How I Got Blacklisted by a Fraternity

This is the final chapter of a three-part non-fiction story. Click these links for PART I & PART II.

Last week ended on a happy note when I was sworn in as a brother to the fraternity I’d spent two months pledging, but the fun didn’t stop there. We next held elections, and I won Rush Chair, which created an opportunity for me to give back to what had enticed me to consider pledging.

However, this also meant submitting budget proposals to a group of eclectic guys who couldn’t seem to agree on much more than “this meeting is boring” (which included me).

Which brings me to an issue we all faced: fraternities are expensive! We were essentially a small business that funded parties, road trips, athletics, and so on. To afford this, we each paid “dues” of $300 a year. But there was also a “National board” that wanted another $300 for the rights to their letters.

So we’re a McFrat?

To make matters even more Ponzi, I mean, weird, “Nationals” kept saying they’d revoke our letters if we didn’t maintain a size of at least 25 brothers, which made it seem like all they cared about was making money off us, an issue held by a growing faction of brothers at our weekly meetings.

The argument was, “What the hell is Nationals really doing for us, and why would we, a tight band of brothers, want to lower the standards of our screening process just to meet an arbitrary standard?”

It was hard to disagree with this logic, especially after one of my pledge brothers quit because he couldn’t afford our dues on top of tuition, books, food, and housing.

I decided to investigate a little.

“What does nationals give us in return?” I asked our local president, a guy I trusted (and still do).

“They provide us with insurance in case someone gets hurt or tries to sue us, they give us the rights to our letters, and they connect us with our fraternity at other schools.”

“And that’s worth $300 a year, per person? Really?”

The conversation sputtered out, but not in my brain. I would think about this every semester when I had to cut a check to some board that never seemed to do anything for us, and while it was true that we could take road trips and see other schools, it’s not like Nationals ever reimbursed us for them.

I sat in this awkward skeptical resentment for two full years until my junior year, when I was running unopposed for vice-president with a close-friend running for President, and he too thought there was something fishy about a National Board that only cared about “more brothers” and “more money.”

We decided to take a deep dive into the National Board’s “coveted” insurance policy, the one that would supposedly save us from a lawsuit and/or jail, and we were horrified! It said, very clearly, that if anyone at our event was underage with alcohol, or if anyone had broken any law, the policy didn’t work.

I know I just spent two weeks asking you to hold your fraternity stereotypes aside, but if one of your associations was that some frat boys smoke pot and drink underage…Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Nationals was scamming us and I was indignant! We’d lost so many cool brothers over the years because they couldn’t afford our dues. And for what? So some retired alumni could profit off our brotherhood?

Piss-and-vinegared, my friend called a guy from his hometown to ask about how his frat at Penn State worked, and he said they’re national dues were way less, so my friend asked me if I, a writer, could draft a professional letter to ask that other fraternity’s national headquarters if we could switch letters.

Enthused, we co-wrote and sent the letter, but there was something we hadn’t considered in our Woodward and Bernstein fog of joy: Fraternities have exclusivity contracts that our letter had violated.

This is where the story gets dark. Even now, twenty years later, it’s hard to think about it. But I vowed to get this off my chest, so I’ll now share the heart-wrenching experience of being kicked out of a group of people you genuinely admire and trust.

One huge caveat: Even though I was entirely vindicated, ten years later, what I did was inappropriate. We shouldn’t have contacted another fraternity without consulting the entire brotherhood. It’s like applying for another job behind your bosses’ back, or flirting when you’re married.

However, I didn’t think that at the time. In that moment, I thought I was saving my friends from paying some Ponzi criminal $300 a year for next to nothing in return! But that feeling only lasted until the next morning, when I got an email from the president of our fraternity, not the one we’d contacted.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

Heart racing, I opened it and saw our query letter in quote blocks below a message from our National President, with a terse sentence asking both of us if we’d really written and sent that.

