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Oct 22, 2026 33 min

What Next - Ban Frats

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The sexual assault allegations against seven Cornell fraternity members has sparked a debate about the role of Greek life on college campuses. But maybe the solution is to get rid of it, full stop? Guests: Susan Matthews, executive editor at Slate. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen. Fill out our listener survey at slate.com/whatnextsurvey Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme and Patrick Fort. Paige Osburn is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD.

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What Next - Ban Frats

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Hey, it's Adam Wild and Jacks, hosts of the Adam Wild and Jacks Show. What does it feel like to have a better laptop like the Dell XBS powered by Intel Core? With a premium design that's thin and light, it feels smooth. Very smooth. For a better feel in your hands and less weight on your shoulders.

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We'd love for you to answer questions about what you like about the show, what you don't like, how you listen. Yeah, it's quick. It's easy. It helps us a lot. We want your feedback and we're going to use it as we think about the future of the show.

So go on over to slate.com slash what next survey. You can fill it out as you listen. Susan, how soon after the Cornell rape case got reported? Did you know you wanted to write something about fraternities? Ah, immediately.

Susan Matthews is the executive editor of Slate. And to know why the alleged rape at Cornell immediately made her think about the problems of Greek life, you need to know a few things. First of all, she went to Dartmouth, more than half of the students there are part of the Greek system. But also, Susan was the editor of her college paper and she is still on the board. So she is talking to college students a lot.

It's not often, I think, that these stories spill out into regular land, regular people land, but I went to a frat school. And there hasn't really been a time where this story has gone away from my life and world. When you say this story, you mean the story of what? Greek life, sexual assault on campus. Students trying to figure out how to change something when it feels like the administration is willing to pay lip service to it, but it's not really on board.

There's a real tension and a push and pull between people. And one of the things that I've seen that I think is the most interesting is that people come in, they spend a few years, they realize what's happening, they're seniors, and they have influence and they want to change something. And then they graduate and it just starts all over again. The article you ended up writing, it's titled was ban all the frats. Pretty straightforward.

The funny thing is you love Greek life. I loved the culture for a time. I still loved it. When I go back, I like to play a game of pong. I had pong tables at my way.

Outdoors with my friends. It was fun. But I loved it. And even while I was there, I knew that it was a problem. Really?

Did you just push that part down? You're like, it's fine for me. I think that I knew that it was not fine for everyone. My freshman year, very early on, one of my very good friends was actually assaulted in France, like super early, like freshman fall, like in the month of September. And I think that I did what everybody is doing with this story, which is that you think it's a bad apple.

It's this person is evil. This is the problem, but it's not the system. Because it makes you feel safer. If I can get rid of this one person or avoid this person, it will be okay. And getting rid of the whole system felt totally impossible to me at the time.

I have to tell you, Mary, like my husband wasn't a frat. And his mom went to our college. And when I wrote this piece, she was like, Susan, congratulations. Like that was so brave. And my husband had not yet read the piece and was like, oh, like I could tell that he was irritated with it.

And I think that he really self-identifies with his frat was totally different. It didn't have Greek letters, actually. Like it was so, it was the one that was sort of outside the norm. But I still can't get the affirmative argument out of anyone of why we should have fraternities now. And like if you were making a college from scratch anywhere, why you would start with that system.

If it asked you like 10, 15 years ago if you were going to write a story telling colleges to ban frats, would you believe me? Yes and no. So I would say that five years ago, I would have said I would have written the piece that was make all frats co-ed. Like just integrate the Greek system. That's enough.

Now you're like burning all down. Yeah. Today on the show, the case for banning frats. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to what next?

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The Dell XPS. Built for you. So, Susan, we talked about how... You talked about how you went to Dartmouth. You kind of didn't go there for the Greek life but you ended up enjoying it and being part of it.

