Wow, could you condemn an opinion that you do not share more? Clearly you are the best parent on the planet having given your child the best experiences at rejection. My son and all my children for that matter have faced many rejections. Disappointment is a fact of life. I hope your daughter is NOT ceremoniously rejected by asking to “now let’s go meet the girls in the basement” and then escorted out to the side yard. I hope that her roommate doesn’t go to endless social events while she sits in her dorm room eating pie (inside family joke). I hope she doesn’t start having panic attacks where she can’t breathe and sweats through 10 shirts a day. You have clearly drank the Koolaide that we NEED these organizations to help students succeed in college. These clubs, groups, gangs, are archaic and voluntary and should not be a large part of college life. They should not a part of the college and should be off campus organizations (Weslyan and some other colleges have just started this ban on their own campuses) because of the discrimination and exclusivity tactics. They are being given far too much power and are unregulated and dangerous. IMO.
I agree it seems like an easy solution to just move on but he is a chemical engineering major and this is the best school in our state for that. We could not afford out of state tuition for him and he stayed because of his future and I admire him for that. The ONLY reason I talked to the governor is because she is one of my best friends for the past 20 years. Someone on this post had referred to my son as privileged and having sour grapes because he always got what he wanted because of being in student government (which he earned) and I wanted to make the point that it doesn’t matter who you know, what you do to prevent this, or who you are, it can happen to your child! These organizations are not regulated well enough. These are kids hurting kids. I am sorry if my being friends with her has hurt my credibility or taken the focus off of my son’s experience. I want to shed light on the kids that don’t “get in”, what it does to their future, their mental outlook at the most exciting and scary time of their lives, the days they move away from home, and the way the greek system and college turns a blind eye to it.
Also I did not take it to anyone at the college. I have talked to no one for 18 months until this thread and only now under anonymity. I asked a fellow board member of a board I am on who is the dean of students there if he knew they were throwing kids out of the basement during rush and he said no and actually implied that he did not believe me. We were in a group and I never said another word to him. He doesn’t even know my sons name.
Mommission, your posts are over the top to the point of being fantastic*.
ETA: *imaginative or fanciful; remote from reality.
I agree. Just got on this thread to see what people would say. Like I say I still do business with this frat and many others on this campus. I would gladly give up my income if they were all abolished. IMO colleges do not need them. They should be an OFF campus activity. Believe me as a person providing their DJ’s for date nights and such I can tell you it has nothing to do with school. However they are good for the students that are accepted because they have a “test” archive to study from, upperclassman to help with hard classes, a group of alumni that get the guys extra great summer internships, etc. All things that put them above and give them a leg up over the general population at the college. So it is really great for the kids that get in and survive.
Actually, I know enough about it from having had several older relatives not only join as active members, but also serve in senior leadership positions in their fraternity/sorority chapters.
The exhibited behavior of the ones who joined fraternities along with their admissions of heavy drinking and being judgmental of other classmates/people on the basis of lower SES/lack of interest in participating in materialistic consumerism that they loved were factors which influenced me and some other younger cousins to avoid joining fraternities when it was our turn to go to undergrad.
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My LAC, Oberlin, has banned fraternities/sororities, secret societies, or socially exclusive organizations which select members on basis other than academic since the 1870’s precisely because the admins and most students on campus at the time felt the social exclusionary aspects and other factors had a corrosive effect on the type of campus community they wanted to build. Unless it’s an organization which selects members based strictly on academic merit like Phi Beta Kappa, student organizations on campus must be open to all students who express an interest in joining.
Those corrosive effects were such the policy covered a ban on undergrads maintaining membership in such organizations even if it is off-campus as a condition of matriculation and continued enrollment during one’s undergrad career.
While we did have a few underground fraternities/sororities, members tended to keep their affiliation a closely guarded secret as the penalties on the books for membership if the college found out went up to and included permanent expulsion.
I only knew because I was actually asked to join one such fraternity during my undergrad years…but declined due to lack of interest. One derived partially from observing and hearing about the fraternity/sorority hijinks from several older relatives who were not only members…but in senior officer leadership positions in their respective chapters.
