The Real-World Consequences of Wesleyan’s Anti-Frat Campaign

, by Scott Karsten,

It’s a strange world where a University goes to war against some of its most loyal, dedicated and generous alumni, but there have been many bizarre elements about Wesleyan’s anti-fraternity campaign. As Jeff Gray outlined in a recent Wespeaks, Wesleyan has achieved the hat trick in closing all three fraternities this year even though no current fraternity member has been charged with or even accused of any offense.

The administration may have felt that its arbitrary and high-handed treatment of the University’s fraternities and the many loyal alumni who love them would be consequence-free but it now seems that the chickens are coming home to roost.

The results from the most recent Wesleyan Annual Fund campaign have been, frankly, dismal. By the University’s own admission, year-over-year class participation has fallen to the low-40%-to-high-30% range. Even in a time of growing strength in the national economy, the number of givers has fallen by almost 500. Over time the decline in contributions will affect the University’s ability to provide scholarships, improve diversity, and support new programs that rely on Wesleyan’s robust financial health.

How many of these donors withheld their contributions out of disgust with the way Wesleyan has treated the fraternities is hard to tell, but clearly hundreds of alumni are unhappy with the University about something.

This decline will have consequences even beyond the University’s immediate bottom line. Alumni participation is one of the variables used in the school’s US News & World Report ranking, which cannot fall further without compromising the University’s ability to attract top-notch students. (Some of the other NESCAC schools report participation rates of more than 60% for their annual giving.)

The decline in giving will also have a negative impact on the University’s endowment, the management of which has proven to be extremely unimpressive in recent years, especially compared to the Wesleyan’s peer schools.

The administration may have thought it was clever in decreeing that fraternities could remain on campus and then setting conditions that none could meet, but the alumni have seen through that and voted with their pocketbooks.

Scott Karsten is a member of the Class of 1974.

33 Comments

    • jemmy

      No, it’s as simple as it looks: Ideological fanatics getting off on demonizing men and–whoops–forgetting that men are donors and so are women that don’t have seething hatred for their sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, boyfriends, etc.

      Land values around a university aren’t going to change because a fraternity leaves.

  2. Walker M.

    It’s disappointing that Mr. Karsten chooses to ignore recent fraternity-related scandals, hinging his pro-frat boy position on “no current fraternity member has been charged with or even accused of any offense.” He is also asking the reader to make a quantum leap and join him in the unfounded assumption that previous donors are no longer contributing to Wesleyan out of “disgust” over the disciplinary action of the University. Proof please, Mr. Karsten.

    • Concerned Alum

      What fraternity related scandals at DKE? I don’t believe it’s a quantum leap when there is such a significant drop in giving and the only major difference year over year is the attack on fraternities who have historically been a loyal and generous donor population. That coupled with his double standard of not punishing Eclectic for repeated drug issues, but singling out fraternities after they met the administrations ever changing demands.

  3. Fraga123

    The Univeristy doesn’t need dirty Patriarchy-polluted money.m how about an LGBT bake sale to raise money for Wesleyan? Or a feminist poetry slam?

    There are better ways to finance Wesleyan than through rape culture-enabling donations.

  4. Janet Wilkinson

    I genuinely hope a lot of universities close and have serious financial difficulties as a result of sexist bullshit like this university has pulled. If I was considering which college / uni my kids were going to go I would be scanning for exactly this type of behaviour being carried out to filter them out of the runnings immediately.

    • Djibril Sall

      Good riddance. The last thing Wesleyan needs are regular ass kids raised by basic pumpkin spice latte parents.

  6. Nick B

    There are quite a few errors with this post.

    First, there’s a high degree of obscurantism in the line “even though no
    current fraternity member has been charged with or even accused of
    any offense.” Well, oftentimes people found guilty of rape or sexual
    harassment are expelled from the school — hence they are no longer
    “current fraternity member[s]”. Furthermore, even if Scott wants to
    lessen this to the point of being “charged or accused,” we might want
    to ask: how does he know this? SJB cases aren’t made public. Just because there
    isn’t a newspaper article about a specific rape case doesn’t mean that these
    issues aren’t being dealt with privately. Finally, even if there haven’t been
    any publicly discussed cases “this year,” as Scott says, fraternities
    have long been a problem at Wesleyan — one data point (a single year) of no
    fraternity members being accused of rape or sexual harassment doesn’t disprove
    the larger trend. What Scott has highlighted is the exception to the norm, not
    the norm itself.

