There has been a lot of media coverage and dialogue about the struggles men are facing in the modern day. There’s been some solutions forwarded to these struggles as well. Among these, Dr. Anthony Bradley has a more surprising idea that you don’t hear every day: revitalizing college fraternities.
Anthony is a research fellow and professor and the author of Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America. In the first part of our conversation, Anthony offers his take on the state of men in the modern day, the difference between heroic and disordered masculinity, the insights that a writer from the mid-20-century can shed on the forms that disorder can take, and why many men today are choosing the path of resignation. We then turn to Anthony’s idea that college fraternities can be the training ground for virtue. We talk about the loftier origins of fraternities, why, at some universities, they devolved into organizations that have become symbolic of the worst traits of masculinity, and Anthony’s six principles for reviving the potential of fraternities to shape great men.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization by Karen Horney
- AoM Podcast #758: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather
- Anthony’s framework and list of resources for the course he teaches on the masculine journey
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. There’s been a lot of media coverage and dialogue about the struggles men are facing in the modern day. There’s been some solutions forwarded to these struggles as well. Among these, Dr. Anthony Bradley has a more surprising idea that you don’t hear every day; revitalizing college fraternities. Anthony is a research fellow and professor and the author of Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America. In the first part of our conversation, Anthony offers his take on the state of men in the modern day, the difference between heroic and disordered masculinity, the insights that a writer from the mid 20th century can shed on the forms that disorder can take and why many men today are choosing the path of resignation.
We then turn to Anthony’s idea that college fraternities can be a training ground for virtue. We talked about the loftier origins fraternities, why at some universities they devolved into organizations that become symbolic of the worst traits of masculinity and Anthony’s six principles reviving the potential of fraternities to shape great men. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/fraternities.
All right. Anthony Bradley, welcome to the show.
Anthony Bradley: Thanks for having me.
Brett McKay: So you are a professor who spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about men and the issues they face. And you’ve actually, you’ve taught a course about the masculine journey. I’m curious, what sparked your interest in the male experience and the development of manhood?
Anthony Bradley: This actually goes back to when I taught high school when I was in grad school. This is late ’90s. I noticed as a high school teacher that the girls were doing great and the guys were not. I mean, it was demonstrable. I would stand in the hallway and the girls were standing up straight, shoulders back, dedicated, focused, ready to go, dialed in. But the guys, heads down, shoulders slumped over, walking very slowly, lost, discouraged, confused. And this was 20 years ago. So about 20 years ago, a lot of people, mostly conservatives were saying, Hey, there’s a problem. There’s a problem. There’s a problem. People in the culture said, No, no, no, there’s nothing. But I saw it back then. And then as I continued my academic journey and became a college professor, what I’ve seen at every school I’ve taught, is it’s the same.
Girls are doing great, dialed in, focused, motivated, successful. Guys are falling behind. Right now, we have a situation in America, where boys are falling behind girls in every grade, in every subject, in every school, in every county, in every city in America. So we’re having some major, major problems right now. And I’ve just seen it as someone who teaches college. About the fall of 2021, we begin to see a major shift, that about 61% of all new students were women. Last year, about 42% of all bachelor’s degrees were awarded to men. That’s it. So there’s something happening. We have about 9 million men right now who are not working.
And this is prime working age between 24 and 54, who are not a part of the economy. So there’s something wrong. And as I decided to come up with a course, my whole goal was to get guys ready for the workforce and ready to be married. And so what I noticed that guys just needed a little motivation. They needed some direction, and some content of vision for what it means for them to be great men. And once they have that, once they have that, it kind of lights a fire under them and I’ve seen them soar.
Brett McKay: So in your work, you talk about two types of masculinity; disordered masculinity and heroic masculinity. Let’s talk about disordered masculinity. What does that look like?
Anthony Bradley: So disordered masculinity is a self-orientated masculinity. I talk about that in the book in three parts really, that a disordered man is focused on himself. He is a navel-gazing man. He is first self-serving. That means that he really uses his relationships in terms of what he can get out of people. He kind of uses people. It’s also self-centered. And by this, I mean, it’s someone who kind of thinks about themselves always first. They may think about others later, but me first is always the mantra. The last part of disordered masculinity is the self-preserving man.
And this man really doesn’t care about anybody else. I mean, this guy is the narcissist. And so this person who is self-preserving, only wants to pursue things that benefit himself and the heck with everybody else. If he has to hurt people, step on people to climb to the top and win, he will most certainly do it. So the disordered masculinity that we see in our culture really elevates the self and centers the self at navel-gazing and being hyper-focused on one’s own advancement, often to the detriment of others.