You did seem to have this realization that happened over the course of years about Greek life and I want to kind of walk you through that if we can. Like in your article that you wrote for Slate you write specifically about you're after you graduated a student broke ranks and said, hey, like this is bad. I wrote an op-in for the Dartmouth student paper illuminating why. Can you explain like what that guy said and whether that was kind of the beginning of you rethinking here? I can definitely explain what he said.

I think that I was already a little bit on the path and we can get to that. But he... Andrew Loose, he came to... I already said that I was the editor in chief of the newspaper and so I had graduated but I actually heard about this first before the newspaper even published it because the editor in chief came to me and was like, we have this op-ed from this guy and I need to figure out how to fact check it because the allegations are like it's going to cause drama. It's she knew.

And red hot. Everyone knew. As soon as I said, 100%. Yes, it was red hot. And so she came to me when we talked through how we would vet it and talking to brothers who had graduated and so on.

And what he wrote was it is astonishing that we go to this college where at that point, Jim Young Kim was college president. He went on to be the president of the World Bank. He was a public health professor from Harvard before he came to Dartmouth. He was like in Paul Farmer's universe. He had a whole specific thing.

And he came here and like you said with your public health brain, you look at this and you think, what is this? Bad things are happening here. We should want to solve the bad things. Like remove all of your emotional bad things. It's like a fraternity at college.

I think you love them. She's like, we can all agree sexual assault is bad. We can all agree that people drinking to the point of vomiting or vomiting or whatever. That's bad. We should want to stop that.

And they were happening in plain sight. So the things that Angelo, the student wrote in his op-ed was the most memorable to me was swimming through a kiddie pool filled with feces and vomit. The other most memorable one is the vomit, which is the vomit. Oh my god. It will live with everyone forever.

And the vomit made a vomit. Those things were things that would be happening in basements. But like every fall you saw the boys pledging, they all had to do different things. Like some of them were sort of mundane. They had to grow mass dashes and carry lunch boxes.

But there was this mentality where it was very clear that you go through this process where you are marked, you are embarrassed, and then you are brought through to the other side where you will eventually do that to the next group. And we know this from military training and all kinds of other group think when you go through that process, it is dehumanizing and demoralizing. And it creates a culture inside of the place where that happens that I think is what sets up frats to be even more dangerous for the boys and the girls for both genders. It also bonds you. Like 100 percent.

I talked to my 18 year old son about this. He's like, well, this is a way that you quickly build bonds with other people by going through a horror together. And people have been asking. Yeah. People have been asking, how could the Kifi brothers have looked at those snapchats and not done something?

And the reason is that because they were so indoctrinated to just defend the brotherhood, to just look the other way, to just they had already probably seen things going on inside of that house that would be not something they would want their mothers or professors or anybody else to see. They're not reporting as part of the culture. Yeah. So I think that explains the psychological poll to just say, this is fine. Yeah.

I mean, last week, just to bring it back to today, Cornell University's president said more and more, we've seen a disturbing culture emerge in some of these fraternities. I want to pause on that with you because it stood out to me that like the way he's framing things here and the wake of these awful allegations on his campus that he's being accused of doing way too little about the way he's framing it as a new thing that's happening here, some kind of cultural change. I'm not sure that is fair. Yeah. And I'm really, really disturbed by it.

Yeah. I think that there have been some arguments that I think are interesting that pair the rise of pornography and different kinds of digital culture with what is happening inside of frats, but 100% what was happening inside of frats was a problem to begin with. I mean, you look back at the history of many of these places. This is one of the things that I wrote about in my piece because you asked like, when did you start to become disillusioned by this? And I think that one of the main things was we had these houses that and by houses, I mean literally physical houses.

We used to call them physical plants all the time because it was so confusing to go back and forth between a Greek house and an actual house. But two of the people went out and your article, which I think is really important, is is like the frats provide housing for the university. They're doing a service for the university. 100%. And I think that row when I was a student, there were two houses that were dark.