Thank you so much! Having others acknowledge and in your case actually witness these devastations and not compare it to birthday parties makes it far more bearable. Believe me, with 4 kids we have had our share of missed invites and even a school bully in 5th grade for my older son, but we got through and made it work. My son is a survivor and had it not reached clinical and physical symptoms for him I would have recovered far faster and probably not be so inclined to share his story. Interestingly, the parents who have reached out to me (found me through my network of friends that know about this) all say they think it worse for girls. Thank you again for your understanding and I am happy your daughter had a positive experience. I believe in it takes a village and do not want any child to have a devastating experience socially their first day of college.
I certainly feel for the mom here, as none of us want to see our children suffer. I still am trying to understand the circumstances that, getting a bid from several fraternities, but not the 1 which the son had hoped to get into, and being summarily dismissed in an embarrassing way, was something which seems to have led to panic attacks, and intervention including moving the student out of the dorm. If that was the event which triggered a mental health crisis, then of course, that is sad indeed. But a student who is susceptible to emotional challenges could have faced another, different trigger in other ways during the fall of freshman year. And I say this as the parent of a child who lives with a mental illness.
@Mommissionson , what happened to your son is beyond lousy. I would not want to be a member of any group like that either. But it does appear you are judging all fraternities at all schools to be like this, and the fact that your son was invited to pledge 5 other fraternities he didn’t even actively rush should serve as some indication that perhaps they are not.
I think I remember some story in the news about a mother who bullied her daughter’s schoolmate on facebook and the girl committed suicide. Terrible and tragic. No, facebook and the Internet are not exclusionary social clubs, but they were the vehicle that made it possible for someone to feel so rejected that they took their own life. What needs to be changed is behavior like bullying and what happened to your son. How? You’re never going to eliminate it completely, but staying on the outside and doing nothing isn’t going to create change. In your son’s case, maybe if he had joined one of those other fraternities, he could have been a leader in making changes so that what happened to him wouldn’t happen to another student.
We’ve all heard that there’s a disproportional number of suicides by gay kids. There’s a thread now where a parent discusses that her gay son chose a college known for being the most (or one of the most) accepting of gay students, but his would-be dorm roommate informed him that he couldn’t room with her son because his parents wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t have a problem with it. In fact, it sounds like they had chatted and all was fine until the parents found out a few days later and said no. Her son was devastated. He wasn’t trying to get into a social club. He just wanted to go off to college and live in a dorm without being pre-judged or having to pretend to be straight.
I was not in a fraternity, and I think my mindset against them was largely geographic. I met who became my best friend in college (and in life after) at orientation before classes even started. I remember him asking if I was going to rush. I said no, why would I? He said . . . why wouldn’t you?! Where I came from, they were more or less looked down on as something you did when you couldn’t find friends on your own. Where he came from and where I went to college, they were not thought of that way at all, but I didn’t figure that out until later.
He rushed and got into what was considered one of the top houses on campus. I went to some of the rush parties at his urging, and with my preconceived mindset against them, I still decided they weren’t for me, but this was back in the day when hazing was still the norm. I’d heard the stories of what that involved. I didn’t want to be forced to drink until I threw up or passed out, or be “bagged,” which was to be “kidnapped,” stripped to my underwear and left somewhere in the city having to find my own way back. Not my definition of fun.
That said, I ended up spending a lot of time at my friend’s fraternity house, especially after he moved in. I was welcome at all the parties except the formals, was able to ride on chartered buses to games with them, was invited to a couple of sorority formals, etc. I started dating a girl in one of the top sororities who I found out later thought I was in the fraternity since I was there so much and knew all the guys. When I realized this after something came up in the conversation and told her I wasn’t in the house, she thought I was kidding. When I convinced her I wasn’t, she dumped me. Ha! Apparently she was only dating me because she wanted to date someone in that house, not because of who I was as a person.
Some kids might have been devastated from that kind of rejection, but we all handle things differently. I actually thought it was funny. Why would I want to go out with someone once I discovered how shallow she was? But I didn’t label all sorority girls based on my experience with one bad apple who fit a stereotype. When I later started dating the president of her sorority, she suddenly became interested again, which I found even funnier.