Brett McKay: It’s something you’ve done in your work is you’ve brought in this post-World War II psychologist. I never heard of her before, but I thought her insights were really interesting. Karen Horney. What are her ideas? How did that influence your idea of disordered masculinity?
Anthony Bradley: So, Karen Horney was a psychiatrist in Brooklyn after World War II, up until the 1950s, and she wrote this fantastic book I highly recommend called Toward Neurosis and Growth. And Karen Horney’s work was instrumental in me helping guys to see some of the patterns and habits in their lives over the years. I have used her work in a lot of my classes now for 15, 16 years. And she basically says this, that all of us, because we are born in homes of imperfection, have uncertainties. We have insecurities. We have what she calls a very basic anxiety. Now, anxiety basically means that we have some sort of apprehension or tension or uneasiness about the anticipation of danger. That the bottom might fall. We think about, Oh, no. This might not go well. We kind of think about that. And being raised in the context of imperfection means that we are suspicious about things. We are often insecure about the future. And all of us have this. This is not necessarily something that is unique to men or unique to women or age brackets. This is just a part of the human experience, having certain questions and doubts and insecurities about the future.
Now, what she does, though, she says that we tend to handle these things in one of three ways. We either, with these uncertainties or these anxieties, we tend to either take them out on people. She calls this the self-expansive solution. And by this, we seek to master the uncertainty. We want to conquer it and win. We want to dominate the vicissitudes of life. This person who’s self-expansive is the narcissist. Sometimes the self-expansive person is considered type A. This person is about winning. This person is often very vindictive and above all else, is going to use other people in their lives to always be on top.
The second way that she talks about the way that some people handle the uncertainty and the vicissitudes and the anxieties of life is by being a doormat. She calls this the self-effacing solution. And by this, we handle these things by being the classic people-pleasing nice guy. You might call this person the simp of all simps, the beta of all betas. I mean, this is the guy who is neurotically focused on making sure that no one’s ever mad at him. This is the guy who comes across as someone who’s kind and pleasant, but the reason they’re always doing something for other people, is that they are desperate to have other people’s validation and love and affirmation. So they’re kind of chronic, chronic people-pleasers.
The third way she talks about this is the self-resignation solution. And this primarily is what I’m seeing massively across the country right now. This is people who are handling the uncertainties, the doubts, the anticipation of a potential danger in the future by simply checking out. I mean, they have resigned themselves from participating in the sorts of things that would facilitate dating, marriage, college, jobs. They just want to be left alone. I mean, this is the classic guy who is playing video games all day. He just wants to smoke some weed, maybe get drunk every now and then, maybe have sex with a couple girls every now and then, but he just wants to be left alone.
The self-resigned guy has a sign over his door that says, do not disturb. Just leave me alone. I am done with all of this. I’ve completely checked out. And then lastly, she says that what this kind of creates for a lot of men is, the idealized self. I mean, this is the ideal person that we think we must be or ought to be or should be, in order to be acceptable to ourselves and to be acceptable to others. And this is the birthplace of people being fake. This is the birthplace of people wearing a mask and not being truly themselves. Now, the difficult part is that you can have an idealized self. You can be a fake person and be successful. You could end up being the CEO of a company, the president of your high school class. You can end up being the governor.
Our culture is set up so that the way the market economy works is that you can be a terrible human. You can be a narcissist. You can be vindictive and be successful. And unfortunately, there are a lot of guys who are this way and it’s been normed She really does a great job of calling out. I would say one last thing here is that when guys are people-pleasing, when they’re self-effacing. They sort of cut off their face, they often find themselves in relationships with people who are narcissists and self-expansive. And that might be relationships of friendships. It might be employer-employee relationships.
But lastly, and maybe more dangerously, they may marry a partner who is self-expansive. They might marry a narcissist and they are in a relationship where someone controls all of their lives, makes decisions for them. It’s often a context of emasculation. So Karen Horney’s work, I think, is really important and it’s been incredibly helpful for my students and the men that I’ve had a read on.
Brett McKay: Okay. So that self-expansive idea, that could be like that Andrew Tate type of masculinity. Win, dominate, be the alpha bro. And then there’s that self-effacing, the Mr. Nice guy. The resignation one, as you said, you said you’re seeing this mostly amongst the men you interact with or the young men you interact with. What do you think is going on there? What is it about modern life that nudges more and more men towards self-resignation?
