Photo by Andrew Rogers

Akash Patel, President of the Delta Epsilon Psi fraternity, helps run the annual Sugar-Free Bowl, which is a flag football tournament held to raise awareness of juvenile diabetes.

Hazing to helping—campus fraternities conjure a spectrum of images. Consider the slew of films attempting to reproduce the college humor and box-office success of National Lampoon’s Animal House since 1978; they reinforced that image, often overshadowing another, more stark perception of college fraternities as secret societies with deep pockets of power. This one is fueled by the number of their members among the ranks of the elite.

Fraternity men in 2003, for example, comprised 76% of all U.S. Senators, 85% of Forbes 500 executives and 63% of U.S. president’s cabinet members since 1900, according to figures collected by author Alan D. DeSantis in Inside Greek U. One can also look toward the White House. George W. Bush, now stepping down from the presidency, his father and grandfather all belong to Delta Kappa Epsilon, a now international brotherhood founded at Yale University in 1844, which also included the likes of U.S. presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt and Gerald Ford.

More recent Greeks, however, span a whole array of social cultural and multicultural fraternities. Emerging at the University of Texas at Austin in the last five decades, these fraternities seek to provide students with the connections and support system outside the traditional Greek organizations, historically known for their exclusivity.

But unlike traditional, predominantly white fraternities that have incubated prestige and affluence for generations of brothers in the past two centuries, most move into the category without either wealth or power. Nor can they afford outlandish, themed house parties—toga or other that generate strong criticism—or levy high dues.

Money matters

Compared to the long established fraternities at UT that typically charge anywhere from $1000 to $5,000 per semester, to remain inclusive of their communities, most multicultural fraternities charge lower dues—in the range of $100 to $250 per semester—and can rarely count on their smaller alumni bases for financial support. They also so far cannot look to alumni brothers to lift them into the halls of power. Most multicultural fraternities struggle to find members because they draw on a smaller pool of students. Chapters have as few as six to 40 financially active members per semester. Some traditional fraternities can reach to more than 70 members each semester.

“Money is always a huge issue that I don’t think a whole lot of people really (acknowledge),” said Adrian Barrera, UT chapter president of Sigma Lambda Beta, a predominantly Latino fraternity. “We don’t pay a whole lot of dues, so it’s up to us to make the money, to raise the funds to do the events we want to do.”

Established fraternities tend to own houses that serve as valuable spaces to develop their brotherhood. Of the three historically black and three predominately Latino fraternity organizations on campus none have a central house, while two of seven largely South Asian fraternities own a house. Chances of owning property became even more difficult in recent years as housing prices on West Campus went up.

Alpha Phi Alpha, a historically black fraternity, owned an official home in the 1990s, UT Chapter President Anthony Williams said. Then, their fraternity had between 20 to 40 members. When their membership dwindled to 11 financially active members, they fell behind on their payments and lost the home, he said.

Today, “there’s been a shift in the way the membership thinks,” Williams said. “People are more worried about grades, they don’t want to worry about working a job to keep up with the house payments.”

Deep in Greek   

UT sociology professor Ben Carrington said fraternities that base their membership on culture may help break down what have been seen as bastions of white, masculine privilege but he is not sure that will happen.

A closer look at the resources and funding among multicultural fraternities and traditional fraternities inside the system could instead reveal that these privileged spaces have become separate and unequal, Carrington said. As multicultural fraternities develop, they could be used to rationalize retention of exclusive white fraternities.

“What could be is that those privileged spaces remain in place and actually remain quite powerful and actually come legitimized because they can say, well there are lots of different fraternities and there lots of different sororities, we don’t need to change,” he said.

Originally from Europe, Carrington said British notions of fraternities carry suspicion as they are linked to the exclusive, self-serving spaces of secret societies and masonry. The historical origins of U.S. college fraternities’ rituals and ceremonies stem from a Masonic influence.

The use of Greek letters by college fraternities also invokes ideals of a mythical kind of Europe, one as the cultured, western “cradle of democracy,” Carrington said. But college fraternities may be using the letters without understanding their elitist discourse and the precise histories and cultures behind them, he said.