Looking back, I still wouldn’t join a fraternity if I had the chance to do it over – even without the hazing, etc., but I think I learned something from my experiences with the Greek system. One of them is that there are always going to be some jerks who fit a negative stereotype. There were definitely several of those in my friend’s fraternity, but they were in the minority and I learned to try not to label everyone based on the bad apples who are usually in the vast minority. And that maybe a better and more effective way change something is to get involved and try and change from within. Make it what you think it should be. This is something I’ve done later in life with some success.
Just sharing some thoughts based on my own experience, but I am sorry for what happened to your son. It sounds like purposeful humiliation, and it’s almost mind boggling to think they would do that and no one stood up against it.
Sad story, hope he feeling better. This is one of the top reasons why I am very happy my kid has actively applied to colleges with little to no Greek life. At the end of the day, it’s about exclusion, IMO.
Incidentally, the second Catholic School I attended had a policy where excluding students in one’s class from birthday parties for reasons other than a confirmed case of the child being bully or otherwise violent with the birthday boy/girl was grounds for being asked to the principal’s office to reconsider or being invited to find another school for the exclusionary birthday boy/girl and family. Only way to get around it is to not hold a birthday party at all while one’s enrolled in the school or to enroll elsewhere*.
Didn’t matter if the invitations were handed out in school or not as one condition of enrolling in the private parochial school was the school had jurisdiction over student and sometimes parental conduct in and out of school.
This was brought home quite clearly when 2 older female classmates were marched into a schoolwide assembly to be shamed by the admins for being caught by a neighbor fighting in a public park on a weekend and later subjected to in-school suspension(a.k.a. Detention) for a week and the strong possibility that a repeat will get them expelled.
- Considering the local public K-12 schools while I was growing up in 1980's era NYC were known for having serious issues with drugs and violent bullying/crime...sometimes with knives and guns, that option wouldn't have been considered much of one by most parents in the area parochial schools.
I think one of the things this thread makes very clear is that when kids (and parents) put too much emphasis on the importance of membership in a fraternity (or sorority) it creates a situation fraught with potential disappointments. That’s amplified when the emphasis is not just on getting a bid but on getting a bid to a “top” house.
Rush was not easy for my daughter. She’s studious and shy and has a pronounced stutter when she’s talking to new people. But she went into it with an open mind, was surprised by how many houses kept asking her back, and suffered through a few inevitable cuts from houses she liked before getting a bid from the sorority that she’s currently a member of. Part of her “success” with rush came, at least in part, from the fact that she did not go into the process with preconceived notions about which houses were “bid worthy” and which were not.
I think OP’s advice to his/her son is right on point—go out and find other social outlets. Studying is fine, but isolation is not. I’m not sure how his school works, but I know that at a lot of schools there are informal rush periods and that many kids rush as sophomores for a variety of reasons. But even if that’s the case, there are lots of other options at a large school like the one he’s attending!
I totally appreciate your answer and thoughtfulness to share your stories. I was also very involved in fraternities as a little sis when I was in college. I never considered joining a sorority and it wasn’t a part of the culture in our family growing up. Until my son tried to join I never even considered them as negative (mostly I thought of them as animal house like because of my experience as a little sis, booze breakfasts, initiations, covering for the guys cheating on their girlfriends, etc.) and didn’t really give them a second thought. I was a little concerned about my son joining because of all of those things I did know, and even warned him if his grades didn’t hold the fraternity would have to go.
I believe now my son was too sensitive for the fraternity. Not anymore as this has definitely toughened him up, but form the day he text “they threw me out!!” and then hid in the bushes, it took a good 6 months and really the whole first year before I saw the son I sent to college. He was too fragile to join another one and actually said “Mom, do you really think I could be that guy in the basement next year doing this to some poor kid?” I believe he views them as basically all the same. There is certainly one common denominator and that is that if they want to do that they can. The regulations of fraternities and sororities is only as good as the kids running it and that changes year to year.
