In their polished public pitches, fraternities pledge to provide boys with many vaunted things. Leaders of Greek Life portray themselves as distinctly charitable, intensely communal, and enlightened. In exchange for dues each semester, they promise to provide the time and space necessary to build brotherhoods, find romantic companionship, and forge academic and future career success. What is generally provided in practice, however, are corrupted versions of these things: bonds built through violence, jobs secured without merit, and intimacy taken, not granted.

Hard evidence of the system’s many horrors and hypocrisies have routinely come to light, spurring a response that is generally the same: righteous outcry followed by insufficient, individualized campus punishments, like apology essays or abbreviated dismissals. The guilty fraternity—and sometimes, it’s an athletic team that functions just like one—always seems to elide proper accountability and generally manages to soften the blow for its accused members. While each new scandal leaves scars, the power and relative impunity displayed by Greek Life time and time again has become the institution’s most truly alluring feature.

These dynamics are on vivid display at Cornell University, which, between 2018 and 2024, logged 1,216 cases of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. One of these data points represents a 20-year-old Jane Doe who, in October 2024, was allegedly plied with ketamine and alcohol by a brotherhood of boys at the Fraternity Chi Phi, seven of whom subsequently sexually assaulted her. “I felt like bait,” she later said in a closed hearing. “I felt like lions around me.” Less than 24 hours before her gang rape, another student had overdosed on ketamine at the same house. Campus police responded, and made an arrest, but Chi Phi apparently remained in the clear.

The university ultimately launched an investigation into the so-called “Cornell 7,” but only two of the men were actually expelled. The rest secured Ivy League diplomas, including Diego Sarabia, who managed to get a job at Wells Fargo even as he actively remained the subject of Cornell’s inquiry. When the case arrived on the desk of District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, he declined to bring criminal charges, concluding that Doe had started her night by consensually imbibing and was thus as responsible for her behavior as the perpetrators were.

Underlying these egregiously weak responses to campus rape culture is an unstated rationale: that fraternities, like millitary batallions, breed the sort of hard-edged attitudes needed to enforce America’s social order. While often cast as coarse forms of youthful transgression, fraternity violence is, as writer Elizabeth Schambelan once powerfully argued in N+1, “a violent resocialization that better equips young men to wield privilege, put down challenges to existing hierarchies, and police the status quo.”

The power of an individual fraternity network is compounded by alumni of America’s many like-minded organizations. District Attorney Van Houten, for instance, graduated from America’s original power fraternity: West Point. Just as Chi Phi dresses up its ugliness with the credo “Truth, Honor and Personal Integrity,” West Pointers purportedly dedicate themselves to the ideas of “Duty, Honor, Country.” Van Houten himself boasted in a letter to his local newspaper years ago that he was “uniquely qualified” to address the concept of “honor.”

Honor is traditionally equated with honesty, integrity, and accountability, though, definitionally it doesn’t require any of these things. All it actually denotes is a fidelity to an institution’s core rites and standards, which men may go any length to meet, often confusing that fidelity for masculine kinship. For the “Cornell 7,” impressing one’s fraternity members was likely more important for each of the men in that moment than the well-being of the woman who happened to be in the room upstairs. Perhaps their gross abuse of Doe felt empowering in the moment, though it came at a deep moral cost, a spiritual degradation that netted nothing more than cheap power and pleasure.

The first major hazing scandal in American history occurred at West Point in 1900, under a system designed by a pair of former fraternity brothers at Dartmouth. At the time, there were no women to abuse at West Point, and so the worst behavior befell the men, in this case, Oscar Booz, a smart but relatively small cadet who was targeted for actively opposing the school’s despotic hierarchy. Senior cadets forced him to chug Tabasco sauce, and to square off in West Point’s underground fight club—all rituals that one wouldn’t be surprised to read about in a college newspaper today.

Booz’s unrelenting abuse left him in failing physical health. After only a few months at West Point, he returned home. A family doctor discovered bruises across his body and observed that his throat was badly swollen, likely from the hot sauce. He died soon thereafter from a rare form of tuberculosis in his larynx. He was 19.

One of the purported masterminds of cadet hazing in Oscar’s day was William Augustus Mitchell, who had previously served in a senior leadership position at Alabama Polytechnic Institute’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. It was an early and illuminating example of the long-standing interplay between military and civilian frat life, one that has since leaked into corporate environments, athletic teams, and American government.