Not trolling here, but I honestly do have the impression that the UK generally is a fair amount fightier in the not-actually-criminal part of the general population than the US. Haven't we had this conversation before? Dsquared talking about barfights is hilariously implausible in a US context, but less so in a UK context?
Let's all list how many ASBOs we've had.
90: well, being fighty is a crime itself, so you'd have to be careful about how you define the not-actually-criminal part of the population. The UK has a much lower murder rate but a higher assault rate than the US, but that doesn't prove anything either way.
One way to approach it might be to ask: once you've normalised for the rate of assaults, does the UK have more people with a violent criminal record? If it does, that would imply that the US has a small, professional, full-time corps of violent criminals who commit lots and lots of assaults, and the rest of the population are peaceful, while the UK relies on a sort of every-man-a-thug model of all adult citizens punching each other sporadically in their spare time.
Dsquared talking about barfights was ludicrous in any context, IIRC.
90: well, being fighty is a crime itself, so you'd have to be careful about how you define the not-actually-criminal part of the population.
I'm drawing a distinction between an employed taxpayer with a generally stable life, and someone who commits a variety of crimes, including property crimes. My vague, ill-founded impression is that the first guy is much more likely to punch anyone ever in the UK than in the US -- essentially, that this: the US has a small, professional, full-time corps of violent criminals who commit lots and lots of assaults, and the rest of the population are peaceful, while the UK relies on a sort of every-man-a-thug model of all adult citizens punching each other sporadically in their spare time, is fairly accurate.
Don't know if I'm broadly right, but Brits I know in the US seem to tell more barfight stories than would seem normal to me for the same type of American.
Also, 'normalized for the rate of assaults'? I saw you palm that card. If there are more assaults per murder in the UK than in the US, that would suggest precisely that there's more um, unserious fighting in the UK.
94: ah, no. I was meaning that if the UK had a lot more people with violent histories and a lot more assaults then there might be no sociological difference - it might just be that it's career criminals doing the assaults in both countries, and we just happen to have more of them. You normalise for the rate of assaults to check for the difference in distributions.
If there are more assaults per murder in the UK than in the US, that would suggest precisely that there's more um, unserious fighting in the UK.
Or just fewer guns. Or better emergency care.
Or difference in recording assaults as assaults rather than 'public disorder' or something - cross-country comparisons of crime rate are dodgy for exactly this reason for everything except murder, which is pretty unambiguous.
Fifty years ago, when I was an immigrant teenager, Canada was much fightier.
I certainly never heard of "glassing" except in a U.K. context.
93.1: I understand, but I'm not sure how you would answer that question with available data. And the original troll was about knifing each other, and that's a bit different from just scraps in pubs.
Except at sporting events, the glass in bars is regular glass.
I think _Why So Slow?_ claims that, while almost all poor-impulse-control young men have high levels of testosterone, many young men with high levels of testosterone are fine, and the latter are vastly more likely to have been responsible for looking after younger children while young themselves
After all, which young man would you *ask* to look after younger children? Self-selecting sample alert.
Meanwhile, to 27-29, derausqd made an interesting point in the other place yesterday. Left-wing people who went to Oxford (like derausqd) overestimate the harm being in the Bullingdon does David Cameron's reputation, because people who didn't go to Oxford have no idea how awful they are.
I think he's right. I mean, I have a strong instinctive hatred of Tories, and I also understand intellectually that the club is awful, but when I see the photo everyone insists on pushing around the Internet every other week, I don't get anywhere the crack-hit of endocrine loathing some people seem to get.
Yeah, he's a posh, Tory dickhead. Yeah, he's dressed up like a twat. Yeah, he did some embarrassing stuff when he was a lad. Right. Anything new?
It's one thing to know you're meant to hate him for that; it's another thing to have the physiological response.
Fair point. Plus a lot of people who didn't go to Oxford may well assume that that's just what everyone at Oxford is like. There are plenty of anecdotes of people from poor backgrounds being told by their teachers not to bother with Oxford because it was a sort of Brideshead Revisited re-enactment club full of violent snobs and they'd be terribly unhappy and probably have the dogs set on them. Most of these anecdotes I heard from fellow students who had correctly realised that their teachers were talking shite and gone ahead and applied anyway.
Inspector Morse is the only thing that keeps the Oxford murder rate from exploding.
I would definitely watch an Inspector Morse/Hot Fuzz crossover in which it is revealed that various colleges are competing for the top ranking in the Norrington Tables by murdering their densest students and making it look like an accident. Possibly also plotting to blow up Keble College, which is hardly in keeping with the university's rural mediaeval aesthetic.
I only know the fake colleges from Sayers novels, Shrewsbury and Balliol.
This must be a city versus college-town thing, but it seems crazy to me to think that eliminating dorms would change anything. Undergrads want to live near undergrads and adults don't want to live near undergrads, so most blocks are either all undergrads or all not undergrads. Also the main replacement for dorms are luxury apartment buildings that only undergrads live in, and where one of the main difference from dorms is that alcohol rules are more lax because it's off campus.
it was a sort of Brideshead Revisited re-enactment club
That's quite an image.
I just finished that novel (or the Wikipedia plot summary of it). I don't get it.
Anyway, having seen several of Guy Ritchie's movies, I'm pretty sure that the UK is filled with violent cartoon characters who feed each other to pigs.
I don't know why what I would now consider a healthier level of non-lethal violence should obtain in so many similar cultures and not here.
It might have been time-of-life, but I had much more simmering anger and resentment over situations that did not end in fighting here, very dark thoughts indeed. And the fights I did have here cleared the air wonderfully, win or lose.
it must have been anomalous though: a former OSU basketball player who had known me in Jr. High once described a fight of mine to my brother and nephew, after noticing their/our name. So presumably odd enough to stick in the memory many years later.
If younger adults benefit from interacting with older adults, what do the older adults get from the interaction? Other than drugs and casual sex.
A sense of smug superiority? Conversely, a cripplingly painful sense of how far the process of inevitable physical decay has already progressed?
Either hope for the future or the ability to complain endlessly about how young people these days aren't any good and everything is going to hell, depending on the young people in question.
Actually now that I think of it some of the old people I've met would have no trouble doing both, and about the same young people.