Everything old is new again

My father was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Arkansas as well as a varsity baseball player so when I decided to attend the University as well, dad wrote a letter of recommendation for me to the fraternity. The typical way of pledging a fraternity is to go through formal rush, an event that happens before the fall semester begins, when everyone desiring to join a fraternity comes to campus and goes through the rush process. You visit all the fraternities the first day and then list the ones you would like to visit again. The fraternities also list the students they would like to see again, the lists are compared, and students are invited back to those fraternities that had an interest in them. From there the list is narrowed until formal bids are extended. But because my dad was a member of SAE, that made me a legacy and being a legacy assured me a bid. But I didn't want to become a fraternity member riding the coattails of my dad so I pledged a rival fraternity.

I'm telling you this because of the uproar that has been caused in the past week over the behavior of two social fraternities; one of them being my dad's fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and their chapter at the University of Oklahoma and the other the Kappa Delta Rho chapter at Penn State University. The SAE chapter at OU was suspended and boarded up this past week because of a video that showed the members singing a racist chant as they rode a bus to a party with their dates. The Kappa Delta Rho fraternity was also suspended for posting nude, semi-nude and sexually compromising photos of college co-eds on their private, invitation-only, Facebook page.

Since I'm not familiar with Kappa Delta Rho because they didn't have a chapter at the University of Arkansas, I'll concentrate primarily on the misdeeds of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, although all social fraternities and sororities share a common bond with each other and I would be surprised to find out that Kappa Delta Rho is much different from Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

SAE's do have one characteristic that separates them from all other social fraternities in America today. Sigma Alpha Epsilon is the only social fraternity in existence to have been founded in the Antebellum South. SAE was founded at the University of Alabama in 1856 and, during the Civil War, 369 of the fraternity's 400 members fought for the confederacy. So their continued racism 159 years later has some history behind it.

But for those of you who have never been exposed to the fraternity and sorority system, some information is needed that is not being supplied in the media. Colleges and universities are social structured and often segregated the same as society is. There's the lower class (the independents who either didn't rush a fraternity/sorority or don't have one rush them) the middle class (lower and middle tier fraternities and sororities) and the upper class ( elite fraternities and sororities). Sigma Alpha Epsilon is considered an elite fraternity, not only on the university campus but nation-wide. That simply means they pledge only well-connected college students with impressive backgrounds and/or connections. And because of that, many of these pledges and members are elitist, arrogant and prejudiced against anyone who falls beneath their social class and that includes most people, including African-Americans. Ties are made at the university that last a lifetime, and one's ascendance up the social ladder is, to a large degree, connected to the social fraternity or sorority they joined while an undergraduate student. My dad was buried with his SAE ring on, a ring he had not taken off in more than 60 years. One girl who went through rush week a year after I did committed suicide when the sorority she wanted to pledge didn't offer her a bid. That's how significant these living groups were 50 years ago and evidently that's still the way they are today. What these two fraternities did this past week is not something either fraternity is going to use in their PR campaign extolling their virtue because there is no legitimate defense to these behaviors.

On the other hand, they're not doing anything today that they weren't doing 50 years ago. This is how spoiled, privileged and moneyed kids act and have always acted. The big difference is fifty years ago, we didn't have social media and 24-hour-a-day news channels to report on what we were doing.

Fraternities and sororities do a lot of community service in their roles of campus leaders. But because they're social fraternities, they also do a lot of partying and that's when their ugly side tends to come out.

But we have to remember that they're kids being kids, something all of us once were and most of us said and did things we wouldn't say or do today. It's a part of growing up and as dreadful and embarrassing as it can be to parents, relatives and friends, it's a part of life that's never going to change.

It proves once again that enthusiasm is wasted on the young and wisdom is wasted on the old.