Swarming butterflies gnawed at my insides as my mind produced a hundred “worst case scenarios” that were outlandishly cruel and preposterous. These anxious voices got so bad that I remember considering dropping out of school and mailing a Dear John letter to my friends to explain my departure.

Bewildered, I called my older brother (my real one), and he told me I was an idiot and would likely eat a big bowl of sh*t over this, but he also reassured me that I was a good person who’d only made a mistake.

Living on borrowed courage, I wrote the President back, “Yes,” and he replied with an “invitation” to a “violations conference call” with the board the next night, the first night of Pitt’s Thanksgiving break.

Most of our brothers had already left for home, so I decided the best course of action was to email the whole fraternity and come clean, but my friend was outraged and said we should first talk to the board.

I felt enormous guilt and staunchly disagreed, but I also didn’t want to get into a fight with my friend, so I agreed to wait. But I couldn’t sleep that night and the emotional turmoil I felt from hiding this from my friends was far worse than any feeling I’d ever felt at that point, and it still reigns heavy today.

Lucky me, that feeling didn’t last long, but only because the “violations meeting” made things worse.

The call got off to a bad start and never improved. The National President was not only an insufferably arrogant man, but he was angry and vindictive. I think his goal was to do whatever it took to make a twenty-year-old boy cry on the phone (a task he failed at, but only because I’m impossibly stubborn).

To make matters worse, my friend never called in, which meant I had to take the full brunt of this man-child’s apoplectic rage, which included statements like, “I forwarded your letter to every alumni so they could read your betrayal first hand. You might want to watch your back. Some of them are in the mob.”

The Sopranos was in its prime and the President lived in New Jersey, so his vague threat terrified me! Was some alumni going to track me down and kill me over this? I was just a kid! I still can’t believe that an adult was willing to attack my character the way he did. It deeply affected me, in a very bad way.

Anyway, there was even more drama after that, but I don’t want to get too nuanced, so I’ll keep it brief:

1. I resigned from the fraternity on that phone call, before the vague death threat, then came clean to my fraternity in an email I sent without consulting my friend who’d ditched the call.

2. My local brothers accepted my resignation, but then surprised the hell out of me by also voting to blacklist me from hanging out at any events! This was cruel, and I was devastated. They didn’t have to exclude me from giant parties that were open to the public. It was mean spirited.

3. On the bright side, a small but loyal contingency of brothers lobbied for weeks to let me still attend parties, and they eventually won, but there was palpable resentment from many brothers at my first party back, so I spent my final year of college hanging with a new group of friends I made.

4. My brothers who had graduated before this event, as well as many of those who stayed in the frat after I resigned, remained my close friends, and I’m still in regular contact with more than 20 of these wonderful men, 21 years later. I’m even in a fraternity group chat with 14 of them.

I think my story is a good example of how group think works. My suggestion, if this ever happens to you, is to play nice and accept the results. If someone doesn’t want to be your friend, don’t fight it.

We all encounter drama and conflict in our lives, but unless we’re immature and incapable of accountability, these moments help us become better humans. Ergo, this experience was worth it, and that’s why I decided to finally write about it. We all make mistakes, but true friends always forgive us.

Oh, and did I mention that the National President, the one who scranted at me about “morals,” “honor,” and “accountability,” the guy who threatened me and told me I was a “horrible person” for questioning his business ethics, did I mention that ten years later he was sued by 14 chapters of my fraternity for fraudulently paying himself a six-figure salary while refusing to hold elections that could replace him?

It’s OK. I didn’t have to forward that news to any alumni. The New York Times published it for me.

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This week on Coffin Talk: Roxanne Chaput is a globally recognized Luminary, Inspirer, Celestial Guide, Celestial and Generational Earth Shaman, and an Oracle of The Divine Golden Order. Her purpose is to lead beautiful souls to effectively illuminate their luxuriance. Listen on all apps, or click here.