What USC wants its students to become

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Faced with the university’s arbitrary rule that shut them down “without explanation or cause,” ten of the fourteen fraternities that serve the students at the University of Southern California (USC) have broken their affiliation with the university and formed their own oversight body.

Not surprisingly, the university immediately implied that these fraternities were acting to encourage “sexual assaults,” “drug abuse,” “mental health abuse,” and “underage drinking,” and should be blacklisted by USC students. Officials from the new independent council immediately disputed these slanderous claims:

“I want to say unequivocally that no, we are not disaffiliating to dodge these social event policies that were put into place,” Harrison Murphy, a representative from the new council, told The Los Angeles Times.

“Murphy said members that separated from USC did so because they felt the university’s policies toward Greek organizations were unfair and flawed,” The Los Angeles Times reported. “For instance, he said, USC banned all social events from November 2021 through January 2022 even for fraternities that had done no wrong.”

A look at university’s long and complex policy [pdf] for supervising these fraternities makes if very clear why so many have told the university to go jump in a lake. The number of inspections, meetings, and consultations required, combined with a lot of odious paperwork, appears absurdly unreasonable and costly. The policies also apparently allowed the school to shut a fraternity down merely on hearsay accusations, based on incredibly vague standards. Note the highlighted words below:

Under the Student Conduct Code, interim protective measures, including interim suspension, may be imposed upon a student or student organization after a report of prohibited conduct is received, pending resolution of a conduct case, where there is information that, if true, indicates the student and/or student organization poses a substantial threat: (i) to the safety or well-being of anyone in the university community; (ii) to the property within the university community; or (iii) of disruption or interference with normal university life or functions. [emphasis mine]

Apparently, no due process would be afforded either a student or fraternity, if accused. They would be considered guilty until proven innocent, and could immediately be suspended or shut down, based merely on an accusation by anyone at the university, even someone who might not be part of the fraternity.

Buried in this policy were also demands that the fraternities “align” with “USC’s core values,” which include “concepts of power and privilege.” What exactly does that mean? Of the numerous pages at USC outlining its so-called core values, this statement was given first place:

Embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion, and promote well-being.

In other words, the new policy will smash a boot onto the face of every fraternity that doesn’t kow-tow to the new racial segregation and discrimination policies being imposed by the Marxist “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” movement, which is simply another name for Critical Race Policy.

Rather than face the certain onslaught from the leftists on campus looking for easy targets (see these stories from 2016 and 2018 for examples), these fraternities have gone independent. They have decided to not allow the university to play them like puppets.

If I was a new student interested in joining a fraternity, I think I would make these clubs my first choice.