“It gives these spaces a kind of gravitas, which perhaps they don’t deserve but also it doesn’t reflect upon contemporary Europe and its actual diversity,” Carrington said.

Some members said multicultural Greek organizations should not be compared to traditional fraternities because they primarily serve a different purpose at the university—to raise cultural awareness.

Photo by Andrew Rogers

Delta Epsilon Psi fraternity members keep score for one of the flag football matches.

“It sucks because we share this whole Greek definition with these other organizations and we get those stereotypes added on, such as that we are exclusive or that we are all about drinking and partying. But our whole purpose is different,” Barrera said.

UT has a number of cultural student groups, but fraternity members said going through an initiation process to become a brother forms stronger bonds.  The special bond of brotherhood is cherished by most fraternity members but is not a unique concept since most organizations from the boy scouts to the Klu Klux Klan claim it as a central value.

It’s also too soon to tell how much these newer organizations will grow in the coming years, members said. The oldest of minority Greek organizations, black fraternities date back to the 19th century with their founding at historically black colleges. But students did not form the first black fraternity on the UT campus until 1960—five years after UT began desegregating with the passing of Brown vs. the Board of Education.

The first Latino Greek organizations formed on college campuses post-Civil Rights era, during the 1970s, and the first at UT emerged in 1986. Asian fraternities followed during the multicultural movement of the 1990s, the earliest organization registered with a national council formed on campus in 1999. Some of the newest on campus remain unregistered with such councils and were founded as late as 2003.

Hard to break tradition   

Despite the challenges of forming a fraternity outside the traditional Greek organization, Delta Lambda Phi inducted its first pledge class in November, seeking to become an official chapter of the nation’s largest and oldest fraternity for gay, bisexual and progressive men. Leading founder, senior Russell van Kraayenburg and the other members said they wanted to break the stereotype of the traditional fraternity and set an example as a more inclusive brotherhood.

Still, there must be more integration in the membership of traditional fraternities on campus for the Greek community to truly see a change, said author Murray Sperber, a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley.

“How diverse the traditional fraternities are is a good indication for the future of diverse fraternities at UT. If they’re not diverse right now, they are not going to be enthusiastic about interchanging with multicultural (or other) fraternities,” said Sperber, who was president of the Jewish fraternity Tau Epsilon Phi during his own college years at Purdue University and a board member of the Interfraternity Council, the national organization that mostly oversees historically white fraternities.

In fact, multicultural fraternities seem marginalized within the Greek system. Fraternity chapters must apply individually for a national association, which means chapters of the same national fraternity can belong to different national councils, depending on those available on the college campus—some of this may be rooted in the history of segregation.

At UT, the Interfraternity Council mostly oversees traditionally white fraternities, while historically black Greek organizations fall under the National PanHellenic Council. The United Greek Council manages Latino fraternities and the Texas Asian Pan Hellenic Council oversees most Asian and South Asian Greek organizations.

Such separate councils can isolate diversity among Greek organizations, said Vinoid Pillai, chapter president of Beta Chi Theta, a largely South Asian fraternity. Although his fraternity has members from many different backgrounds, students on campus often label it as South Asian, making it difficult to reach out to non-Asian students, he said. Joining one of the national associations could further limit whom they reach and whom they host events with, as fraternities within a council must attend each other’s events, among other requirements.

Photo by Andrew Rogers

Fraternity members of Pi Kappa Alpha hold a party at the corner of W 24th Street and Leon Street.

A look to the past

Almost 100 years ago, in 1913, the Executive Committee of the Non-fraternity Students, composed of three-fourths of the student body at the time, formed at UT to fight for the abolishment of all fraternities on campus. Their action was part of a much larger anti-fraternity movement, which included lawmakers and university officials across the state.

The students, also known as “barbarians,” submitted a resolution to then UT president S.E. Mezes and faculty, stating that fraternities gave the perception that the university was a “rich man’s school,” when the majority of the student body came from rural districts.

The Barbs, as they came to be called, cited the fraternity as an “aristocratic institution” and as an evil of division and prejudice between the rich and poor, describing discrimination of non-fraternity members by university faculty.

Today, however, their battle has been forgotten.