The allegations were shocking. Fraternity brothers had been accused of beating new members with paddles, burning cigarettes into their skin, forcing them to lie on beds of nails, spitting on them, and commanding them to drink urine. University of Maryland administrators were alarmed by the claims, which appeared in their inboxes in late February, coming from at least two anonymous accounts.
They decided to act fast.
On March 1, all 37 fraternities and sororities on campus were told they were put on “social moratorium.” All activities involving alcohol were prohibited and “no contact” would be allowed between some 5,000 current members and new members, known as pledges. “Failure to comply with this cease and desist directive may result in further group or individual sanctions,” James Bond, the school’s director of student conduct, warned in an email to the Greek students on campus.
Soon after hearing the fraternity allegations, Maryland hired a team of lawyers who called in 150 Greek members for questioning. Some students were leaders; others were picked at random for the mandatory hour-long interviews in a campus library. Though students were allowed their own lawyers, those lawyers were permitted only to call in and listen rather than speak up on the students’ behalf, multiple sources told me. Three students said they felt “coerced” into cooperating, and none were told what they had been accused of. Some students were ordered to hand over their phones or their interrogators would note that they “weren’t fully cooperative,” Micah Kamrass, a lawyer for four fraternities and one sorority, told me. (The university denies this happened.)
“We were guilty until proven innocent,” Jackson Hochhauser, president of Theta Chi, told me. “It felt like I was only there for them to turn something against me.”
It wasn’t until March 13, when four fraternities filed a civil rights lawsuit against Maryland—arguing that the university had violated due process and the free speech rights of students—that the college revealed what they had actually been accused of. Sorority Kappa Alpha Theta filed a similar suit on April 4. The social moratorium was lifted for most houses, except for a few that remained under investigation. Days later, in a March 22 TV interview, Maryland’s vice president for student affairs, Patty Perillo, said she was not only proud of the university’s response to the allegations—she hoped it would become a “model” for schools across the country.
But by the end of the school year in June, 35 Greek organizations out of the 37 on campus were cleared of all wrongdoing—and just two were given a year of disciplinary probation for allowing underage drinking, multiple sources told me. That was it. None of the serious allegations, sources said, were proved to be true.
The Maryland case, sources told me, reveals a double standard on American campuses today: students who openly break the law—including trespassing, breaking and entering, and harassing their fellow students—are given a pass when they’re committing crimes in the name of activism, while students suspected of behaving badly in their social lives are treated like villains.
As Maryland was cracking down on its fraternities last spring, pro-Palestine protests were sweeping through campuses across the country. Students built sprawling encampments that openly violated university rules, and some assaulted and verbally attacked Jewish students. A student at Yale was stabbed in the eye with a flagpole, and another at Columbia was told to “go back to Poland.” At UCLA, violence and hate erupted on both sides, as Jewish students were blocked from walking to class, and a group of pro-Israel protesters attacked the pro-Palestine encampment with fireworks.
In many cases, students got off scot-free despite committing criminal acts. At Princeton, the faculty voted to grant students “legal and disciplinary amnesty” after they were arrested for breaking into and occupying a campus building. At Columbia, protesters who held three janitors hostage after breaking into a campus building saw charges against them dismissed by the Manhattan district attorney, who cited a lack of sufficient evidence—even though multiple photos and videos documented their crimes. (The pro-Palestinian protests at Maryland were mostly confined to sit-ins that dispersed peacefully.)
Now, as students nationwide are preparing to return to campus this fall, all signs point toward another chaotic, and potentially violent, semester. One coalition at NYU has already said it’s ready to embrace “armed struggle” in its fight for the pro-Palestinian cause. And it’s not clear whether or not colleges will stop them.
Wynn Smiley, the CEO of Alpha Tau Omega, one of the fraternities investigated by Maryland, says the differing treatment of pro-Palestine protesters nationally and fraternity members on his own campus reveals “two very different sets of rules. . . depending on who you are affiliated with.”
“Based on rumors, Greek students were targeted, and yet, after everything that the university did, they found none of the initial allegations to have merit, and they took all these students through this process needlessly,” Smiley said. On the other hand, there are protesters who “are not only breaking university rules in many cases but also state laws. And those folks—the university seems to turn the other way and give them permission to just go ahead and do whatever. No punishment issued.”
Last year, I investigated Stanford University’s war against its own students. I reported how the college closed down a dozen fraternities and sororities for months over a number of minor infractions, such as serving alcohol to students under the age of 21.
Stanford student Decker Paulmeier, now 24, was president of his fraternity when the college investigated him for seven months for three accusations, the worst of which was a member suffering a panic attack after an alleged hazing.
Paulmeier was subjected to months of interrogations by lawyers hired by Stanford, as threatening letters flooded his inbox during his exams. Over the course of the investigation, Paulmeier said he spent at least five hours a week trying to piece together the fraternity’s defense. Rattled by the anxiety and pressure, he had to drop out of his graduate-level coursework and his honors thesis program, and he told me he failed a class for the first time in his life.
Even though his fraternity was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, Paulmeier said his life was marred by the experience. He told me he suffered from an “exhausted, burnt-out depression,” as he went through a “a state of mental and physical exhaustion and collapse.”
He said colleges see student social life as a potential liability: anything can go wrong when kids are allowed to have fun, so it’s best to put them in a social straitjacket.
“Students are objects to be commodified and acquired,” Paulmeier recently told me of how colleges view young people, who now pay up to $500,000 to obtain a bachelor’s degree. “And then once they get to your school, then they become an asset with a possible risk of liability.”
Even now, the University of Maryland continues to defend its sweeping actions, going as far as to dedicate a page on its website stating that, “The decision to pause certain activities. . . was based on the serious nature and frequency of the concerning reports and data we received, which did not always pinpoint specific fraternities or sororities.”
In a recent email to The Free Press, a university spokesperson said, “to be clear—chapters were never shut down. . . . They could still meet and engage in work, service, sporting events, etc., but simply without alcohol or new members for this limited period of time.”
Meanwhile, the fraternities and the sorority behind the civil rights suits continue to pursue their cases. Micah Kamrass, the lawyer behind both suits, said his clients are focused on preventing these violations from happening again—and ending the double standard of punishment on campus.
“They aren’t treating fraternities and sororities the same as other groups on campus,” Kamrass said of Maryland. “Wanting to make sure students are safe is a laudable goal. The University of Maryland should have that as a goal. But there are ways to do that appropriately and ways to do that inappropriately and unconstitutionally. And they chose to go inappropriately and unconstitutionally here.”
Francesca Block is a reporter for The Free Press. Read her piece “Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out” and follow her on Twitter (now X) @FrancescaABlock.
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