They were shuttered. Nobody lived there. And it's because they had been kicked off of campus in the 90s and early 2000s for hazing and sexual abuse of women. And like I said, I was the nerd on the newspaper. So we had in one of our offices, we had this wall of bound volumes of every single newspaper that the paper had published since the 1700s.

And I would go through them for various reasons. But to flip through them and read through why these houses were banned was so chilling. And I did that because when I was a student, they were both re-recognized and brought back. And one of them was banned because they were circulating an internal newspaper that talked about brothers having sex with certain women, talked about that they had a peephole where they would watch this happen. Like the things that were published in this internal newspaper were bad enough that when it was seen by the outside world, they had no choice but to ban them, to de-recognize them.

And it just took a cycle before they came back. And I think that this gets back to this whole question of like, is it the individual culture at one fret is bad? Is it a bad apple situation? Like what the Cornell president is trying to say? It's not that beta or zeta-sci, these two froths that came back, were necessarily going to bring back specific traditions that were uniquely bad.

In the 15 years since I graduated that I've been paying attention, things have ebbed and flowed between which houses are, the popular houses, which houses are, the houses that women are kind of like, you don't really want to go there. Like which of the house is in the house as my son has told me, the top house, the bottom house. Yes, it totally changes. It's not specific to any house. It's just the culture.

Yeah. I mean, there's certainly something happening in fraternity culture. Like there's this 2007 study, fighting fraternity members commit three times as many sexual assaults as people who aren't fraternity members, which is kind of shocking. Like the idea that just this one indicator, which yes, couldn't be an indicator for other things about you, but like that this one characteristic seems to be associated with poor behavior writ large. Yeah, which I would say that the number one behavior that it's maybe pulling out more than any characteristic about you is binge drinking and drug use.

And we know that those things correlate way more than almost anything else. So here's a question. You say ban the frats. Do you think we should ban the sororities? Of course.

So walk me through that. I think so here's one thing that I want to make really clear, which is the reason why those rats were sitting empty houses on Dartmouth campus 30 feet away from the library where we had a housing crisis where it's a small town, like they were building dorms out to the edge of where students could walk. The winters really cold. There were buses is because the university did not own them. They were not in charge.

The fraternities were in charge. And so they were just going to do whatever they were going to do. And the thing that actually you asked by the time I graduated, what was I the most annoyed about by the time I graduated, I was the most pissed about the distance and the difference between the sororities and the fraternities. What do you mean by when you say that? If you were a woman at Dartmouth, you had a totally different experience with Greek life than frat, than men had with fraternities.

And that's not even because of what you were experiencing inside of fraternity. When I was a student, there were probably 15 frats where each house owned their house, had tons of money, had this physical property and had total autonomous independence from the college. The sororities, there were seven of them. None of them had their own houses. None of them had the established money that the frats had.

And so how this played out is that when women were pledging a sorority, the houses, the classes, the pledge classes were twice as large instead of 30 kids, it was 60 kids, because they were half as many. And in the frat, my husband, I thought he was Greek, his best friends are all from his fraternity. My best friends were not, the women were not as kind of filtered into their houses because there wasn't the same cohesion, there wasn't the same ownership of the space, it wasn't the same social center of our lives as it was for the men. And for the men, it was the center of their lives because they had so much more institutional, not from the college, but from the frats support throughout that whole process.

Well, somebody said, oh, we need to empower the sororities to be just as in charge as the frat houses. Yeah, I think that first of all, well, I think that I agree that that is a road to go down. And if I go down that road, the answer is there's a limited resource here that we're dealing with. So you could try to take some of the fraternities away from the men and give them to women. I don't think that that would go over really well.

I actually think that making the houses co-ed is the first step in that process. And that is where I was basically when I graduated and within the five years after of just like, wait, why are we doing this at all? Why are the women struggling with this totally different landscape compared to the men? And why wouldn't we just like the college went co-ed 50 years ago? Why would we not make these institutions co-ed as well?

