“Freshmen haven’t had much experience with drinking and don’t know their limits,” said Massini, who is considering joining a fraternity to perform community service. “We’d send them drafts of each section,” said Jason Colombini, then a campus fraternity leader and now student body president. “Alcohol plays a major role in the Cal Poly fraternity/sorority experience, especially within fraternity life.” 
 
 Still, the report called for an end to deferred recruitment because it runs “counter to a student’s right to choose.” The policy unfairly required fraternities, but not sororities, to postpone rush, according to the assessment. The current school year began, and still the falls continued. But for the fraternities themselves, it was a far different story. More important than self-insurance, however, was the development of a risk-management policy that would become—across these huge national outfits and their hundreds of individual chapters—the industry standard. “There will be a lot more accountability.” 
 
 The Interfraternity Conference assured the university that fraternities had shown “higher alcohol awareness.” Humphrey agreed, saying that students are taking alcohol safety more seriously. “Delaying rush makes a lot of sense.” 
 
 Founded in 1909, the Interfraternity Conference joined the industry’s political arm, known as FratPAC, in fighting against a federal anti-hazing bill last year. During a crisis, the questionnaires and honest accounts that fraternity members submit gratefully to their national organization may return to haunt many of the brothers. The opposing positions on this matter are held most forcefully and expressed most articulately by two men: Douglas Fierberg, the best plaintiff’s attorney in the country when it comes to fraternity-related litigation, and Peter Smithhisler, the CEO of the North-American Interfraternity Conference, a trade organization representing 75 fraternities, among them all 32 members of the Fraternal Information and Programming Group. It simply wanted fraternity and sorority recruitment on the same schedule. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.” As for the risk-management policies themselves: “They are primarily designed to take the nationals’ fingerprints off the injury and deaths, and I don’t believe that they offer any meaningful provisions.” The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function. He believes that the fraternity experience at its best constitutes an appeal to a young man’s better angels: through service, leadership training, and accountability for mistakes, a brother can learn the valuable lessons he will need to become “a better dad, a better teacher, a better engineer, a better pilot, a better ‘insert career here.’” Spend some time talking with Pete Smithhisler, and you can go from refusing to allow your son to join a fraternity to demanding he do so. “There is so much vulnerability in that first week, that first month as a freshman on a college campus -- of feeling lost. But everything changed after he pledged. “Take care of your friends.” 
 
 Freshmen were divided over the new rush policy. “If only I could have gotten my son to join one,” the other mom said, wistfully. “I kept trying, but he wouldn’t do it.” Why had she wished he’d pledged a fraternity? The assessment, prepared by fraternity executives, college administrators and a social worker, called Cal Poly’s recruitment “dehumanizing and superficial” and said alcohol was “a, and perhaps THE, defining factor” of Greek life. The clean-cut, curly-haired 18-year-old from Austin, Texas, knew no one on campus, and the opportunity to bond with fraternity brothers soon appealed to him.
– Frat-house accidents and sexual assaults are getting so common they're impossible to ignore—but how did it get this bad, and why does it keep happening? In an extensive Atlantic piece, Caitlin Flanagan looks at the history of fraternities and their myriad ways of avoiding legal obligations for what goes on behind closed doors. As Bloomberg reported, 60 students have died in frat-related incidents since 2005, a fact "that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses," writes Flanagan. She chronicles a few incidents, from a freshman girl's heinous rape at Wesleyan University to a young man who fired a bottle rocket out of his butt at Marshall University—and the guy who fell off a deck videotaping it, and later sued Alpha Tau Omega for his injuries. To avoid financial ruin, fraternities have merged into "vast national organizations" that buy liability insurance, and they've created rules about alcohol consumption that are nearly impossible for party-lovers to follow—so when the inevitable lawsuits come, frat members are considered at fault for breaking the rules. That means their soon-to-be-retired parents pay extensive legal bills, and parents' homeowners insurance often pays settlements. So why do universities allow this perilous environment to persist? Largely because fraternity dorms save schools "untold millions of dollars" in housing, writes Flanagan, and the frat-house party image helps lure students into expensive universities. To be fair, advocates also describe the positives—like increased confidence, brotherhood, and leadership training. But parents should know the dangers: "Until proven otherwise," a lawyer tells Flanagan, "they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in." Click for her full piece.