Today, Explained - Should we ban fraternities?

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

Cornell University’s president is wary of an outright ban, but the school’s sexual assault case has campuses around the country considering the question. This episode was produced by Kelli Wessinger with help from Ariana Aspuru and Danielle Hewitt, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. The Chi Phi fraternity house at the center of a rape allegation stands on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast⁠.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We will re-engage students, alumni, and other members of our community to examine how we preserve what is valuable about Greek life. That was Cornell University's president Michael Kotlakov trying to quell some of the anger on his campus in a video address on October 3rd. A few days later, he addressed Cornell's faculty and what he said has since leaked out to the world. And it's clear that he doesn't want an outright ban on frats. He thinks a ban could make matters worse, driving violent behavior off campus, and into the shadows. But clearly, his response wasn't enough for Cornell's community because today,

the university announced a ban on frat parties for the rest of the academic year. Cornell also says it's gonna add experience sexual assault investigators to their police force. The question is, why didn't this happen two years ago when the sexual assault at a campus fraternity was first reported? Or maybe the question remains,

why don't we just ban frats? We're gonna ask on today explain from Vox. I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Nathan Lane. We talk about his critically acclaimed run in Death of a Salesman, taking his dog to therapy, and winning an Emmy for only murders in the building. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

Megan Rapino here. This week on Why Are You Like This? I am talking with shrinkings and ugly betties, Michael Yuri. We dig into his Plano, Texas upbringing and how Vanessa Williams had a huge impact on his career. I'm also weighing in on the Indiana fever GM Amber Cox's comments on their fan base. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This, wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. This is Today Explained. Let us be clear. Nicole Bedera thinks we should be. ban frats. She's a sociologist who studies sexual violence, and we asked her how she got there. She started with the fact that college campuses just aren't safe. Specifically for women, for queer students, for transgender and non-binary students. We see high rates of sexual violence among really anybody who isn't a cisgender men on a college campus. And one of the things that's really striking about the research on campus sexual violence is that the rates of victimization haven't really changed since we started measuring them in the 1980s, which is really significant.

Because if you think back to what had happened around the 80s, is right before that, a number of universities had gender integrated for the first time. And so if you think about the environment that women were coming into on campuses at that time, it wasn't like schools were gender integrated and then they had a 50-50 split of men and women on campus. And they were experiencing an extremely hostile environment from men who did not think they belonged on campus and wanted to punish them for coming to campus. And so we have seen similar rates of sexual violence now that we saw then. It's a problem that part of why the Cornell story is blowing up so much is because basically every living generation of college educated people today look back and say, wait, this hasn't gotten

any better since I left. I mean, hearing about this story out of Cornell is horrifying and also the clearest evidence that we have not fixed this issue, but I actually think a lot of people in our audience will be surprised to hear that it hasn't gotten any better despite various waves of feminism and social media and Me Too and all the rest. I mean, how has it not gotten any better? Does that mean it's actually getting worse?

Well, you know, the rates have remained stable, although some of the rates that we're seeing from New York data and from Cornell in particular, is that the rate of sexual violence on that campus seems to be increasing. And if that is, in fact, happening, that has never happened before. To answer the question of why things haven't changed, what most sociologists would tell you is that the problem is something we call symbolic compliance. And so symbolic compliance is when there is a civil rights law

that our institutions are not fulfilling their legal obligation. So they're violating our rights. And when they get caught, violating our rights, instead of making the necessary cultural and structural changes to bring about equality, instead they give us these symbols that make us think they changed things when they didn't change things all that much. And so in the context of campus sexual violence, there are a couple of examples that I like to point to from different eras of feminism. So the version that universities in the 80s brought on of bystander intervention. was rape whistles, was saying, okay, let's give all of our students these whistles orientation. If they're getting raped, they can blow the whistle, and people will come out of the woodworks to save them. A loud piercing noise can scare off an attacker and attract attention they just don't want.