    Second, if Scott thinks that we should be expecting greater donations because
    of an improving economy, he should check and see whether or not the economy is
    actually improving. It isn’t, at least not to any significant degree:

    http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300000

    https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1QxP

    Third, Wesleyan has had lower rates of alumni giving for a long time. That 40%
    figure for Wesleyan versus 60% for other schools doesn’t reflect a
    year-over-year change in any way whatsoever.

    Fourth, having 500 fewer alumni donate doesn’t actually sound terribly
    significant to me. If 650 students graduate every year from Wesleyan and live
    for 60 years on average after graduation, we get 39,000 living alumni (not
    counting the few grad students). A drop of 500 donations would amount to a drop
    in alumni participation of 1.3% — not exactly the drastic, scary drop of 20%
    or more Scott portrays when he compares Wesleyan’s high-30/low-40% rate to the
    60% rate of other NESCAC schools. I’d also wonder if such a small drop is just
    a standard year-to-year fluctuation.

    Fifth, I find it weird that fraternity supporters bring up the donations
    fall-off that they expect will occur thanks to lower donations from fraternity
    alumni, yet never consider any greater donations coming from those of us who
    support women’s rights. I actually donated to Wesleyan this past year
    specifically because I thought President Roth had taken bold action to reduce
    the incidence of campus rape and protect women’s rights. I wouldn’t have
    otherwise. If you’re going to see how the “anti-fraternity campaign”
    has affected donations, you can’t just take account of the decrease in
    donations from former frat bros — you also need to consider the increased
    donations coming from people like me.

    Finally, I just wonder why Scott (and other supporters of fraternities)
    consider this to be such a great point in their favor. There is a much larger,
    more important point here, which is how fraternities affect the incidence of
    rape on college campuses. (Hint — joining a fraternity increases your chances
    of committing sexual assault: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/09/opinion/foubert-fraternities-rape/
    ). Even if Scott could show a relationship between alumni giving and the
    “anti-fraternity campaign” — which, in my mind, he hasn’t actually
    done — I’d like to see an explanation for why this is supposed to be more
    important than preventing rape. From what I can tell, you can’t put a price on
    rape, but if Wesleyan’s fraternity alumni want to do that, they can feel free
    to tell us how much each rape is worth. It seems to me that even if the
    “anti-fraternity” / “pro-women” (my phrase) campaign has
    led to decreased donations, it’s a tradeoff that’s more than worth it.

    • Pissed off alum

      Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that Wesleyan became a facist dictator ship, where to belong, you had to follow Generalissimo Roth’s demands and beliefs. I thought this was America, where you had a right to belong to whatever groups you choose and that there had to be evidence of a crime, which there is no evidence of beyond party violations at DKE. Finally, why do people so anti-patriarchy continually let white males fight their battles for them. Last I checked, in America, which the bullshit Wesleyan bubble is a part of, every person had the right to associate with any legal group they wanted.

    • Ex-Cardinal

      Hope you are donations are large, because all of my fraternity brothers in my class have stopped donating, and I suspect this is the case for 95% of the other classes / fraternities.

      And yes, “‘anti-fraternity’ / ‘pro-women'” is definitely your phrase, because our fraternity is decidedly “pro-women”. This fraternity witch hunt is detracting from any productive methods of addressing the primary driver of sexual assault on campus, drug and alcohol abuse.

      • Nick B

        Just to clarify one point here: ” ‘anti-fraternity’ / ‘pro-women’ ” isn’t my phrase. “Anti-fraternity” is the author’s phrase; “pro-women” is mine.

        As for your point about your fraternity being pro-women — you have to be kidding. Fraternities are sexist BY NATURE. Take a parallel case — think of this in terms of not sex, but race. Imagine if President Roth got up in front of campus and announced a plan to establish an “all-white house” on campus — that is, a house in which only white people could live. Would you deny that a house which refused to admit black people was racist? If not, why would you deny that a house which refuses to admit women is sexist? Moreover, think not only about the nature of this house, but also about how the experience of living in such a house would affect the beliefs of people living in it. For example, think about how much different this house’s conversations on topics such as President Obama’s legacy, police brutality, racial inequalities in public schools, and affirmative action will be from conversations held with the input of racial minorities. The “all-white house” would not merely stand as a symbol of racism — it would BREED racism. For those of us who haven’t been indoctrinated into frat culture, it’s equally obvious that fraternities breed sexism (check out the CNN article above as well).

        Also, your point about drug and alcohol abuse being the true cause of sexual assault is quite weird. What, exactly, do you think is the role of fraternities in terms of the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse on campus? This is a little like hearing a murderer deflect blame for his killings and pin the blame not on himself, but on lack of emotional control or restraint. Of course, lack of emotional control or restraint may have been his problem, but he’s still culpable for his crimes.

