East Carolina Chi Phi Chapter Suspended

ECU Fraternity Suspended for Alcohol Citations

By Patrick W. Connelly
Co-Editor, The Frat Boy News

East Carolina University's chapter of Chi Phi fraternity was suspended after at least 60 students were given alcohol citations last week at a party.

"East Carolina takes seriously underage drinking, whether or not the students are involved with Greek life," Corey King, an ECU administrator told a local TV station.. "Our students must understand that underage drinking has consequences."

The fraternity won't be allowed to take part in rush until after a investigation by the university concludes. Chi Phi was also suspended at the campus last February after its national organization questioned its practices with new members.

The chapter has about 33 members, a report said.

Man Threatens Brothers at Arizona Chi Phi House

Unknown Man Threaten Chi Phi Brothers

An unknown man came into the University of Arizona's Chi Phi house on St. Patrick's Day and threatened brothers with a baseball bat and a gun.

The brothers said the man stopped in his vehicle near their house and had a blown out tire. He entered the frat house and told brothers he was going to kill them with a baseball bat. The brothers laughed at first and told him to leave.

The man then told brothers he has a gun in his car and he thought it would be funny if he shot the place up. The brothers locked themselves in a room until the police came.

Newspaper Praises CU Frats for "Maturity, Common Sense and Dedication"

Credit where credit's due

An editorial by the Colorado Daily

If someone had told us five years ago we would some day write an editorial praising fraternities in Boulder for their maturity, common sense and dedication to their community, we would have laughed out loud. After all, the reputation of some of the fraternities - and by association the entire Greek system - has been marred by everything from loud parties to alcohol-related deaths. For a while there it seemed like the fraternity houses on the Hill had been replaced by Al Qaida training camps.

Times have changed. And the most impressive part of the whole transformation of CU's fraternities from soccer hooligans to respectable young men is they did it on their own, without the help or persuasion of the CU administration. Good for the fraternities, we say, for recognizing their own shortcomings and addressing them before it was too late.

Then, to top it all off, the CU Interfraternity Council's (IFC) executive board announced last month plans for a “Social Moratorium,” a two-week hiatus in partying to aid Boulder's 15 fraternity chapters in an ongoing assessment of their risk management policies.

During the moratorium, which ends today, chapters were prohibited from holding any social events in their houses that involve the use of alcohol, giving them an opportunity to improve their safety and risk management procedures with a particular emphasis on holding safe, controlled social events.

Typically, a university or national fraternity imposes such restrictions on partying only after something terrible happens. But reactionary tactics yield almost no benefits for fraternities or the public. What they do create is more hostility between the university and the frats who have grown tired of being blamed for every little thing that happens to drunken partiers in Boulder.

That attitude reached a fever pitch after CU freshman pledge Lynn “Gordie” Bailey was found dead in the Chi Psi fraternity house on the Hill in September 2004 after a night of initiation that included the consumption of mass quantities of alcohol.

Shortly thereafter, the University demanded that CU fraternities and sororities abandon fall rush. The sororities bowed to the university, but the fraternities refused. In retaliation, the university dissociated itself from all fraternities.

The move to stand up to the university was a smart one. No one, save the family, mourned the death of Bailey more than his fraternity brothers. Punishing the fraternity involved and its members was appropriate, but meddling in the affairs of other fraternities was not.

The unfounded bias against fraternities became even more evident a few months after Bailey's death when another student, 21-year-old Bryan Merritt, was found dead in his dorm room. Even before the facts of the case were clear, fingers were pointed at a fraternity that hosted a party the night before Merritt was found. He had attended the party, but by all accounts was not drunk. Despite the efforts of the fraternity - which checked IDs and had police on hand to administer breathalyzer tests - they were blamed for the death. They were later cleared of any wrongdoing.

The moratorium enacted in February represents a new approach for the Greek community. CU Greek Advocated Marc Stine said, since October, the IFC noticed a trend towards noisier parties. Fraternity-police liaisons, he said, expressed concern about the problem, and the IFC took action. They held a risk management meeting which included fraternity presidents, social chairs, house managers, risk managers, and new member education chairs, who heard presentations from the Boulder Police and Fire Departments, national fraternity legal counsel, specialists in fraternity operations, and IFC officers.

This proactive approach to problem-solving received praise from some university officials as well as police and fire representatives. Boulder's Fire Safety Educator Sherry Kenyon went so far as to call the decision “mature.”

Again, not a word we thought we'd ever be using to describe a Boulder fraternity.

The efforts of the IFC to control fraternities and to take the safety and reputation of its members into its own hands has been nothing short of astonishing. It's the kind of thing that used to be expected of Greek organizations. We think the university should take its lumps, admit the fraternities have done a great job of self-policing, and allow them back on campus.

Fire at Ohio State Chi Phi House

Fraternity Fire Causes Minimal Damage

Columbus firefighters responded to a Sunday afternoon fire at Ohio State's Chi Phi house.

Reports said none of the brothers were home at the time of the fire. They said it caused minimal structural and cosmetic damage.

"When we got home, we heard the fire alarm first and then we saw the smoke," a brother said. "I ran and grabbed an extinguisher to put out what I could."

Cornell's Own 'Van Wilder'

The Frat Boy News Daily College Column
By Will Wiseheart of the Cornell Daily Sun

The year is 1993. Bill Clinton is in his first year in office. The Cowboys are the number one team in football. And Jurassic Park is the biggest thing in theaters.

