YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO KNOW YOUR PLEDGE BOOKS BY NOW.

Alexandra Robbins has made a career out of exploring the lives of the young and ambitious, whether it's the overscheduled kids of the upscale suburbs or the social climbing of the southern sororities, and she continues her work in Fraternity: An Inside Look at a Year of College Boys Becoming Men.  The "becoming" leaves the "boys" at different stages and fraternity life has an uneven effect on the maturation of the members.

In Book Review N^o. 13, two months after the twelfth, so much for making the half-century this year, I'll focus on reinforcing that assertion.  Tellingly, the author buys into the "toxic masculinity" school of ethnography, titling the eighth chapter "What Makes a (College) Man: How Students View Masculinity, with the concluding ninth chapter "Good Fraternities vs. Bad Frats: How to Tell the Difference."  Dear reader, does anything scream "playing to the academic ethos" like chapter titles with subtitles, and there's probably a semiotics essay somewhere on the connotations of "fraternities" as opposed to "frats."  A sample from page 292 in chapter eight will make my point.

Some scholars say that because there is a "hierarchy of masculinities in which some will have more privilege than others," school administrators should better recognize college men who excel outside Greek life and sports.

Another way universities could help college guys would be to increase their consistent exposure to less stereotypical interpretations of masculinity.  A handful of once- or twice-yearly presentations about alcohol abuse, sexual assault, and hazing is a Band-Aid reaction that condemns what brothers might do without addressing why they might be compelled to do it in the first place.  To get to the root of fraternity issues, universities and national offices would be better served by concurrently trying to reframe how students perceive gender roles.

I don't know, does that mean putting Hefty Bags over the urinals? Seriously, though, those "Some scholars say" alludes to two essays in Journal of College Student Development: the endnotes are as blundering around in the Colossal Cave to find the first reference.  Such blundering around is instructive as many of the sources, such as Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and Jezebel, are not exactly known for their objectivity.  Do we really gain by creating more men without chests?

What, though, of the plan of the book?  As the title suggests, it's chronological: joining, house and hierarchy, pledging, drinking, girls, male bonding.  Not all fraternities are Animal House.  There are some, page 82, that "created an environment that encouraged better behavior," meaning reinforcing bourgeois norms; and she located more support for those conventions, page 290, in black and Latino fraternities (yes, Greek Row is a segregated space, and a lot of that is by mutual consent) with "upwardly mobile men [who] draw on ideas of maturity and social responsibility to depict college partying as foolish and self-indulgent."

"By mutual consent" does not mean solely by mutual consent, page 176. "Fraternities want guys who are a lot like themselves."  That's true of the Connecticut women's basketball team or the mathematics faculty, although they screen on different dimensions.  Greek Row might be best understood as high school with better keg parties, although the author suggests too tight a self-selection can go wrong, page 183. "If you're careful to keep the group diverse, and careful to prevent people from influencing one another too much, the individual mistakes people make will be irrelevant.  And their collective judgement will be wise."  I don't know.  Emergence is messy.  On the other hand, that might be a reason not to be too heavy-handed in that getting "to the root of fraternity issues."  Of which, no doubt, there are many.  For instance, the hazing, whether it involves vodka and pledge paddles, or sleepless nights and mindless memorization of minutiae, seems cruel for its own sake: there's no building of unit cohesion the way the military or a good sports team does it.  Perhaps the author has a point converting the pledge period into some sort of community service.  I suspect, though, that breaking the hierarchy of the houses is a forlorn hope, particularly in an academic environment structured by U. S. News guides, national championships for the sports teams, Fields Medals, Nobel Prizes, and National Institutes grants for the academic departments.  That the author's fieldwork uncovered fraternities that were into the booze, ball games, and balling as well as fraternities that "encouraged better behavior" and might have been serious about identifying Rising Stars for Professional Networking, and if they play at being Freemasons and Shriners along the way (conductor and guard? worthy master and worthy high master?) is that really fostering toxic masculinity?

Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.