Like in the newspaper, we talked about how it like two years after the college went co-ed, a woman was in charge of the newspaper. The secret society is integrated. Every single other club and thing was co-ed. Why on earth are you separating people out for Greek life? OK, just LOL to the fact that it's like the secret society at Dartmouth.

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For a better way to work without being near a charger, charger, charge. Feel for those who want better, the Dell XBS built for you. I guess some people I think would say, well, the sororities do an important thing, a much softer thing than the fraternities do. We should be empowering them, not getting rid of them. You know, it's really these frats that are the problem.

What would you say to them? I think that there's a way in which when men come together, they do things that burst into the news in this horrific way. But I don't think that when women come together in these kinds of systems, it's all peaches and daisies either. There are masses in that situation too. I mean, just in terms of our sorority culture was really different, but like Southern sorority culture and what they do to the girls who are trying to get into them.

There's this story that I read in New York, a few weeks, maybe months ago about how when they're pledging, these girls are trying to take ozempic when they're like 19 years old. I think that there are problems with sororities that aren't necessarily on par with these problems, but it's not good either. The violence is internalized, not externalized. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't think that the sororities are fine. The frats aren't. Is an answer. I think that the Greek life becoming coed is a really interesting answer.

I think that's what the Wesleyan Kiankelroft did. Yeah. Michael Roth just wrote a really interesting op-ed for the times in which I think that you can kind of read between the lines and see how he navigated this problem where the fraternities are kind of institutions that have power in and of themselves. He talks about the fact that there are some fraternities who didn't go along with it and have to kind of operate underground and off campus. And then there are the fraternities who decided to go coed and they have a very different relationship to the campus and to being a central social influence in that space.

So I think that going coed before, as a last resort before taking them away, definitely is a better option. And I think that that's where I was about five years ago. And I think that that's because by the time I graduated, I was so mad about this difference in power. And I remember so clearly realizing like everybody talks about one of the things that was brought up to me about Cornell was like, wasn't there sexual assault training? Aren't there sober monitors at these parties?

Like, aren't there these things that you can do? And if you haven't had a lot of experience of watching like at a frat house, the bouncer and the bartender and the DJ and the social chair, like every single aspect of creating a party environment, if that is all powered by the same brotherhood who has these incentives that we've talked about, it creates a space that they're not trying to make it dangerous. It just inherently is. If you're at a club, the people who are running the establishment as a business are not also going to be incentivized to be partying and drinking. But if you're at a fraternity, even the people who are the sober monitors or the sexual assault, you know, trained hall monitors as well, like those people are going to their college students.

They're not paid to be doing this. They're going to end up partying with the people that they're trying to protect. It's a really, really difficult dynamic to ask them to responsibly take on that social infrastructure. OK, so we're at this interesting moment right now, when it comes to the conversation about what happened at Cornell and Greek life, where we go from here, like you've got New York State attorney general to James doing her investigation. Then at Cornell, you've got this separate process going on.

The faculty Senate is considering a resolution of no confidence in the school's administrators. In light of that, you're hearing people like Cornell's president speak out. Basically make this argument, which will be very familiar, I think, that, OK, if we ban frats, if we do the Susan Matthews plan, it's just going to drive all of this bad behavior underground. What do you think of that argument? Yeah, I have a lot of empathy for that argument.

I think about it because when I think back to my experience at Dartmouth, I think, wow, it would have been so much different. It would have been so much less fun. It would have been all of these things. And I've been thinking about that a lot recently because I feel like where I've come down is realizing when I think about taking away the frats, I think of all these things going away. But what if instead we think about what could exist in their place?

And one of the things that I really think about is what would it have been like if I had been able to be friends with a group of girls and guys that was just like my high school friends throughout college? It would have felt really different. Yeah. And I know how hard it is to, I think that students, particularly, you know, sophomores who have just pledged and seniors who are going to be in their senior spring, they're always going to be all of these reasons for college students to be like, just let me have this. Like it's my turn.

