I know I already linked to Caitlin Flanagan’s article about fraternities in the Atlantic, but I really have to give this first paragraph a shout out.
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
Apt. 11d 
If I understand Flanagan correctly, her thesis is that raising the drinking age forced college drinking into unsupervised fraternity houses, so the best response would be to ban the fraternity houses, thereby forcing college drinking even deeper underground. Talk about the definition of insanity. Her second thesis is that college is too expensive, so imposing massive tort liabilities on colleges when unsupervised students do stupid things would be an improvement.
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I thought that part of what she was arguing is that college is extremely expensive — but not for the reasons that you may think. The administrator whose job it is to supervise “greek life”; the passel of lawyers that work for the university on liability issues; the administrator whose job it is to work with substance abuse issues; all of these things cost your family’s tuition dollars and contribute nothing to whether or not your student emerges better educated and prepared to navigate the job market. I’m an academic administrator and you see some strange things — decisions being made to cut back on journal subscriptions in the library to fund other programs on campus.
She’s also pointing out that universities may have a vested interest in allowing fraternities, since fraternities can now be considered legally liable, rather than the university — and those costs of insurance, legal counsel, etc. can now be fobbed off onto the fraternity’s national infrastructure instead of that of the university.
My takeaways were: if your kid doesn’t want to be in a fraternity (and he probably shouldn’t), and you go to a school that has a huge frat presence, it is very likely that at least some of your family’s tuition money will go to fund these activities or their consequences.
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Yee Haw, fraternities! http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/frat-kicks-out-suspected-vandals-james-meredith-statue-n36251
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