Why I Hate the Frat Thing

Quick note: college fraternities suck. They're abusive, counter-educational institutions, and should be banned.

I obviously sort of always knew this, in the dim way you do when you're in college and find you actually prefer hanging out in the library to getting drunk and slipping in somebody's vomit at a frat house. As fun as that can be, of course.

My son, who is a freshman at the University of New Hampshire, is completely unlike me (to his credit, I'm sure), and actually enjoys social interaction, so he was thrilled to be accepted into the pledge program, if that's what it's called, at one of the "better" fraternities at school. I was a bit alarmed, but he wanted it "more than anything," and besides, his tripled-up dorm room was getting on his nerves. At least the frat had some space. If he could only make it through about six weeks of frat boot camp. If only he could prove his commitment.

For many, many days, he had do things like this: get out of bed and rush to the frat house at 1:30 a.m. in shirt and tie to memorize a bunch of pointless statistics about the house "brothers" for a 5 a.m. quiz (yes, that same morning). Break into the house with other pledges and "kidnap" a brother and take him to an undisclosed location where they could all chuckle and guffaw at the sheer transgressive coolness of, well, kidnapping a brother. Accompany brothers, on demand, while they did their laundry. Swab the house down after major parties.

The problem here is twofold: 1) this is really moronic stuff that certain 18-year-olds are naive and needy enough find "important," and 2) my son got pneumonia in the middle of it and ended up in an ambulance in the middle of the night, headed for the hospital. Full of self-recrimination over his weakness, but hacking too much to make nightly appearances, he ultimately had to drop out of his fraternity quest. His dormmate, who was also pledging this particular fraternity, dropped out a few days later, after failing an exam - yes, these boys have classes, too! - the morning after an all-night quiz session at the, you got it, frat house.

It's not complicated: many kids want to belong to a small, exclusive community; they want to rest for a while in a cozy way station on their way to adulthood. Too bad fraternities - and this one could hardly be called the worst - are run by kids not much older, who themselves only dimly realize what a community is, and what it should take to get into one.