I know that others want to peg this as the only frat that would do this or that this is exceptional but I am telling you it is not. Others have implied that I complained or took it to authorities, I have not done that…yet. When he leaves this campus and graduates I will go back to the dean of students and remind him of that day I mentioned this at our unrelated board meeting and he didn’t believe me. Literally a 10 second conversation that i instantly dropped by his reaction. I will then make sure he does know that it did indeed happen. After 18 months I can now say my son is happy to not be a member and although he spends very little time with any of the friends that did join, he has a group of wonderful friends from high school who didn’t go to college, are working, or are at other schools. I cannot speak for him but I believe he would say his biggest sadness was not only in not being included in all the activities his friends who “got in” were going to but also in not meeting any new friends and that will come with time now that he is starting to feel confidence again. Our school is 30% greek and that includes everyone at the school. So take out the 27% or commuters, 12% graduate students, and you can see how the kids that live on that campus are in the minority if they are not greek.
You are right Elliemom! Parents…do not get involved or have an opinion on whether your child “gets in”. If they do not then they will feel they have disappointed you. I also want to reiterate what you said and accept my part of the responsibility for putting too much emphasis on the Greek System. My best friends son was in a fraternity and that started my son thinking of this whole thing. He called him when he was accepted to the university and made plans to start the process just after December of his senior year of high school. I wasn’t involved in any of his interactions with these guys all summer but was on the campus for an unrelated event when we ran into one of the officers and they invited us to come and tour the house which we did. I regret now how excited I allowed myself to become at their wooing of my son and wish that I had not been involved at all. Like I said others here think I am putting too much into this but I am telling you we never talk about this anymore and it is not a part of my son’s future and only a small part of his past I am hoping and a this point the clinical issues are mostly resolved. I just wanted to test the waters here to see how other’s thought. I am home recouping from surgery and otherwise would never have time to type so much! LOL!
Why pledge 1st semester Freshman year?? You spend all this time,effort and money looking a colleges and decide on a particular fraternity after a few weeks on campus? A year later and this son could have made a totally different decision.
I want to share my virtual support for the OP and her son also. I haven’t had a chance to read all the replies yet, I am sure they are amazing, just based on the length and effort people are putting into them.
I don’t have much useful advice.
All I can think of is talk to him and let him know he has to handle this stuff like a man and be strong. That’s what it comes down to in my mind. It doesn’t work saying it won’t hurt, baloney, yes it will, it always hurts being excluded from anything and even though he might be better off without being in a frat that alone doesn’t ease the sting.
So, you have to go back to knowing who you are. You have to remind him that he is who he is regardless of external validations. You can’t win them all. But don’t let anyone talk down to him or think less of him. Don’t accept that. You can still be a “champion” without them, if that makes sense.
Yes, he could try again. But first make sure he even wants the whole routine. Don’t fight for something he might be better off with anyway. I am reading a book called Straight Flush, by the way, about a few frat kids who started an online poker sight and became billionaires and then saw it all come crashing down. What is interesting, and on point, and the author is amazing, is that I just read the part about when the business first started.
Guess what?
Not all the frat bros were invited to get in on it. Even if you get in, sometimes you get left out, it is life and there is a life lesson there somewhere. You are who you are regardless of these sorts of external validations. I think. Not sure that is true, to be honest, because being popular does make a difference in life so I do wonder if the going it alone routine is honestly good advice. Anyway, I hope the young man keeps his chin up.
In hindsight I wish I had given him that advice to wait and rush second semester if he still wanted to, although the positions reserved for sophomores are probably about 5% of the rush class. Rush at this huge school starts 3 days before the first day of class freshman year and bids are given after 6pm the night before their first day. It is brutal and one of the most ridiculous things about the greek organization. No care at all for those students that could potentially be devastated.
Thank you so much! That is helpful advice and some of which has become my mantra. After this happened to him he would never join a frat. They do not represent what we stand for as a family. We were all very naive to this and had never had a family member in one. I am going to read that book! I appreciate your kind words and advice.
To all the good advice, I thank you… it has been well received!