There's such an issue there. And I think that it's really, really hard. Dartmouth has tried for a really long time not to get rid of Greek life, but to supplement it with these kinds of housing communities. And I think that one of the real problems is that people are assigned to them and they're not self selected. And so I think that what you have to do is you have to really pull back and include people in what the new system would be from the ground up.

But it's really, really difficult because colleges are places where the students are cycling through every four years and they just want to have their experience when they're used to it. It's the other side of that is that it would maybe be six hard years and then you would get through it to the other side of it. I just wanted to take a punch. Do you know what I mean? Like it's like so 100 percent.

I had sort of looked at these comments from Cornell's president and like will things go underground? Like let's look at places where they have gotten rid of frats, which is like Williams College, which is much smaller place. I know it was like, I know, like, did it decades ago. So many, many factors that are different now. I think it's going to ground, but you had to really actually invest too in the students.

You'd be like, OK, if we get rid of this thing, how are we investing in the students in order to make this a place that they want to be? And like that requires a lot of questions instead of outsourcing your college culture to these organizations. You need to be like, Oh, what is our college culture? What do we want it to be? And I think maybe the colleges are really used to asking themselves a question.

I mean, one thing that I want to bring up in addition to Michael Roth the Wesleyan president, when I was in college, I remember the middle very president at the time was really leading this push to lower than drinking age. And like it is really crazy when we're talking about this and everyone's acknowledging what's happening in frats and the ketamine use and all this stuff that we're still like. But it's totally it totally makes sense that the drinking age is 21 years old and like students can't go out and get a beer at the local bar. Like when I mentioned that whole thing about the infrastructure of the party being totally by the people who are participating in the party, you know, where that's not happening at the local bar on Main Street, where like if the students, they're still going to drink, they're still going to do bad things. They're still going to mess up their college students.

But if they're doing it in town, in public, in a place, there are just so many more guardrails that are there. And so I really feel like, yes, of course, you have to invest in the infrastructure and how are we going to create this college culture. I also thought I remember being so impressed by that and all very professor and being like, duh, this would make life so much better on college campuses. I have a friend who went to McGill who when she read the Cornell story, she was just basically like, what? Because they didn't have that.

They were in Canada. They could go out to a bar. They had total power and control over it. And I think that really what you're seeing, it's so interesting to bring up the divide between the faculty and the administration because as a college newspaper nerd, that tension was there all the time. My father is a college professor.

I hear so much about that tension. And I just have to tell you, the administrators aren't up for it. Like college administration right now in so many places is so weak and so invested in rankings and figuring out how to play the admission system of getting the lowest admission number possible and all these things that I really, truly feel is not invested in figuring out what life on campus is like for students and how to make it the best possible. Yeah. I mean, we've kind of made college into this experience that is like the equivalent of like sending your kid into the woods and like seeing if they survive.

Do you know what I mean? We haven't really acknowledged that. We're still saying why. Which is why getting a four year degree, but it's like not. It's like for a certain class of parents.

And I want to acknowledge that it is like a way to like, Oh, now you have a little freedom and your life. This is my fun four years. And then you hear about the students who are like, wait, just don't eliminate the frats for my year. And we wonder where that mentality is coming from. Like we've positioned the whole thing as this wild experience that's going to define their life.

I mean, I can see both sides of the argument about banning frats like the four and the against. You're going to make the affirmative case. I want to hear it. Mary. Well, why?

It's not affirmative case for friends. I would never build up in the ground up. I think you've really put your finger on something important there. But I think banning any behavior, it does drive it underground. And like, I also wonder like who can ban the frats?

Sometimes the frats own their property. They can just move off campus. They are national organizations, not affiliated with one college in particular. So it really gets into these sticky questions of like, if we were going to be on the frats, how are we even going to do it? Right.

