Out of control

MIT frats aren't running amok -- media coverage of the school is

by Michelle Chihara

It's not easy being a geek. Or, more specifically, it's not easy being a Greek geek at MIT. Lately, MIT has been portrayed as a school with increasingly rambunctious students, a number of whom belong to animal-house frats that party too hard and then blow things up. But in reality, MIT has just closed down one of its last bad-boy fraternities. Dangerous minds make for good copy, but it may be the press coverage of MIT that's out of control -- not the student behavior.

"I'm totally flabbergasted," says Matt McGann, president of the Undergraduate Association at MIT, of recent news stories about the school. "Everybody is feeding off of each other; it's a kind of one-upmanship."

The most recent incidents include a lawsuit filed by Scott Krueger's pledge captain, whose diploma was revoked after Krueger died of alcohol poisoning in 1997, and the disbanding of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, where a Wellesley freshman was served alcohol and then later brought to the MetroWest Medical Center in Natick, where she was treated and released. (The last fraternity to be disbanded before this was Krueger's fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta.) The closing of Sigma Alpha Epsilon made the lead of Channel 4's 11 o'clock news on Monday, November 15. Yet according to a 1995 medical-center survey, MIT's binge-drinking rate across its student body is half the national average, and 30 percent of its students do not drink at all.

The Wellesley student was underage and should not have been served alcohol. But what's missing from the recent flurry of coverage is perspective. Sigma Alpha Epsilon's case is not the norm at MIT. In fact, the student-government organization that represents the fraternities recently voted to support the dean in her "de-recognition" of the fraternity. "It was almost student led, the actions against the house," says McGann. "We're all very disappointed." Underage and binge drinking are nationwide problems. That doesn't mean they are not worth addressing. But they are far from shocking -- and far from specific to MIT.

Part of the hubbub comes from MIT's reputation as a top school. A particularly harsh November 2 Boston Globe editorial about alcohol consumption in MIT fraternities referred to Krueger's death and asked, "What greater reminder do the nation's top students of science and technology need?" The Globe called MIT fraternities "dense" and "slow" for not having cleaned up their acts completely. The editorial was so extreme that MIT president Charles Vest and dean Rosalynd Williams actually made an impromptu visit to the Globe offices. Says MIT spokesman Robert Sales of this visit, "It was an effort to establish lines of communication in an effort to get out a more balanced picture of MIT."

Fraternities at MIT, in turn, are trying to de-emphasize the role that alcohol plays in Greek life. Already, two of MIT's frats are "dry," or alcohol-free, and two more are voluntarily going dry in the near future. The reality is that MIT is not known among college students as a "party school." Some of the schools working to revise their policies on drinking -- such as Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, which recently received a grant to combat binge drinking -- are responding to binge-drinking rates as high as 68.9 percent. MIT's is around 23 percent of the student body. Compare that with a Harvard School of Public Health estimate that puts the overall percentage of binge drinkers nationwide at a steady 43 to 44 percent from 1993 to 1998 -- despite widespread crackdowns and publicity campaigns.

The question that should be asked here is not what MIT is doing wrong, but what it's doing right.