<p>The best way for this fraternity to be shut down is for no one to pledge it.</p>
<p>No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head. Claims of murder here are absurd.</p>
<p>SAE national must be tired of answering these complaints.</p>
<p>Why should it matter one little bit whether or not the parents want the chapter closed down? Exactly what does it say about the judgement of parents who do not feel they would want to do whatever they could to prevent another set of parents from experiencing the same horror? The fact that their older son was a brother makes a difference in their thinking on this? </p>
<p>I don’t think we should be arguing about whether this was murder or involuntary manslaughter. </p>
<p>My husband is an SAE from a U where the house was disbanded for years due to ‘malpractice’ on the part of the group.</p>
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<p>I would argue that it was neither. Rather, the deceased was likely a willful participant in a stupid activity (excessive drinking), the potential consequences of which were likely well known to him. (I don’t mean to sound heartless, I just mean to address the facts. I am very sorry for the family of this young man.)</p>
<p>I found the old post with the information about the criminal case. I don’t know what they were convicted of, but the penalty was certainly minimal.</p>
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<p>So, four days in jail. In Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, out Monday.</p>
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<p>I disagree. Because the fraternity is a university institution, the university has in away tacitly endorsed the fraternity and its usual practices. Everybody knows that drinking rituals occur at most of fraternities. Not only that, I remember at my own school, the administrators made quite an effort to sell the fraternities to the students and their parents. I suspected this is because they didn’t want to spend the money to build more dorms. Then when a pledge died in a drinking ritual, they expressed astonishment that there was underage drinking going on.</p>
<p>There’s another wrinkle here. The fact that this was a pledge and not a brother dying is meaningful. The pledge is a subordinate in the fraternity, and his membership depends on participating in the hazing.</p>
<p>Frankly, I have more sympathy for the frat members than I do the administration who no doubt ignored this type of activity in the past.</p>
<p>^^
“I would argue that it was neither. Rather, the deceased was likely a willful participant in a stupid activity (excessive drinking), the potential consequences of which were likely well known to him. (I don’t mean to sound heartless, I just mean to address the facts. I am very sorry for the family of this young man.)”</p>
<p>Hmm, let’s see if The Three Bears can put some context on this viewpoint:
Does the SAE level of pledge drunkedness represent (a) too much of a good thing, (b) too little of a good thing, or (c) exactly the right amount of a good thing?</p>
<p>[Note: By definition pledge drunkedness must be “a good thing” – if it was a bad thing why would SAE continue the practice?]</p>