So and then I think they just have this infrastructure. They're probably like senators and Congress people who are deeply connected to their fraternities. And it's going to be a hard slog to ban the frats. Right. Here's what I think.

I think a couple of things. First of all, I think it is useful to see what happened in Cornell in concert with other other episodes of dehumanization and abuse at fraternities, like hazing. I would really like to see victims of sexual assault from fraternities, find shared community with people who have been injured in hazing and have other beefs with fraternities because I think that their cause is the same. I really think that they are, they can do interesting things by making this a less gendered fight. It's not.

It's about the dehumanization, like you said. So I think that first of all, I think I was something like controlling behavior also comes down a lot of the times, not from starting with a ban, but from like starting with financial control. Like I think I think about, you know, if what we want to prevent is the sexual assaults, right? We want to prevent or the hazing, the abuse. How do we do that?

Like I think about car accidents. How do we get everywhere to where there's e-belts? Like insurers were involved. Do you know what I mean? Like I think about like the money lovers you can pull.

But it may be that you need to do all these things at once too. That's the other thing I think, which is like maybe we just need to try it all. So that's, I guess, where I come down. Does any of that make sense to you? Yeah.

I think that that idea of bringing the victims of these institutions together makes a lot of sense because I think that one of the things where I feel very affected right now, in particular, by the fact that this is the first case of this happening since my child was born. He's a boy. I've thought so much about what I, what do I do? If he has to do the same, like what would I want him to do? That idea of it's a non-gendered problem that people go through these things and come out harmed.

I think that that applies to the Cornell seven themselves. Like I do not necessarily think that these kids are broken and are awful and should necessarily be sent to prison. I'm not the law. We're going to decide that. That's a different thing there.

But I think that there's a real case that these students, these members of this frat, it would be fascinating to see what they went through before they came to be participating in that Snapchat. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I agree with you, but man, it is so hard to look at those messages in that group chat and just think, how did you get here? How did you get to this place?

If I was a mom of one of those children, I really don't children. I'm not children. They're men, but like, they're men. They're in this net or they're in this in between world. That's the problem with the way that we position college.

They're guys in this in between space. Yeah. Yeah. I just feel like there should be consequences. I feel like when you're talking, how did they get to the point where like those messages were in a world of okay behavior, non-reportable behavior.

This is really where I feel like there is never going to be a moment at Cornell, again, where the public's root knee and the embarrassment of what happened inside of their Greek houses is higher, let's hope. And even now, it is not obvious that they're like, all right, this is the tipping point. Let's let's tear this thing down. Like they're not there. They're still so far on the like, maybe we can slide.

They're just like, yeah, we should just be on the frats. Especially because we're now they've had like years of problems leading up to this after Trinity is 100%. Um, Susan, I'm really grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show and talking about. Thank you as always, Mary.

Susan Matthews is our executive editor at Slate. And that's the show. What next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames, New Charm and Patrick Forte. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TVD. Neil LaBelle is our executive producer of podcast here at Slate.

Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. And I'm Mary Harris. Go say, Hey, over on Blue Sky. I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening.

Catch back here next time. Hey, it's Adam Wild and Jacks, hosts of the Adam Wild and Jack show. What does it feel like to have a better laptop like the Dell XBS powered by Intel Core with a premium design that's then enlightened feels smooth, very smooth, for a better feeling your hands and less weight on your shoulders with a responsive touchscreen and feels fast and precise for better scrolling, zooming and swiping. So everything just flows and with long lasting battery life. It feels like nonstop energy for a better way to work without being near a charger, charger, feel for those who want better, the Dell XBS built for you.

For most of the history of professional sports, there was a wall between the game and gambling. Then suddenly it was everywhere. Ontario is all in on sports back every moment more. But that wasn't supposed to include the players themselves. For after sports, a porter is under NBA investigation.

Athletes are the perfect gamblers. Understood the big bet. Find us on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

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This episode is 33 minutes long.

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This episode was published on October 22, 2026.

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