Update on May 2: Swarthmore College Fraternities Disbanded After Student Organizers Held a Multi-Day Frat House Sit-In Protest
Previously...
Students at Swarthmore College — a private, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with 1,577 undergraduate students enrolled — are on day three of a sit-in protest after the April 18 revelation of documents detailing racist, misogynistic, and homophobic language used by members of Phi Psi, a fraternity at the school. Protesters are calling for Phi Psi and Delta Upsilon, the school’s other fraternity, to have their leases terminated and their space reallocated.
On April 18, two student-run publications, The Phoenix and Voices, released redacted internal documents from Swarthmore's Phi Psi fraternity. The documents are “meeting minutes” and pledge tasks from 2012-2016 that include the offensive language and pornographic images. In addition, the minutes include references to Delta Upsilon having a “rape attic” and a “rape tunnel.”
An anonymous Tumblr page that allegedly details students’ firsthand accounts with fraternity culture has also been circulating stories that detail alleged acts like shoving, physical harassment, verbal harassment, and graphic sexual assaults.
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In response, according to NBC10, student advocacy groups Organizing for Survivors (O4S) and Swarthmore Coalition Against Fraternity Violence staged a sit-in and protest inside and outside the Phi Psi house. O4S has demanded that the school terminate the leases of the fraternities, and use those spaces for women or minority group organizations.
Student protesters carried posters detailing anonymous accounts of alleged sexual violence in the fraternity while demanding an end to violence done by fraternity members, reported Voices. Some of the signs were about specific situations and calling out the school’s public safety department, which includes uniformed officers. One sign read, “Frat boys’ right to party vs. survivor safety: You choose.”
On Saturday, in a letter to students, Swarthmore College president Valerie Smith announced that the fraternities have been suspended until an “external investigation” has been completed. “We respect the rights of students at Swarthmore to express their views and beliefs,” Smith wrote in her letter. “As Dean Terhune mentioned in his message earlier this week, we will continue to hold students accountable to our community standards. At Swarthmore, civility and dissent must coexist.”
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Students, dissatisfied that the school hasn’t yet shut down the fraternities, have continued to protest. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that students are sitting and sleeping inside the frat house and in tents on the front lawn, with banners hanging on the building that say, “This house is ours” and “Nothing has changed. Admin knew all along.”
“It’s saying, [the leaked archives and student testimony] isn’t good enough, and that flies in the face of people’s experiences of pain. The pain was not just from what the documents contain but really about the college’s protection of fraternities and refusal to act in any moral way,” Morgin Goldberg, a Swarthmore senior and O4S organizer, told Voices.
Philadelphia magazine reported that Swarthmore’s Delta Upsilon chapter provided a statement saying the leaked documents — which it read with “total revulsion” — “call into question whether there is any place for fraternities at Swarthmore at all.” They said the leaked documents “do not reflect the values of Delta Upsilon” and, in a follow-up, added they believe the fraternity does “have a place on Swarthmore’s campus.”
“Delta Upsilon is a group of dedicated and driven students who, just like everyone else on this campus, strive to live by the values and principles of our college,” the frat said in its statement. “We continue to work closely with Swarthmore faculty, students, and our international headquarters to create a space free from bigotry, harassment, or violence.”
Prior to the protests, Phi Psi fraternity members released a statement on their Facebook page, condemning the language used in the leaked documents and noting that currently enrolled fraternity brothers weren’t yet in college at the time the now-leaked documents were created.
“None of us would have joined the organization had this been the standard when we arrived at Swarthmore,” the statement read. The statement goes on to highlight some of the organizations positive community efforts, adding, “We remain steadfast in our commitment to our extensive Title IX programming, positive coordination with Public Safety, and our desire to always be a space where students can enjoy themselves outside of the academic climate.”
But protesters say that the space of a few years isn’t enough time for the culture to have changed so dramatically.
"Nothing about these documents reflect that these minutes or hazing practices were done in isolation," wrote Swarthmore student Olivia Smith to NBC10. "The Tumblr speaks to ongoing harm in fraternities, and structures of fraternities themselves represent a continuity that works against any sort of isolated set of events. Hazing rituals continue in cycles, senior members teach freshman brothers the same toxic ideologies. Essentially the practices that were taught in the ‘80s and today through this ingrained structure of exclusive and self-isolating continuity."
On April 21, Swarthmore alumni and former member of Phi Psi, Callen Rain, wrote an op-ed for The Phoenix where he argued the case for why the fraternities “must go.”
“Violence, disparaging language, and other behavior attributed to Phi Psi members have been partially documented by the Swarthmore Fraternities Tumblr. I can confirm these are not isolated instances but come from a culture that pervades this institution,” he wrote. “Failure to hold Phi Psi members accountable for their behavior explains the persistence of a toxic culture, despite repeated claims of improvement.”
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Rain also mentioned a time when he was a student and the fraternity came under fire for the behavior of its members, so the fraternity issued a statement pledging to change its actions. He said he helped write the statement, even though, “It committed Phi Psi to a goal that could not be achieved. At that time, even the leadership of the fraternity had no intention of changing their behavior, but saw an opportunity to 'save face' by associating with those words.”
According to The Inquirer, last year, O4S staged a nine-day sit-in at Swarthmore’s administration building, where they demanded an update to sexual-assault reporting procedures — that ultimately resulted in the resignation of the dean of students. Prior to that, in 2013, The New York Times reported on a complicated case of Swarthmore’s handling of sexual assault complaints. According to a CNN op-ed by a researcher, a 2007 study found that fraternity men nationwide were three times more likely to commit rape than other men on college campuses
“We’ll be peaceful,” Goldberg told The Inquirer, “but we will stay put.”
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