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I wrote about the cocaine ring at Penn State, the rape allegations at Cornell, and the criminology of frats. www.whatsitlike.me/when-the-tra...

There are striking parallels btw initiation rituals in frats and street gangs. Violent hazing (which is not universal in either case) is meant to break down individual discretion, & foster shared trauma & secrets. When it happens to frat boys, people wring their hands about coercion & consent.

Which, maybe they should! Hazing is obviously bad for people. But when a frat boy does crime, you’ll hear a lot of he was pressured, he was insecure, he was hazed. He’s a victim of male loneliness. Every man who joins a frat knows he has plenty of options. Not the case for street gang members.

I understand that there are psychological mechanisms at play during hazing that can make it feel impossible to say no. But there is something maddening about how the law and public narratives treat the consent of a pledge rushing to gain status compared to, say, the consent of a drunk woman.

A concrete example: At Penn State’s Delta Upsilon chapter, a senior frat bro and cocaine trafficking ring leader would pull pledges aside and ask them to hold out their hands. If they were steady, he’d order them to the boiler room to help bag cocaine. Those pledges got low level misdemeanors.

The pledges would cut the cocaine with creatine, a supplement popular among bodybuilders. They chose creatine because it’s a white powder frat bros can buy in bulk without anyone suspecting a thing.

There are many levels of legal insulation at play in the cases at both Penn and Cornell. Often when there’s a drug bust, police will seize the “trap house” property because it was instrumental to the crime. But when a drug ring runs out of a frat, the alumni board owns the house so it’s shielded.

“The Cornell Seven” moniker rings dissonant to my ear bc it’s reminiscent of “The Central Park Five,” who were exonerated. The two cases are not comparable. The Central Park Five were wrongfully arrested within days of the attack. It’s been 2 years and the Cornell frat bros haven’t been charged.