In 2016, two Ithaca College students were stabbed leaving a party sponsored by Cornell fraternity Omega Psi Phi. “Obviously, we realize with both our campuses in the same town and our students interacting socially on a variety of different levels … sometimes safety concerns cross ,” Prunty said. Prunty said this is one reason why the Office of Public Safety and Emergency Management (OPS) issued a notice following the recent shut-down of Cornell fraternity parties that included information and resources. “But it’s not a recognized organization, and it’s not affiliated with a college in any way.”ĭespite not having recognized fraternities at Ithaca College, students frequent Cornell fraternity parties. “Periodically, we will receive information that leads us to believe that there’s an off-campus organization that students have formed,” Prunty said. īonnie Prunty, vice president of Student Affairs and Campus Life, said that in 2015, a committee convened to reexamine the Greek life policy on campus. The final decision came years after a student died as a result of a fraternity initiation in 1980. In 1993, the college made the decision to no longer recognize social fraternities or sororities, which remains the policy today. He said the college revoked recognition of the last remaining social fraternity in 1989.
#Phi psi rape professional#
Under current Title IX rules, colleges are not responsible for sexual assault incidents that take place outside sanctioned programs or activities.Īt Ithaca College, the only Greek life recognized by the college is academic-related fraternities like the professional music fraternities.Īccording to Dave Maley, director of public relations, over the course of the 1980s, the college’s social fraternities were regularly sanctioned for violating college policies primarily related to hazing and alcohol. Underground fraternities legally do not have the oversight that other college-sanctioned groups have. Vitchers said USC’s policy changes were a positive move, but that the university is walking a fine line because it runs the risk of accidentally creating these underground fraternities. “And so they can still be enrolled students, right, unless the university suspends or expels all of them, which we know they don’t d o … and then they go underground … and you end up in a situation where the school really has no mechanism for holding them accountable.” “ don’t actually need access to the university to operate,” Vitchers said. These hightened regulations were in response to reports of sexual assaults and druggings. This occurred at the University of Southern California (USC) in August 2022 when fraternities severed their affiliation with the university after new policies were put in place, including having security guards at parties, mandated ID scanners and a ban on large containers of alcohol like kegs. Vitchers said that if fraternity members believe their university goes too far in trying to hold them accountable, the effort can backfire and fraternities can disaffiliate themselves with the college. So, it just becomes a really confusing space for university administrators to navigate.” “ either support s the chapter or they just don’t do anything at all and put this weird responsibility back on the school to hold the members accountable. “What ends up happening is that when an incident happens, the university often doesn’t have support from the national organization,” Vitchers said. Most fraternities report to national Greek life organizations, some fraternity chapters owning their house’s property. Tracey Vitchers is the executive director of Its On Us - a national no npr ofit that combats campus sexual violence by focusing on prevention education programs and grassroots student organizing - and said that holding Greek life accountable can be challenging for colleges because fraternities operate as semi-independent organizations. While very few studies exist on the relationship between fraternities and perpetrators of sexual violence, one study from 2005 found that fraternity men were three times more likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence than their male peers not in fraternities. The most recent that received media attention was in 2016, when the president of the Cornell fraternity Psi Upsilon was charged with first-degree attempted rape, first-degree criminal sex act with a helpless victim and sexual misconduct. This is not the first assault by a fraternity member at Cornell. The sexual assault allegedly happened on the 100 block of Thurston Avenue, which only houses one recognized fraternity: Alpha Epsilon Pi. CUPD reports state that the recent druggings happened on the 800 block of University Avenue, which houses Chi Psi and Theta Delta Chi.
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