OP, I truly am sorry for the pain your son experienced and you as well. Having said that, I find it a bit odd that your strong view of fraternities only developed after your son had a disappointing and humiliating experience. You wrote that “Until my son tried to join I never even considered them as negative (mostly I thought of them as animal house like because of my experience as a little sis, booze breakfasts, initiations, covering for the guys cheating on their girlfriends, etc.) and didn’t really give them a second thought.” How could you not think of booze breakfasts and guys cheating on their girlfriends as negative? It seems like everything is all fun and games unless it comes at your son’s expense.
I personally am not a fan of fraternities and my DS isn’t looking at schools with a strong fraternity presence. Your son obviously wanted and expected to be in a fraternity. He also was involved in a pledge system that patently discriminated against students who didn’t have an in with the fraternity as it seemed like all summer he was attending parties that other incoming freshman who were not so connected wouldn’t even have known about. Why was that okay? Maybe that should have been his first clue that this fraternity wasn’t out to play fair. I’m not sure what happened in the basement, but it sounds like they publicly announced their bids and asked those who did not receive pledges to leave. If that is correct, it’s a crude and unpleasant process, but certainly far less egregious than the student rapes, forced drinking, etc. that you seem to have been aware of before your son went through pledging. I guess what I’m saying is that I think it is your son’s unexpected failure to get a bid, and his profound response to that disappointment and humiliation, that led to your change in feelings about greek life and perhaps you need to take a step back and realize that there are much bigger problems with the greek system than what your son experienced. And to consider your son a “survivor” because he was rejected in this fashion also seems to be truly under appreciating what many other young people have to survive.
I guess you would have to read all my posts to fully understand the situation. He was never a pledge but was rushing to be one. I spent quite a bit of time telling him of the negatives I knew to be true about fraternities and laying down some laws about grades and such should he choose to do this. I figured if the whole world thinks they are good who am I to tell my son he can’t do this? Over the summer, I too was swayed by this wonderful tour of the house, etc. If you are implying I should have known based on my experience from 30 years ago on a different college campus then touché’ you are right, I should have known and forbid him from rushing. I will now spend my years remaining making sure every parent who asks me knows the risk associated with seeking entrance into a fraternity and sorority. Before you do it picture your kid being the only one rejected in his group first day of college and picture him being throne out the basement of the house while all the others remain inside. My guess is most parents would still do it and pray and do everything in their power to assure their son was left on the inside. Some kids are lucky and some are not. It is just a travesty that colleges put kids in this situation on purpose and knowledgeably.
There was no announcement of the bids to a group, only the offer to “meet the guys in the basement” and being taken out by one guy down there who told him he was not offered a bid. His friends saw him go down there but whether they knew what happened to him down there is something I suppose he never asked them. I am sure they found out very quickly. Bids or no bids…they are supposed to tell you by email that night, so they broke the rules, but who is enforcing them anyway?
The panic attacks got so bad and he was able to stay in this school where he wants to complete a chemical engineering degree. For 6 months I feared he would do something drastic to find happiness again. A kid a couple of doors down from him went up to the roof of their dorm second week of school and threatened to jump. The ambulance came. My son saw the whole thing. I am not sure of why this kid this but I was sure concerned that my son seemed to be talking about it to much. He isolated, gained weight, developed a sweating condition that is clinical in nature having to change his shirts 10 times a day even in the winter. He had a bike he loved that was stolen several months later, when the handle bars were removed and the bike was disassembled and stolen all that was left was the back tire on the tree when he came out of class. Normally he would of course be upset over this and then recover, no big deal, but in a child with so much anxiety it was a bigger deal to him. I had rarely seen my son cry before all of this happened and crying became a constant.
Honestly, our family has grown a thick skin over this and I could care less whether you think he is a survivor or not. I am well aware that there are bigger problems in the greek system than our own personal experience. That is why they should be gone from college campuses. I am guessing parents who disagree so vehemently and spend so much time defending the need for fraternities and sororities feel that their children NEED these organizations in some way. If not then why not just let them go away if they are hurting so many?