Since the first blog post, my ideas have not changed much. I liked the ideas you have given me and will definitely look into both the article and maybe even purchase the book. I googled "the history of fraternities" and a lot of good articles came up. They align with the one article about Animal House you gave me. I also googled "how the media destroys fraternities" and the first website that came up was the article you showed me. That is pretty neat. Again, articles and books that come to mind are the ones you gave to me. I am especially intrigued because I am in a fraternity as well.
http://thefraternityadvisor.com/the-impact-of-technology-on-fraternity-37-opinions/
this link is cool because it gives opinions of 37 different people. This can help me find more articles.
http://theodysseyonline.com/wku/media-outlets-destroying-greek-life/168169
this link will be helpful as well because it was written by a girl in a sorority. This will give the other perspective other than just males and older people bashing on fraternities.
There are definitely multiple sides to this debate. One side being the men in the fraternities and all of the good that they do for the community. Another side is that adults that only see the negative things in the media that get persuaded to be biased towards the situation.
The links you give do not seem to useful to me -- they are simply opinion-based "defenses" of Greek life and a warning about how to handle the media or how not to trust media portraits of Greek life. How does that connect to the history of Greek life? It sounds like you are in a defense-of-fraternities posture. That is not the best way to approach the paper. If you want to investigate history, you have to start by looking at the history. And I think the article I referenced in my last post is most interesting in suggesting that film/media portraits of fraternities have actually had a role in shaping frat member expectations of Greek culture and Greek behavior. That's an interesting bit of history that has nothing to do with the readings you link.
ReplyDeleteBut there are lots of ways to approach the history of Greek life on campus, especially since there is a very long history there -- back practically to the Revolution.
Personally, I would be most interested in learning about the way that the change in the legal drinking age affected the relationship between host colleges and the Greek culture on campus. There is a lot of history there, beginning with the big shift that happened around 1983-1984 in the drinking age. Before 1983 (when NJ raised the legal age to 21), they sold beer at the Rutgers student centers on campus because most students were presumed to be of legal age (the drinking age was 18 from 1970ish-1980, then went to 19 from 1980-1983, when it went to 21 in NJ). I was here in 1983, so I saw these changes and their impact. Nationally, the legal age went to 21 in 1984 when Ronald Reagan pushed for a bill that would take federal transportation money away from states that did not comply (which was the same way the federal government brought the speed limit down to 55 for a long time). After the change in the drinking age, there were a lot of tensions between fraternities and host colleges. There were all sorts of crackdowns on drinking in frats, because colleges did not want to lose their federal money either. What is interesting, though, is that while Reagan brought "college-age Prohibition" to the US, he also ushered in the era of privatization, which eventually made colleges begin to accept the value of the "party pathway" on campus and to find ways of tolerating drinking in the fraternities. I don't know if anyone has written that history, but it would make for a very interesting story. And you could even draw upon the living memory of people (possibly from your fraternity alumni network) who were there and experienced it.
Remember: Animal House was 1978, when everyone of college age through most of the US was allowed to drink. Animal House created certain expectations among students for what fun at college meant, and then six years later that was all taken away. I think it makes for a compelling story.
Tensions caused by the relationship between fraternities and college drinking culture continue today nationally and seem to be pushing some fraternities off-campus, taking the party life with them and causing all sorts of town-and-gown problems. The film "Neighbors" (and maybe the more recent "Total Frat Movie") is the ultimate illustration of that. I am not sure why the party life has moved off campus in the past ten years, but you can definitely find evidence to show that. Consider this article:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mcall.com/news/local/bethlehem/mc-lehigh-university-student-housing-20150709-story.html
This seems the result of recent historical developments, of which I'm not certain. But there is definitely something going on.