It obviously didn't work, right? We can look back at that now, and there's been so much thinking about what a silly intervention that would be, that it so fundamentally misunderstand is, understands the source of violence, that it is not a situation where a whistle is going to save you. That sort of presumes that it was a stranger in the bushes and that you happen to be alone and that everybody would take action, not that there were a bunch of witnesses in a fraternity who were cheering on what was happening in the moment, right? And so in the contemporary era, the version of symbolic compliance we have seen is stuff like the proliferation of Title IX policies and procedures that universities have created

these really big bureaucracies where victims report into. And the outcome of those reports really haven't changed. So expulsions are still very uncommon. We've just made it harder and more exhausting and retramatizing for victims to get help. So before that big change, victims used to go to their schools and say, I was sexually assaulted by someone on campus. I'm worried that they pose a threat to me or other students. Can you do something about it?

And schools would say, no. We don't have a process for that. you should have made better choices. We think it's your fault, actually, and they would be dismissed in the same day. And how long ago was that again? The stories that I'm thinking have come from the documentary The Hunting Ground, which came out in the early 2010s.

Problem of sexual assault on campus is enormous. I think it's fair to say that they cover these crimes up. There's a lot of victim blaming. Okay, wow. Which you would think that was ancient history, but we're talking about a little over a decade ago? We're talking about a little over a decade ago. And so then to help us understand what

is Title IX and when exactly it's established? Yeah, so Title IX is a law. It's one of the educational amendments to the civil rights law. And it was passed in 1972. So long as any part of our society adheres to a sexist notion that men should do certain things and women should do certain things and then begin to inculcate our babies with these notions. through curriculum, development, and so forth, then we'll never be rid of the basic causes of sex discrimination. But it's only a single sentence.

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. So if you're getting money from the government, you cannot discriminate on the basis of sex. what happened in the aftermath of that loss since it is just a single sentence is all of these schools got to decide how or if they wanted to implement Title IX, especially because there's no really clear enforcement mechanism for Title IX like you would expect from the federal government. The only enforcement we got from the federal government, which we really didn't even see happening until the 2010s. That's why we had this conversation in the 2010s is a lot of survivors used this enforcement mechanism, really for some of the first times. But if something happened to them and their rights were violated, they could file a complaint with the Department of Education and the Department of Education could look into it.

They could sanction the school if they wanted, but there has not been a single case in American history where a school lost their funding because of mismanagement of sexual violence. So it was all reactive. And it was a huge burden on victims who had to do things like hire a lawyer who could help them file this complaint that they didn't stand to make any money off of, which I say not just because it didn't. benefit them, but because that meant they couldn't offset the cost of filing the complaint. That's something they had to take on themselves. And so you can see how this led to schools for a very long period of time, being able to do pretty much whatever they wanted. So it sounds like how Title IX was enforced was essentially left up to schools, but also I

imagine to a particular administration that maybe took it more seriously than the previous or the next. Yeah. How is the current head of our federal government feel about Title IX? Well, Title IX was one of the biggest fights during Trump's first administration. And although a lot of people probably remember Trump's first administration as clunky, as failing, at a lot of what they set out to do, they did pass their Title IX regulation right at the very end of his first administration in 2020. Some of the most highly debated and awaited new rules around sexual assault and harassment on campus were made public by the Trump administration today. No student's learning journey should include surviving sexual misconduct. No student should be made to feel alone or abandoned by their school.

No incident should ever be swept under the rug. And no student or teacher accused should be punished before evidence proves responsibility. So I think if you were a student on a campus during this period, it would be really hard for you to notice what had changed for a few reasons. One of them is that Trump's 2020 regulation went into effect in 2020, which if you remember what a college campus looked like during that era of the pandemic, a lot of them were closed. And so there were no students on campus to protest or to even be involved in the process of implementing these new Title IX policies and procedures. And so there was a gap where a lot of students who'd been involved in those efforts before the pandemic graduated or left in some other fashion. And the new students come in who this is the only thing they've ever known. They don't know that this is abnormal at all, which is a problem we consistently run into with Title IX and campus sexual violence in general is that you do get a new cohort of students every four years.

Schools can start the movement over every four years and pretend that they don't know they have a sexual assault problem or they've never heard critiques of their problem. process before. Whereas people who've been on campus the whole time like faculty know that students have been raising the same concerns for as long as they've been employed there. But why? Why? Isn't it in the interest of college campuses to keep all of their students as safe as humanly possible? They aren't just students. They're your customers. Yes. I'm laughing a little but because this is something I feel really strongly about. Protecting perpetrators of sexual violence does not make sense for universities. I think a lot of schools would tell you, and I think a lot of critics of schools would say that they focus on protecting the institution.