        Finally, on your point about how your fraternity brothers have stopped donating to the university — you have to keep this in perspective of Wesleyan’s much larger budget. It’s not as if frat bros were donating at a rate of 100% before this year, and are now donating at a rate of 0%. So that’s the first point — it’s not as if we’ve lost 100% of the frat bros’ donations, since we didn’t have that before. Second, you have to consider what percentage of alumni are frat bros — if, say, 20% of the MALE graduates were frat bros, we’re only looking at 10% of all alumni. So even if alumni donation rates fell from 40% (the campus average) to some really low number like 10%, we’re looking at a net decrease in alumni donations of 0.1 x (0.4 – 0.1) = 0.03, or 3%. Even if you fiddle with my assumptions a bit, it’s clear that we’re not exactly facing an alumni donation shortfall due to President Roth’s “anti-frat campaign.” Finally, on top of all that, you need to realize that alumni donations are just one source of university funding — throw in the revenue from student tuition, research grants, non-alumni donations, and the returns on investments from the endowment, and we’re looking at a very small figure indeed. I don’t know how you can look at such a small funding decrease on the one hand and the sexual abuse from fraternities on the other and conclude that the most worrying problem at Wesleyan is that frat bro alumni won’t donate to the university. There are much bigger problems out there.

      • Concerned Alum

        I love the parallels to the “all white house” like that’s even remotely similar. How about an all male or all female athletic team. That is the comparison. We have separate athletic teams because there are physical differences between men and women. At a time of their lives where it is heightened, confusing and sexually charged, some men and women want to live separately as they deal with that as well as processing all that Wesleyan is. Wesleyan allows it in the dorms, why can’t they allow it for fraternities and sororities.

    • jemmy

      “It seems to me that even if the
      “anti-fraternity” / “pro-women” (my phrase) campaign has
      led to decreased donations, it’s a tradeoff that’s more than worth it.”

      Would have been nice if you led off with that as it indicates you yourself have doubts about those paragraphs you wrote insisting that donations dropping are unrelated to removing fraternities.

      Pray tell, has there been a decrease in reported sexual assaults since fraternities were made to bear the brunt of the feminist rape hysteria? If there is indeed a noticeable reduction in reported incidents, then you might have a point. But prepare to be disappointed.

      The more witches you burn, the more you find hiding.

      • Nick B

        Well, I’m not definitively certain that the slight drop in alumni funding is unrelated to the fraternities — it’s possible that it is. My point, though, is that Scott greatly exaggerated the figures in the article; he made it seem as if the 20+ percentage-point gap between Wesleyan and other NESCAC schools was due to the “anti-frat campaign.” That’s clearly false. At best you have a small drop in revenue due to the “anti-frat campaign” — I concede that this small drop in revenue is possible, but to claim that this is a significant worry when considering the greater overall budget is clearly disingenuous.

        Second, the fraternities haven’t integrated women and/or been disbanded yet. Your question about “has there been a decrease in reported sexual assaults since fraternities were made to bear the brunt of the feminist rape hysteria” is really off-point here; these policy changes haven’t even gone into effect yet. How could they have led to a drop in sexual assaults before they were even implemented?

    • Concerned Alum

      Nick B.
      First: Any sexual assault is one too many. However; the publicly available Clery statistics on sexual assault show that he vast majority of sexual assaults in the last 6 years occur in Wesleyan university owned property not residential fraternities. DKE for one has taken significant action to improve sexual assault prevention by going to the foremost authority, Dr. John Foubert, One in Four for training and ongoing program implementation which is far and above what the university is doing.
      Second: Seriously

      Third and Fourth: There has been a significant decline year over year and 500 is a significant number for a university the size of Wesleyan with a historically underperforming endowment and financial situation as compared to the other universities Wesleyan likes to compare itself to.
      Fifth: Maybe that’s true, but the numbers don’t support that or why would there be a 500 net loss of donors and still chronically underperforming financial situation.
      Finally: Again, read the Clery statistics which are the actual numbers for each university. And you’re right, if that’s the trade-off so be it. Just not the Wesleyan I went to. It seems now it is forced conformity to the dogma of feelings trumping fact.