Rob Shuck, a lanky teenager with a full head of hair, is a freshman at Cornell, excited about joining a fraternity and hoping he won’t spend the next 40 years crunching numbers for an engineering firm. Little does he know that he’s about to embark on a career as a frat boy.

“You don’t sit down and decide, oh, you’re going to stay in college for 13 years. It’s a process that happens over time, where you just become comfortable, and you find things you think are useful, and you stay,” Shuck said.

Flash forward. Shuck, hairline slightly receding, is now 32, still taking classes at Cornell and living in the basement of Chi Phi Fraternity. He’s the closest thing Cornell has to a celebrity, having been the subject of a GQ article and a guest on The View. Most recently, he was the subject of a day-in-the-life short documentary, 32 Yr. Old Frat Boy, made for Current TV.
The piece follows Shuck around Homecoming 2006. It begins at Chi Phi, a Tudor-style mansion decorated with wood carvings and old books that somehow managed to survive years of open parties.

From a leather sofa, Shuck talks about a portrait on the wall, looking as if he should be smoking a pipe and stroking a Pekingese. Later, he looks on as frat boys play beer pong on long wooden tables and wrestle under chandeliers, like monkeys who just took over Xanadu. Surrounded by such luxury, you begin to understand how Shuck never managed to graduate.
On a tour of the house, Shuck recounts his 30th birthday — he ordered a truckload of packing peanuts and filled the fraternity’s living room five feet high to mark the occasion.

Why packing peanuts? So that he and his fellow frat boys could do back flips off a second-story balcony without serious injury. Still leading the tour, he comes across a bag of garbage in the middle of the hallway.

“I’ll tell you exactly what happened here,” said Shuck, toeing the bag. “They needed trash cans to put beer in downstairs. And the fact they left a bag full of crap on floor didn’t cross their minds —did not cross their minds.”

Much of the rest of the film shows Shuck schmoozing at Homecoming, and you start to get a sense of the celebrity status he is beginning to acquire, especially within the Greek community.

At one point, a group of sorority girls watch him from across the room, whispering amongst themselves. Another girl does a double take when she recognizes his face.

“Hey, there are cute college girls, no question about it,” Shuck admitted; however, he insists that for him most of these girls are off-limits. “It takes a while for women at Cornell to realize that I’m just trying to be friends. I’m really not trying to hook up with them,” he said with a sincerity that’s so emphatic you suspect that he might just have a few secrets to confess.

The piece, which may soon be available online, was produced by Georgi Goldman ’00 and aired in January on Current TV, a cable channel that specializes in short-format programming for an 18 to 34-year-old audience.
Goldman, who shot the film in two days along with fellow alum Wayne Price ’98, makes the piece interesting with up-tempo music, jump cuts and long tracking shots that speed up unexpectedly, all in a style popularized by MTV. As for her portrayal of Shuck, she does a fine job of laying out his reasons for living the way he does.

“Everyone’s first reaction is usually, ‘Oh my god! How can he be living in his frat house at 32? That’s crazy!’ But if you sit down and watch the piece, Rob has logical explanations for his decisions and you see that it’s not an Animal House sort of lifestyle — it actually seems pretty laid back and academic,” Goldman said.

What is most notable about Rob Shuck is the seriousness with which he takes on the life of a slacker. His room his is littered with issues of the Economist and books on flying, an interest that motivated him to get a commercial pilot’s license.

Indeed, he seems genuinely interested in the world outside his fraternity, although he shows no intention of joining it.
Perhaps he is symptomatic of a time when young people just didn’t care about the future. But while his Generation X brethren gave up apathy for something that smells a little less like teen spirit, he stayed strong.

Will Wiseheart is a staff writer for The Cornell Daily Sun at Cornell University.

Virginia Chi Phi Ritual Includes the Shooting Flaming Stuffed Animals into Trash Piles

Fires Reported at Student Residences

The University of Virginia's Chi Phi chapter has some unusual Bid Day practices - one of which includes the launching of flaming stuffed animals into a pile of trash. This past weekends Bid Day, however, caused a little more excitement than the frat is normally used to, as the Charlottesville Fire Department responded to the incident.

"It's purely visual, to excite the new pledges," said Harrison Wheaton, Chi Phi president. "It is nothing to the scale of a brush fire."

When the fire department arrived, the brothers had already properly extinguished the flames. Brothers believe that some of their neighbors may have alerted 911 because it probably looked like their hedges were on fire.

Chi Phi's Back at Rhode Island

Chi Phi Moving Back on Campus After 2 Years

Chi Phi, the University of Rhode Island's oldest fraternity, will be moving back on campus after a 2 year hiatus.

The chapter's new house will be completed in September of 2007. In 2005, the fraternity was kicked off campus for violating the school's substance abuse policy. Officials say the frat's recolonization will be complete a year later.

Their old house will be the new home for the college's International Engineering program students.

Substance abuse, shumptance abuse - On behalf of the Frat Boy News, welcome back guys.

5 Frats Must Move: UG Wants Prime Real Estate

Lumpkin Street Negotiations Left in Adams' Hands

The University of Georgia is focused on coming to a settlement with 5 fraternities it wants to relocate to make room for campus expansion.

The fraternities - Chi Phi, Kappa Alpha, Phi Delta Theta, Pi Kappa Alpha, and Tau Epsilon Phi - are each planning to build new houses elsewhere around the university. Georgia president Michael Adams was granted permission to agree to a settlement with each frat. The proposed new houses offered by the university will be worth $2 or $3 million.