And that that comes before taking a side of the victim or the perpetrator. They're thinking about protecting the institution. But a lot of the things that I found in my research, I thought were vulnerabilities for these institutions. that if the general public can't trust you because your school is a hotbed of sexual violence, that is not something that's good for the institution. Allowing this type of sexual violence to fester on a university is not good for its bottom line.

But even, I want to use the most basic example of tuition. You know, I spend a lot of time posting things about sexual violence online. I see the types of comments of where the general public thinks schools might be making their decisions from and something I hear a lot is they don't want to lose the perpetrator tuition dollars by suspending or expelling them. So the best explanation I've been able to come up with, which I think is a bad explanation, not because I think the explanation is wrong, but because I don't think it's a good reason.

That's what I really mean. Is that universities are patriarchal institutions, and they just see protecting men as one of the essential missions of the institution, even more important to them than things like providing high-quality education. If you believe that universities want to protect their own institutions more than some of their students, what if we just ban fraternities altogether? Does that protect maybe everyone? We're going to ask Nicole when we return on Today Explained.

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It's free to sign up and posting a job is simple. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent. Ready to help your business grow, spelled UPWRK.com, Upwork.com. This is today explained. So, Nicole, we just talked about how unsafe college can be and how Title IX isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing to protect students, especially women.

How much of a role does so-called Greek life play in the prevalence of sexual assault right now in college campuses? Greek life certainly plays a large role. We know that men who are in fraternities sexually assault their peers at a rate that's three times higher than the average. man on a college campus. We also know that women sororities have some of the highest rates of sexual victimization. And so the Greek system really has set up the system where you have these environments that are encouraging perpetration, sometimes literally as a hazing ritual to enter the fraternity,

sometimes, you know, it's just extremely formalized, that this is not something that there happens to be a great concentration of rapists in this space, but rather sexual violence is something that they are encouraged to do as members in this space. And then you have the sorority system of women who feel a huge amount of pressure not to come forward, who are sort of channeled in ways that are much more overt than I think the average person would expect. And if you weren't in the Greek system, I think a lot of people don't realize just how hierarchical it is. It's not that all fraternities are the same, but there is a hierarchy of the highest status fraternities and lowest status fraternities. And it's the same thing with sororities. For you.

fraternities, they get their hierarchy on their own. Sororities get their hierarchy based off of which fraternities like to spend time with them. And how fraternities rank the sororities. And so it really has created this system where you have this pool of victims who are facing all these social incentives and systemic incentives to not say very much. And then you have these perpetrators who have a huge amount of impunity. We have known this to be an issue since I think I've existed. which is now like some 41 years. And surely there have been,

I know there have been efforts to reform Greek culture, to make it safer for women in particular. Can you tell us about such efforts? Or do you not take them seriously? Well, okay. So we talked about symbolic compliance in the first half of the show.

A lot of the efforts to reform fraternities have also been. symbolic compliance. And so from fraternities, we've seen things like they have voluntarily enrolled in sexual assault prevention trainings. I used to teach some of those trainings at the University of Maryland. It did not look as good on the inside as it was presented on the outside to say the least. So things like the program that I was a part of, the fraternities had to have at least seven, it was called 10-man plan, but they had to have at least seven men present to get credit for a 10-man plan, so they didn't have to make the number of 10. And then the idea was that they

would enroll in this 10-week course to learn about sexual violence, gender inequality, sort of the things that are upstream of a gang rape to make sure that if any of these kinds of behaviors are happening in the fraternity, they can intervene, they can stop each other well before you get to something like happened to Jane Doe. But what I found is that a lot of the time, when I was teaching the sessions, we didn't see the same men multiple weeks in a row. They were not getting the benefits of a 10-week training. And at some of the last weeks, they were sending men that were not even a part of the fraternity to sit into the training to count as their number seven. No.

