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The Violent, Militaristic Ideology that Undergirds Fraternities 

The first major hazing scandal in American history occurred at West Point in 1900. There are eerie parallels to what happened at Cornell’s Chi Phi.

The fraternity house at the center of a rape allegation stands on the campus of Cornell University on September 30, 2026, in Ithaca, New York.

In their polished public pitches, fraternities pledge to provide boys with many vaunted things. Leaders of Greek Life portray themselves as distinctly charitable, intensely communal, and enlightened. In exchange for dues each semester, they promise to provide the time and space necessary to build brotherhoods, find romantic companionship, and forge academic and future career success. What is generally provided in practice, however, are corrupted versions of these things: bonds built through violence, jobs secured without merit, and intimacy taken, not granted.

Hard evidence of the system’s many horrors and hypocrisies have routinely come to light, spurring a response that is generally the same: righteous outcry followed by insufficient, individualized campus punishments, like apology essays or abbreviated dismissals. The guilty fraternity—and sometimes, it’s an athletic team that functions just like one—always seems to elide proper accountability and generally manages to soften the blow for its accused members. While each new scandal leaves scars, the power and relative impunity displayed by Greek Life time and time again has become the institution’s most truly alluring feature.

These dynamics are on vivid display at Cornell University, which, between 2018 and 2024, logged 1,216 cases of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. One of these data points represents a 20-year-old Jane Doe who, in October 2024, was allegedly plied with ketamine and alcohol by a brotherhood of boys at the Fraternity Chi Phi, seven of whom subsequently sexually assaulted her. “I felt like bait,” she later said in a closed hearing. “I felt like lions around me.” Less than 24 hours before her gang rape, another student had overdosed on ketamine at the same house. Campus police responded, and made an arrest, but Chi Phi apparently remained in the clear.

The university ultimately launched an investigation into the so-called “Cornell 7,” but only two of the men were actually expelled. The rest secured Ivy League diplomas, including Diego Sarabia, who managed to get a job at Wells Fargo even as he actively remained the subject of Cornell’s inquiry. When the case arrived on the desk of District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, he declined to bring criminal charges, concluding that Doe had started her night by consensually imbibing and was thus as responsible for her behavior as the perpetrators were.

Underlying these egregiously weak responses to campus rape culture is an unstated rationale: that fraternities, like millitary batallions, breed the sort of hard-edged attitudes needed to enforce........

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