A new year for me, a new year for the universities, and right now college campuses are packed with new students, shuffling about from class to dorm to class with expensive new books and the unmistakebale mix of eagerness and trepidation. Slightly more experienced students wander about casually, offering all the wisdom of a world-weary 20-year-old to greener kids, while graduate students cycle around with far weightier things on their minds. Others still can be found performing any number of bizarre and ridiculously dangerous acts, all in the name of joining one of those mystical groups with greek-letter names that, while non-existant in Britain, have been a huge part of university life here since before the USA was the USA (or even the ΥΣA).

Despite their boards and signs and sweaters and houses everywhere I look, fraternities and sororities are still a bit of a mystery to me. I’m sure that is their intention; after all they were founded as secret societies, much in the tradition of the masons and other shadowy fellowships. Some of the oldest fraternities date back over two hundred years, such as Phi Beta Kappa (ΦΒΚ), founded in 1776 as a society for “fostering and recognizing excellence”. Many fraternities grew out of the idea of being a forum for academic discussion, but it wasn’t long before the social element became a prime reason for joining. After all, isn’t that what old boy’s clubs are all about, the networking? Frats such as Sigma Phi (1827) were among the first to expand their net between colleges, and Zeta Psi (ΖΨ, 1847) was the first to be present on either coast. Sororities (girls only, in case you don’t know) followed later, as did groups for minority groups such as Latinos and African-Americans. Among the first fraternity established for the latter was Alpha Phi Alpha [ΑΦΑ], whose past members included Martin Luther King Jr and Jesse Owens.

As you’d expect, many of the great and not-so-good from American history were in frats, and I’ll bet that students look closely at the roll of honour before signing up. Some follow family ties; King George was in the same frat (Delta Kappa Epsilon) as Daddy Bush, for example. Not that the Bushes ever indulged in rampant old-boy cronyism, eh folks. To join a fraternity or sorority is to join a historical association. So what does it take to actually join?

There has been a lot of talk in the news lately (I guess it’s a common news item at this time of year) of the ritualistic behaviour known as ‘hazing’, in which ‘pledges’ are weeded out through a series of tasks during ‘rush’. Ok, yes, I got lost back there on the way in. There is a whole new vocabulary that comes with this frat business, that may sound like something to do with furniture polish but probably involves a lot more cleaning up. Rush week is going on now across campus – I’ve seen the fliers – and that means it is time for new members to join up. A new member being a ‘pledge’. And you show just how badly you want to be part of a club that would have someone like you as a member (keep groucho out of this, pete) by performing all sorts of crazy stuff, usually involving drinking. People have died in hazing, resulting in calls for it to be banned, with organizations such as StopHazing.org campaigning against it through education. Most of the extreme cases of hazing involve pledges consuming large amounts of alcohol (which is fairly common among British students who aren’t trying to join a club), or even water (which is a little less common in Britain’s student union pubs, but is apparently quite dangerous), but can even, in the case of certain sororites, involve going to a different social event every night for two weeks and having to wear a different outfit every single time. If you wear the same outfit twice, you’re out, sister. Not quite life-threatening, but bloody expensive.

So why do people join these crazy and secretive groups? Coming to university is a daunting and often lonely experience, so being part of a ready-made family of new friends can be pretty helpful. What’s more, a lot of frat members live in their frat houses, and Davis has plenty of those, their big old-fashioned buildings lining the edge of campus. Most importantly, you can put it on your CV, so when employers in years to come see you were in gamma beta ipsilon or whatever, and they too were in gammer bitter whoopsydaisy or something, then you might get the job. I don’t know, I’m glad we don’t have frats in the UK. No, what we have are things like the rugby club, whose members (if my memory serves correct from my own uni days) will converge upon the pub, drink massive amounts of pound-a-pint lager that would make even the hardiest frat boy shiver, stand on the table, vomit into a bucket, drink more cheap beer, vomit into the bucket again, and if particularly daring, drink from the bucket. While naked. I suppose everywhere has their little cultural quirks.