About men; about cold beer, willing women, hazing, conformity - about fraternities.

• Author: DeParle, Jason

About Cold Beer, Willing Women, Hazing, Conformity- About Fraternities

If I'd had more sense I would hue walked away from the motel room where we bound, gagged, and pummeled our captive while stuffing him into a pair of red panties. But I was young and malleable. And he kind of had it coming.

A man in red panties was not what I'd had in mind a few months earlier, in the beginning of 1979, when I pledged my honor to the Duke University fraternity of Delta Tau Delta. Visions of a woman in red panties might have been part of the draw. But most of the allure consisted of simpler seductions: I needed a place to live, I wanted a group of friends, and I liked the parties. I liked the hey-ey hey-ey rhythms of the song"Shout!" I liked being on the floor in mid-gator, a preppy version of slam-dancing. And I must have liked being drunk and high, since I spent a lot of time that way. What was college, after all, without revelry?

This fall promises to be another record-setting rush season. Fifteen years ago, the Greek life seemed poised on the edge of extinction, a cultural relic like lavalieres and saddle shoes. By 1972 fraternity membership had fallen to an all-time low of 151,000; now, with more than 400,000 members, college fraternities dominate more campuses than ever.

A former national president of Delta Tau Delta told me he thinks the fraternal resurgence reflects a yearning for "rather old-fashioned Christian morality'" If my experiences offer any gauge, that's one explanation we can safely rule out. More convincing are theories that emphasize the chance to make connections, pad resumes, and secure liquor. With the drinking age now 21 in most states, frat houses are often the last sure source of booze. They've become the speakeasies of the eighties.

As fraternity membership has swollen, so have what are sometimes politely called fraternity "mishaps." In February, an 18-year-old Rutgers pledge choked to death on his vomit after an initiation drinking swnt. Two months later, some pledges at nearby Rider College kidnapped their pledgemaster and drunkenly sped their car into a parked truck. One of them died. In the past ten years alone, hazing incidents have killed about 50 college students and injured countless others: they've been beaten, branded, burned, buried, stabbed, shot, drowned, and frozen, usually while drunk. Fraternities have also notched dozens of gang rapes, including one at Duke during my senior year.

Their defenders protest that these incidents are "isolated." The violence isn't as exceptional as they pretend, but the bigger problems do lie elsewhere. And not just in drink and drugs. Debauchery, after all, has served a function from ancient Rome to modern Mardi Gras.

More troubling than the inhibitions fraternity life lowers are the ones it raises. The fraternities I knew were a suffocating force, dividing the campus into clans and steeling members' resistance to new people, ideas, aspirations. They offered members an identity, but tyrannized them with it, wed them to it, used it to seal them against outside influence. At an age when people are freest to experiment in thought and action, the fraternities at Duke locked them in a pose. Some groups manage to become greater than the sum of their parts; Delta Tau Delta had an uncanny knack for the opposite.

The beau ideal

Animal House made its debut in the summer of 1978, about a month before I left for college, and like most of my high school friends I saw it a few times before leaving. It constituted 90 percent of my knowledge of fraternity life. The other tenth came from one of the summer barbecues fraternity alumni throw, particularly in the South, for the right kind of incoming freshman. This staid vision of businessmen, blazers, and suburban lawns held about as much allure as the Young Republicans, But Animal House was inspirational. After 18 years at home, the film's bacchanal ian antics fit our fantasies: oceans of beer; loud music; sweating, willing women.

Though it didn't consciously register, the film had a more subtle appeal too. It offered a vision not only of rebellion but also of reassurance, when both were needed. When John Belushi first appears as brother Bluto, he is staggeringly drunk and absentmindedly pissing on his prospective brothers' shoes. By the end, he is on his way to becoming United States Senator John Blutarsky. "My characters say it's okay to screw up," Belushi explained at the time. For 18-year-olds ready to rip and roar, this was a wonderfully welcome notion. Though college students had mastered coarse revelries long before Animal House, the film lent the pursuit new elan. At Duke, a fraternity-led food fight in the Bluto tradition closed down the dining hall for a week of repairs,

Though some schools shrink the rush season into a few weeks, a frenzied pace to pick blood brothers, Duke gives it a whole semester. I was later to look back and wonder, with all that time to come to my senses, how I was borne off into the riptide. But the answers are those that most fraternity-joiners offer.

I needed the housing. Duke fraternities were based in dorms, not off-campus houses, and they controlled the choicest buildings. To remain independent was to face likely banishment to a room on the old women's campus, two miles from the action.

I liked the parties. Most of them took place in a darkened chapter room, with broken couches pushed aside to clear a beer-sogged dance floor. They were louder, later, and wilder than anything I'd known. I don't remember if anyone wore a toga, but the songs, dances, and excitement had that Animal House feel. This is it, l thought, the real thing. Given their numbers, fraternities also seemed like the only thing. Just about half the campus was Greek, but to my freshman eye the other half, scattered and less howling, seemed invisible.

I liked the pageantry. In its traditional forms, this spirit took shape in items like homecoming floats, which, sappy as it sounds, can be a grand sight on a leaf-blown October day. Less grand, but probably more appealing, was a Delt ritual called the Charge of the Hill. The fraternity opened onto a patio that faced a steep, 25-yard slope to the street. Each spring, the brothers would wet the hill into rivers of mud, place a keg on the patio, and sturdy themselves to defend it against a charge of advancing pledges. There were few prohibitions on what could be slung during the ensuing free-for-all. A diversion column would throw smoke bombs or buckets of beer from the roof. Unhappy solutions of egg...