Dry Frats

Ban of Brothers
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS Published: January 9, 2005

Gillian Laub for The New York Times

With alcohol off-limits at the chapter house, Phi Delts resort to off-campus housing for their parties. Even these gatherings are subject to raids by the local police.
Gillian Laub for The New York TimesGreg Bok, a sophomore brother at the Phi Delt house. The ban on alchohol, Northwestern Phi Delts agree, has had no effect on housekeeping.
y modern fraternity standards, Phi Delta Theta's tailgate party was a real rager. For one thing, there were kegs. I couldn't see them just then, but proof of their existence was everywhere. Packed into a backyard near the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., were some 100 drunken college students, beer spilling from plastic cups, industrial-size ketchup bottles overturned on the grass near the grill and gaggles of hard-drinking sorority girls (including one self-described Phi Delt groupie) keeping pace with the boys.
Amid the revelry, I spotted a lanky, easygoing Phi Delt sophomore from Texas who goes by the nickname Two-Shot, because two shots is about all it takes to get him acting silly. ''Two-Shot!'' I said loudly as he meandered through the crowd in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, a beer in one hand and a cheap plastic bottle of vodka in the other. ''Where's the keg?''
He pointed toward a far corner. ''Hey, homey,'' he said. ''The beer's over there.''
''You going to the game?'' I asked.
''Man, that's a good question,'' he said. ''I got great intentions, you know. But stuff happens. Sometimes I don't make it.''
I wished him luck (''Keep it real!'' he replied) and made my way toward the keg, where I bumped into Theo Michels, Phi Delt's likable chapter president, and Greg Bok, a big, sarcastic, deceptively smart sophomore. (Bok looks like a meathead but says he scored a 1,550 out of 1,600 on the SAT.) Both Michels and Bok were marveling at the success of the day's tailgate.
''Six kegs and no cops,'' Michels said. ''This has to be some sort of record. Last year, we had an off-campus party that started at 10:30, and by 11 the police came with a paddy wagon. A paddy wagon. We're college students trying to have a party off campus, because we can't have one in our own fraternity house, because we're not allowed to drink there. So we try to have one off campus, and it gets broken up. Basically, we can't have a party anywhere.''
Peter Micali, a square-jawed Phi Delt sophomore who had wandered within earshot, chimed in, ''Yeah, it was easier to party in high school.''
Bok shook his head sadly. ''The good old-fashioned fraternity experience is dead,'' he said, pausing for dramatic effect. ''So long, 'Animal House.' ''
t's doom and gloom time for many fraternity boys at Northwestern and at colleges across the country. University administrators, alarmed by the extent of binge drinking on their campuses, are cracking down on the excesses of Greek life, saying it's high time for fraternity boys to shape up and sober up. While all kinds of college students binge drink, the 2001 College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that fraternity house residents are twice as likely to do so as other students.
Eleven national and international fraternities, including Phi Delta Theta, now require most of their chapter houses to be alcohol-free, no matter what their university's policy is. (Sororities have long banned drinking in their chapter houses.) Take away the booze, the new alcohol-free theory goes, and fraternities will be safer, on more solid economic footing (fewer lawsuits, cheaper liability insurance) and more conducive to the creation of real bonds of brotherhood. Friendships will be forged out of genuine respect, not the shared misery of hazing or the shared fog of drink. ''We just didn't see a way to dramatically change the fraternity culture without removing alcohol,'' said Bob Biggs, executive vice president of Phi Delta Theta, when we met last fall in his office at the fraternity's spotless, museumlike international headquarters in Oxford, Ohio.
But what, exactly, would a dry fraternity look like? And would anyone want to join? You'd have a better chance, I thought, of getting James Carville and Bob Novak to open ''Crossfire'' with five minutes of meditation. As I listened to the brothers in that backyard go on about life at one of Northwestern's ''alcohol free'' fraternities, I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for them. I was a Phi Delt at Northwestern in the mid-90's -- not that long ago, to be sure, but seemingly a different time entirely. While we considered ourselves tamer than fraternities at many state schools (where Greek affiliation can often take precedence over just about everything), my brothers and I still saw drunken debauchery in the chapter house as our fraternal mandate. We threw rowdy keg parties. We got drunk in our rooms and then broke into other fraternities, stealing their sacred robes and toaster ovens. Some of us smoked marijuana, which we grew and harvested in an off-campus apartment. And many of us eagerly participated in drunken hazing, which most of the hazers and hazed saw as a kind of comic relief integral to fraternal bonding. To my brothers and me, a dry fraternity would have been inconceivable.