      • Nick B

        Point-by-point:

        First: On the Clery data, look at how they define “On-campus Student Housing Facility.” Their definition is: “Any student housing facility that is owned or controlled by the institution, or is located on property that is owned or controlled by the institution, and is within the reasonably contiguous geographic area that makes up the campus is considered an on-campus student housing facility.” So even if the house itself isn’t campus property, it is considered an “On-campus Student Housing Facility” so long as it is “located on prober that is owned or controlled by the institution” — and aren’t all the fraternities, except Beta, ON CAMPUS PROPERTY? Yes, the actual edifices may not be owned by the university, but they’re on property. And the definition of “On-campus Student Housing Facility” is so broad that it covers not only the building on the campus property, but even facilities “within the reasonably contiguous geographic area” of the campus — I’d be shocked if this didn’t include the fraternities. Even Beta, it seems to me, would most likely fall under the “contiguous geographic area” part of the definition, since it’s surrounded by Wesleyan property on all sides.

        It’s also worth discussing a little bit exactly how to interpret statistics. It doesn’t matter where the “majority” of sexual assaults occur — all that matters are the PROPORTIONS. For example, if you lived in a country that was 5% Nazi and they committed 45% of all the murders of Jewish people, presumably you wouldn’t look at that and say, “well, gee, the majority of Jew killings are committed by non-Nazi…there must not be a link between Nazism and anti-semitism!” Well, no: if you take a group that is only 5% of the population, then it should only commit 5% of the crimes if there is no link between its character and its actions. The 50% threshold is irrelevant. You could even have, say, the 5% of the population that was Nazi committing, say, 10% of the murders of Jews — in that case, you could talk about the “vast majority” (your phrase) of Jew killings being committed by non-Nazis. But there would still be clear link between Nazism and antisemitism, as the Nazis would be twice as likely (compared to their percent of the population) to kill Jews. Fraternity members are a small percentage of the student population, but anybody who has followed the sexual assault issue at Wesleyan can tell you than they far outweigh their number in terms of assaults committed.

        The trick to good data analysis is to isolate a given variable and see how changes in that variable affect another variable. In this case, we’re looking at whether or not living in an all-male house makes one more or less likely to commit assault women. And fraternity members are disproportionately likely to commit sexual assault.

        Now, you could argue that perhaps the higher rate of rape committed by fraternity members owes itself purely to the nature of men who choose to join fraternities — that is, the type of men who disrespect women are the men who are most likely to join fraternities. If that were the case, fraternities themselves would actually be off the hook — it wouldn’t be that joining a fraternity made future assaults more likely, it would just be that the people who were going to commit assaults regardless of whether or not they joined a fraternity were the same people who happened to join a fraternity. This would be a classic case of “selection bias.”

        But that’s where the findings presented in the CNN article come into play. Here’s the key paragraph from the article: “What we found was highly instructive. Before they got to college, fraternity men were no different from other male students. They committed the same number of incidents of sexual assaults before college. But here’s the difference. Guys who joined a fraternity then committed three times as many sexual assaults as those who didn’t join. It is reasonable to conclude that fraternities turn men into guys more likely to rape. Our study confirmed that fraternities provide the culture of male peer support for violence against women that permits bad attitudes to become treacherous behavior.” Because of how the study was set up, we can actually isolate the effect the jocular, all-male nature of fraternities has on rates of sexual assault — after all, if it were just the case that men who joined fraternities were by their nature more likely to commit rape or other forms of sexual assault, then they would’ve also committed rape at disproportionate rates BEFORE they joined a fraternity. Instead what has happened is that we have taken two groups that were equally likely to commit sexual assault before they got into college; once they got into college and had to choose whether or not to join fraternities, those who did join fraternities committed rape at three times the rate as those who didn’t. Clearly fraternities make rape more likely.

        So, to sum up the different statistical analyses presented by each of us. In your favor, you have data on the location of sexual assaults which doesn’t clearly demarcate fraternities from the rest of the campus, and doesn’t provide any data on whether or not incidences of sexual assault are disproportionately committed by frat bros. What I have in my favor is a careful statistical analysis which tracks men over time and has determined that, even though they were no more likely to commit rape BEFORE joining a fraternity, frat bros were three times as likely as other men to commit sexual assault. If one of us has been ignoring statistics and going with “conformity to the dogma of feelings trumping fact,” it isn’t me.

        Also, I’m not opposed to anti-assault training, but it seems to me to be a separate question from whether or not fraternities should admit women. I think all parts of Wesleyan’s campus — not just DKE, but everyone on campus, including members of the other fraternities — should have to undergo this type of training. But other things equal, does the presence of all-male houses make assaults more or less likely? More likely, as the CNN article clearly shows. I’m glad that DKE is willing to undergo training (after all, they need it), but assault would be reduced to an even greater degree if they underwent this training AND began admitting women.

        Second: Yes, “seriously.” I work at an economic policy think tank. Scott’s claim that we have a booming economy that should’ve led to greater donations from alumni — and that therefore a slight decrease in donations reflects not just its own drop-off, but also any foregone increases that we should’ve expected to see in the face of a booming economy — is absurd.