They had ringers or something? Yes. Right? And so we had these types of interventions that just weren't working particularly well. But the other thing I want to note is that fraternities are national. And so even if you have made some kind of really good faith attempt to change your fraternity on your own campus, the national chapter. the national chapter still has a huge amount of sway over the structure and culture of fraternities. And so it becomes a game of whack-a-mole,

where maybe one university will try to do something to really change things, but the national charter is still continuing the way they have the whole time. And so in that case, really the only kind of intervention that would work is banning the fraternity so that that national charter doesn't have a gateway onto your campus anymore. And this is the central question of our show today. And we waited this long to talk about it. But let's get into it. Why don't we just ban fraternities? I think there's a hesitancy because a lot of decision makers within universities were fraternity members themselves. That was something that I noticed in my research is that a lot of the people who were tasked with things like making decision in Title IX cases, they would, I would go into their offices to interview them and I would see their certificate of membership and a fraternity on the wall.

Amazing. And so there is a conflict of interest. here. And the sense of if I ban fraternities, what am I saying about my own college experience? What am I saying about myself, my identity? The people in charge are themselves fratros. Yes. In a lot of cases, yes. So I think that's one component. I think a lot of schools would tell you that fraternities are a reliable source of fundraising for universities. Although I also want to name that so are sororities. I've seen these arguments out there that if you ban frats, you push Greek life off campus where it's even more unregulated and even more of a free for all. And you're not going to get rid of alcohol on campus no matter what you do.

This is a part of our college culture. What do you make of those arguments? Well, the first thing I would say is that there is basically nowhere in the United States that is, as unregulated right now as a fraternity, and it's because it's kind of on campus. So this is something that a lot of people don't know, but most large or well-resourced, especially public universities in the United States, have their own police departments. And so that's something that's come up in the Cornell case, right, is these jurisdiction issues over who should Jane Doe have reported to for violence that happened in a fraternity.

And one of the things we know from the research is that fraternities, they end up in this, area where they're not really policed at all because the university will say they're not technically a part of campus. They're technically independent. So technically we want to say that's not our jurisdiction. And then the local police department will say fraternities, that's kind of the university. So we don't think that's our jurisdiction either. And so researchers have documented that there is for white fraternities in particular, because this is a really, really racially segregated system, Greek life is really racially segregated. white fraternities will have no policing, where if you call the police about something that happens on a fraternity campus, nobody will step in there.

And for black fraternities, they're double-policed. And so for anybody who's saying if fraternities move off campus, then there's no control, it's totally unregulated, no, then they would be under the letter of the law that the rest of the city is, which would be a huge step in the right direction in comparison to this ambiguous gray area, where, you have police on campus and off campus who know that there is a legal activity happening in fraternity houses every weekend and no one is doing any about it, anything about it because they're always pointing at each other. If they were totally off campus, you might have a local police department that would decide to do something. It's clear that this problem has not been getting any better, but something does feel different to me, at least, right now, at least when you see the outcry to what happened at Cornell. does it feel different to you? And does that make you hopeful that something could change? It does feel different. It does make me feel hopeful. You know, one of the things I said earlier is that the reason it feels like campus sexual violence hasn't changed is because every four years, there's a new group of students who are just as naive and who schools can lie to in the exact same way and they haven't ever had to come up with a new strategy. I do think that that's changing right now. They are not as cynical. as the other generations of activists have become. And so that gives me a lot of hope. I also am encouraged, you know, there are a lot of things that have changed between then and now,

even though 10 years isn't that long. And so in previous iterations of this movement, there was this real pressure to give somebody like a university president the benefit of the doubt. And in this case, it's not working because we all know that he doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. And we know that these institutions, they can't be trusted in the way that we, used to trust them in the past. This isn't something that's specific to campus sexual violence. We're seeing this across the country right now on a wide range of issues, this distrust of institutions that have failed the people within them. And so I do think this could be a time that something

really changes. And I think it's a time to ask for the biggest changes. We've tried negotiating and cooperating with institutions that have made very clear that they don't want to do that, that they don't want to take that approach. And so I think calling for something more radical and for some bigger shifts to change the power dynamics on campus is much more popular than it's been in the past, and I think it would be much more effective, too. Nicole, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Nicole Benera is the author of On the Wrong Side, How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence. Our program today was produced by Kelly Wessinger and Danielle

Hewitt, we were edited by Amina al-Sadi and fact-checked by Gabriel Dunitav. Bridger Dunnigan and David Tatashore mixed. I'm Sean Ramosveram, and this is today explained.