I won’t go all the way with @JBStillFlying , but I do detect an element of gratuitous insult in the Maroon’s coverage. That doesn’t surprise me - if student culture today is anything like what it was in my day. Being a fraternity boy was the last thing anyone I knew would ever have wanted to be. We knew these guys existed, but we never seemed to run into them. We mocked them - or the idea of them. They lived lonely outcast existences in their little castles. You could say that at the University of Chicago they were our homegrown persecuted minority. One could believe anything of them - that they lived only for parties, that they had fathers with money, or - the worst possibly insult - that they would have preferred to be at Princeton, all things considered. They were certainly not the types who would ever be found at The Maroon, and they were bound to be detested by the types who in fact were to be found at The Maroon, who had much more status on campus than any of them. They were too lowly to take notice of.
If anything like those attitudes persist today, I find myself being sympathetic to the cause of the DU brothers in their present situation. O.K. something must have happened at a party, someone must have made a complaint, rumors were going around campus, and after all everyone knows that the DU boys are the worst of the worst. But doing a hit piece on them on undisclosed evidence sounds just too easy, too much like the stereotyping we deplore in other cases. It sounds like grandstanding carried out by people with an animus. Was it in the public interest to inform young women that the DU boys are mad, bad and dangerous to know? Didn’t they already know that? That’s not a rhetorical question but a real one: Did it take publication in The Maroon to bring this incident to the attention of the student body at large if, as the Maroon itself states, the rumor was already going around?
I do wish the Chicago DU President had showed some spine, but we’re not always at our best in a bad situation. And it may certainly be true that he didn’t know enough to comment and was worried or half-worried that a bad thing had been done. I can hold that thought in my mind at the same time that I hold the thought that the editors of the Maroon were likely motivated by a bias they should have suppressed.