In some ways, frats are similar to sports teams. Its a group of guys who has something in common and hang out sometimes. Both frats and sports teams involve hazing sometimes, both involve drugs and women, and if you play club sports you have to pay to be on the team. Frats have a place, they have some appealing aspects. If they were all bad they would've faded out by now. I feel like the people who are vocally anti frat have some unfair grudge against them. Are there bad aspects to them? Yes, but there are bad sides to everything. In many schools going greek ins't really an option. If you don't pledge somewhere in those schools you get left out. At Colorado the majority didn't go greek. However if I was a predominately greek school I would've pledged somewhere.
Frats where I am are fairly tame and mostly composed of a bunch of guys that are full of themselves. Lots of pastel and boat shoes and "my daddy works for..." going on. The black fraternities are another story altogether. My freshman year some chick had her leg broken during sorority hazing. A friend of mine dropped off the face of the earth for a semester and we only found out later he was pledging a black frat. He got pretty drunk later on and admitted that he was a part of a lot of things that could get him and other people sent to jail if he spoke about it...we didn't ask for details because there are some things i'd just rather not know.
Yes, there are "secret" handshakes. Nothing terribly fancy like Otter and Bluto or anything, since it is meant to be a subtle, non-verbal way to identify other members of the fraternity.
I am a GT Alum and at least back in the day Phi Kappa Tau was one of the nerdier fraternities at a very nerdy school. So the fact that it came out of there is kind of shocking and hysterical. I always figured it would have been us (Kappa Sigma) that had something like this sneak off the email list.
Fiji at my school were the oafish, kinda weird looking, didn't eactly fit in with anyone types. And thats coming from me.
Fiji at my school were total fuckups. It was a decent frat with some history, but it was just a chapter with total bros who inevitably got into trouble for dumb shit. One year it was a poorly made bonfire collapsing and hurting people at Fiji Island, another was them pelting pedestrians with fucking beer cans from their balcony. Which brings me to the other point about their terribleness... They had a massive, old frat mansion RIGHT uptown. I mean, the main drag in town came to an intersection where campus ended and on the otherside, the bars and restaurants began, and the house was right there, catty corner from campus. It overlooked one of the best outdoor drinking spots and was less than a block from the best bar. And the house was FANTASTIC. Huge wrap around balcony, inside was actually a quite cool layout and rooms were lofts. The problem was it was treated like shit. The floor was basically made of beer cans and assorted filth, maintenance wasn't kept up with, and general disdain was paid to treating the house well. My freshman year had some amazing memories of sitting on the balcony and making out with drunk girls, the same drunk girls that got me into the parties cause they knew people. By my sophomore year, they had restrictions on going on the balcony cause of aforementioned target practice. By my junior year, they weren't allowed on due to structural problems caused by neglect and other assorted bullshit. This past spring...the house fucking burned down. It was a combination of suspected arson and deplorable upkeep which only aided the fire spreading. My old roommate was a Fiji and typified them completely. Total bro, thought his stories about drunkenly pissing on his gf's jacket in corner and her thinking she got stuck in the rain or when his friend banged a girl in a common room and they stepped in puke were HILARIOUS, and also unable to drink in moderation and an emotionally unstable mess when blacked out (aka every weekend). Oh the other great thing about Fiji? There was a boarded up doorway in the basement...which had lead to a tunnel that went under the street to the Beta house across the street. Why? Cause back in the 80s, they used to cook and distribute fucking meth. Beta is probably the most "prestigious" chapter on campus now, an Alpha chapter. But apparently they weren't always that way. Funny is that I found out from a guy I knew at the CC I bartended at in college. He was president of the Fiji chapter when they were kicked off during that time. I asked him if he participated or knew about the meth dealing. His response "plausible deniability my friend...and we had AMAZING parties". Dude is currently a Managing Director with Raymond James in Chicago, so maybe college crime does pay
Every couple of months, a few of my fraternity brothers would turn their apartment into a head shop. There was a guy from Vermont or something who would drive down in this van with like $15k worth of glass and other shit. And he would give my friends a cut of the profits from the sale for using their apartment. Every room in this college apartment was just covered in one-hitters, bongs, bubblers, vaporizers and hookahs. It was magical. Over the years, we acquired quite the collection of pieces.