        Third and fourth: It’s clearly not THAT significant. You can read some of my earlier responses which you may not have seen. Also, I’m not sure where Scott got his numbers from, but it looks like overall alumni donations are UP rather than DOWN: http://thisiswhy.wesleyan.edu/news/item/fy14update And even if they are down over the past few months, they’re only down from the RECORD-HIGH YEAR. In comparison with the best year of fundraising ever, then yes, it may be the case that donations are down, but that’s a faulty starting point. (And my guess is that Wesleyan’s FY2014 ran from July 1, 2014, to June 30, 2015, so this past year probably WAS that record-high year; but if not, a decrease from “record-high” is to be expected.)

        Fifth: To be clear, I doubt that women’s rights supporters are donating significantly more because of Roth’s actions. The increased funding coming from them is probably quite slight — BUT SO IS THE DECREASE FROM FRATERNITY BRO ALUMNI. That’s the whole point — Scott apparently decided that an unproved insignificant increase in donations from women’s rights supporters didn’t deserve mention in his post — yet he decided to focus his entire piece on unproved insignificant decreases in donations from frat bros. Just as you aren’t jumping up and down on your couch with glee about the thought of women’s rights supporters dramatically improving university funding, I’m not exactly breaking a sweat about the possibility of fewer donations from frat bros.

        Finally, on the trade-off. Just ask yourself, how much would you be willing to pay to stop someone from sodomizing you? It’s a brutal question, but people who are prioritizing alumni donations over rape have clearly answered that question in their own heads — but it’s a slightly different question, because, in truth, they know they won’t be the victims. How you like it, as a parent, if you knew that Wesleyan could take actions to decrease the chance that your daughter would be raped at college, and the response was “sorry — we could take such actions, but that would mean accepting fewer donations from fraternity brothers. We have to keep our priorities straight.” Well, I know how I’d respond. How would you?

  7. Informed Alum

    As an alum who worked in alumni giving while taking classes an an undergrad, I do find it worth mentioning that roughly 65% of alumni donations came from either fraternity members or male athletes. Therefore, I do not think it is so egregious for the author to write that alumni giving is down in large part due to upset alumni who were also fraternity members.

    • Cliff's Tux-table

      This is the cold, hard truth that a lot of alums would rather not acknowledge. Starving artists living in a crowded studio apartment in San Francisco and surviving off of their dwindling family trust aren’t the ones giving the huge sums of money back to their alma mater. They just have the loudest voices.

  8. Anonymous

    The Feminastys are always slitting their own throats when they think they’re disempowering men.
    You might want to GOOGLE[ student loan defaults by race ] or [ student loan defaults by gender ]
    Want to know a secret? 50% of all black college students don’t graduate High School and of those only a maximum of 50% graduate College.
    Want to know another secret? Men are being denied College admission by the sexist anti-male Affirmative Dysfunction policies and only 30% of all males of all races are being admitted to all colleges.

    Want another secret? The race and gender of the people who repay their College Loans by over 75% is WHITE MALES. The most financially rewarding demographic for all learning institutions.
    The worst demographics for College Loan repayments? Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics in that order.
    The worst gender for College Loan repayments? FEMALES.

    Now you know why it is AFFIRMATIVE DYSFUNCTION.

  9. Anonymous

    By the way the Student Loan Defaults (non-repayments) by gender?
    64% of women admitted to College NEVER REPAY THEIR LOANS.
    ONLY 36% OF MEN fail to repay the College Loans.
    Golly, are you going to dance with the mooching unemployable Feminasty Whiners who never pay the bills? Or are you going to dance with the White Males who are the highest percentile of graduates and who repay the College Loans by a reliable 64%?
    Pick your partners wisely Wesleyan, your survival DEPENDS ON IT.

  10. survivor

    i just want to put out that maybe $ going to our school isn’t the most important real world consequence of shutting down frats … like maybe it’s fewer people being raped? or like rapists and rape apologists not getting to have their own special house to rape people in ? like seriously scott- you’re putting the importance of money over people’s safety.

  11. DKE Bro

    I have never given a cent to Wesleyan for exactly the reasons you describe. They don’t even call me anymore !

      • Spin

        If I’m wrong: exactly how much do you pledge to contribute to Wesleyan if DKE is allowed to retain all-male status?

      • DKE Bro

        Five million dollars over next 10 years for

        1) Departure of Michael Roth before the end of the calendar year 2015

        2) Total cessation of hostility towards Fraternities by

        a. The administration

        b. The student body

        Best regards.

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