Why guys join fraternities

Mott the Hoople said:
Well that's the point Wacko. It is the snobbish exclusivity that many people find offensive about Fraternities. Not to mention the boorish behavior many of them have well earned reputations for.

But then I was a serious student when I was in college and didn't have time for Fraternity games or to play social hour. I wanted to get into grad school and had to focus on taking the right classes and getting the right grades. I didn't have time to play kiddy games.
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You could be talking about many Universities with that comment. When schools proudly say they only accept 10% of applicants that's pretty damn exclusive.

But as to fraternities when you get involved it's about running a business. You can run for office you have to be able to handle the budget. It's about learning to be a leader. These are skills that you take with you for the rest of your life. And being in a fraternity and going to grad school is not mutually exclusive. Hell, three of my best friends from the house got their MBA's from USC, Duke and Stanford.

I understand people who aren't involved in fraternities may think being in one involves only 'childish antics' but that's not the reality. Like I said I haven't put anyone down who didn't join one. It's a personal decision. But I think the negativity towards them comes from not understanding what they are all about.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
there was no Greek where I did my undergrad....in fact there was one apartment with ten guys living in it that called itself the "frat house" and they were invited by the administration to squelch the name or find another school.....
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Your school did not believe in free speech?
 
Watermark the Red said:
I honestly couldn't tell you the name of a Greek letter, for instance, I don't know what Epsilon is. I only know the Phoenemic value, what you actually use when pronouncing the letter.
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Really? Damn, and here I am thinking you knew more about awesome languages than me (you still do).
 
I was a Marine for 4 years, which is basically being in a frat, except a lot more gun fire.

Oh, and FAR more drinking.
 
The reason that people have a bad view of frats is because only the extreme bad behavior gets reported. Rolling Stone isn't going to do an expose about how a frat helped its members establish friends & business connections for life.
 
Jarod said:
Your school did not believe in free speech?
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You have a right to speak without government reprimand (within reason - there are, of course, some exceptions to this right, it's not generally interpreted entirely in a literal manner), and you have a right to protection from others taking illegal action towards you in response to your speech. You do not, however, necessarily have a right to protection from others responding to your speech using legal actions that just happen to negatively effect you. For instance, you couldn't sue for a free speech violation if your boss fired you for saying "My boss is a dumbass!". And you can't go up to your boss and say "I'm going to violate rule X", and say your firing was a violation of free speech; in this case, the organization had a rule, and your speech merely to them off to your violation of that rule. Similarly, the university had a rule against fraternities, and the name of this house merely tipped the university off to the fact that the group who owned it was attempting to violate that rule. If fraternity members were some special class that's historically been discriminated against, and were in need of extraordinary protections (for instance, someone getting fired because they admitted they were Jewish), you might have a point. But they're not. Also, perhaps if there were some law protecting fraternities from being banned by universities - you wouldn't necessarily have a cosntitutional case, but you'd at least have something. But there's not.
 
Dick Puncher EXPRESS said:
Really? Damn, and here I am thinking you knew more about awesome languages than me (you still do).
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Well, the "name" of a Greek letter honestly isn't of much practical use. Maybe if I needed to talk about it with someone, but because of my solitary language learning style, I didn't. As it was, the only thing I really needed to know was how to look at Greek letters and pronounce the word, so that's all I learned. The names of letters don't make sense in a lot of cases anyway, it's generally just an arbitrary set of phonemes that just happens to include the phoneme in question, usually at the front. Why not just learn the phoneme? This is even less useful when learning Ancient Greek, because the phonemes have shifted and all the English pronunciations generally represent the modern phonemic values (not a problem if you, like most college classrooms, don't give a shit and use the modern ones anyway, but I was trying to learn the reconstructed pronunciations). And the great vowel shift in English has made some of them totally off, for instance, our name for ι is "iota" but the actual phoneme it represents is something like our "ee" sound in both modern and ancient Greek, so the name of the letter doesn't actually include its phoneme at all.
 
Watermark the Red said:
Well, the "name" of a Greek letter honestly isn't of much practical use. Maybe if I needed to talk about it with someone, but because of my solitary language learning style, I didn't. As it was, the only thing I really needed to know was how to look at Greek letters and pronounce the word, so that's all I learned. The names of letters don't make sense in a lot of cases anyway, it's generally just an arbitrary set of phonemes that just happens to include the phoneme in question, usually at the front. Why not just learn the phoneme? This is even less useful when learning Ancient Greek, because the phonemes have shifted and all the English pronunciations generally represent the modern phonemic values (not a problem if you, like most college classrooms, don't give a shit and use the modern ones anyway, but I was trying to learn the reconstructed pronunciations). And the great vowel shift in English has made some of them totally off, for instance, our name for ι is "iota" but the actual phoneme it represents is something like our "ee" sound in both modern and ancient Greek, so the name of the letter doesn't actually include its phoneme at all.
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Tl;Dr, yeah I know, you know more about languages. You still need to teach me. And Dung needs to send me that beer he promised.
 
Also, take upsilon. That's three damn syllables, none of which contains the actual phoneme of the Greek letter it's suppose to be the name of at all (in modern Greek, it's redundant with iota and represents an "ee" sound, in ancient Greek, it was similar to "ee" but spoken with a rounded mouth). Who the hell came up with this shit?
 
The Dude said:
I was too poor to be in a frat!
And would have decked cawackos brother during initiation
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At least in my house we had guys join who couldn't afford it. There were ways people contributed that couldn't pay dues. Money wasn't an issue.

As far as decking people in he house that probably wouldn't work out real well for membership.
 
cawacko said:
At least in my house we had guys join who couldn't afford it. There were ways people contributed that couldn't pay dues. Money wasn't an issue.

As far as decking people in he house that probably wouldn't work out real well for membership.
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Back in the late 70's it was almost exclusively rich kids, all my buddies were wrestlers
 
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