Anthony Bradley: Yeah. That’s a great question. I think there’s something different about the way our economy works today than it did, say 50 years ago. And of course, a hundred years ago, plus. Guys are lost. They don’t know where they fit into this current economy. For one, we don’t need men’s bodies anymore. We don’t really need men’s physical strength anymore. So a lot of guys don’t know where their bodies fit into the economy.
We don’t really need men to pick up big things anymore and move them. I recently saw a video of a construction site, an excavation site, where these massive, massive tractors and excavators were being driven remotely offsite somewhere else with a joystick and a screen. So you don’t even need men to be physically driving bulldozers anymore. And so, men don’t often know where they fit. I think also is there’s a lot of neglect. We have not been paying attention to boys, particularly in the K-12 space.
We’ve been focusing so much on girls that we’ve just neglected affirming, validating, building up guys. A lot of guys lack a lot of fatherly attention, fatherly affection, fatherly encouragement. So there’s a dad deprivation problem as well. And this is a really sensitive topic that could probably be an entire episode is mother enmeshment. I mean, we often talk about the ways that men suffer from father wounds, but there is a pretty massive trend, long-standing data on the fact that moms who were neglected or abused when they were girls often become neglectful and abusive moms. And so there’s a lot of boys who grew up with pretty toxic and narcissistic mothers.
And there’s a lot of mom enmeshment, where moms use their sons to get the emotional and sometimes physical support, affection that they’re not getting from their dads. And a lot of guys just don’t want to have any of that anymore. They don’t date or anything like that.
But we also have this ridiculous overemphasis on “toxic masculinity”, where being a guy is bad. There’s some shame there where we place all of the world’s social ills, all of the evil in the world on the backs of men, that men are evil and that being a man is bad and also evil. And there’s a lot of emasculation there. So you add all those things together. And a lot of guys are like, Listen, I don’t know how to date. I don’t know where to work. I’m dangerous, you’ve told me. I don’t have anything to contribute. I don’t think that anybody needs us. No one’s asking us to do anything. So I’m out. I’m just going to resign and live my life.
So just leave me alone. And if guys are constantly told that they are the problem, why would we expect anything differently? Why would we expect anything different from a population of men who are told, that if they exert any sort of influence, if they exert any sort of agency, that they might hurt people just by being physically present. And a lot of guys, I see this with guys beginning in middle school, all the way through their mid to late 30s, they are done. Absolutely, 100% done. Throw in the towel. Give me a 10 count. I’m out. Leave me alone. I’m going to play video games, have a part-time job, smoke some weed. And hopefully I’ll figure out how to have a life where people might want me.
But we’re seeing this more and more, and it just reflects back on the data that we’re seeing. One, spikes in anxiety and depression. Two, spikes in suicide, particularly two age groups, 15 to 24. There’s a spike right now, about three times more likely to commit suicide than girls. Also, major, major suicide spike is between the ages of 45 and 54. That’s the next spike. And the last suicide spike are men who are over 65. So there’s a motivation void.
Then there’s also, lastly here, a purpose void. And that purpose void, I think it is really at the root of so much of the resignation, is that guys just don’t have a purpose anymore. And they’ve been told that if they have any purpose, it’s potentially harmful to others.
Brett McKay: Okay. So that’s disordered masculinity and the potential sources of it. What is heroic masculinity?
Anthony Bradley: Yeah. So the way I framed heroic masculinity is simply this. These are men who use their presence and their power, and their strengths and their creativity for the benefit of those around them. They are primarily thinking about the ways in which their presence makes other people’s lives better. It is the exact opposite of the self-preserving and the self-centered, the self-orientated approach. It’s a way of thinking about the fact that my presence somewhere makes other people’s lives better. I am adding value to others. Everything about me, everything about him makes his environment, makes his surroundings better. When I leave the room, people are much better off than they were before I came.
My friends are better. My siblings are better. My parents are better. It’s a way of thinking about how is it that I can add some sort of value and benefit with my gifts and talents and creativity and my strengths, so that other people can thrive and flourish. And the beauty of this is simply this. If we had massive, massive armies of men who were committed to this level of mutuality, our local communities our states, I would say even our entire country would radically transform into a place where everyone thrives. And it’s not this idea that it’s just about me. The idea is I’m here to help others. And if everyone’s helping each other, we all benefit. No one loses.
And I think lastly here, that when guys really do give themselves to others, that’s where they find themselves as well. They sort of find vision, direction, calling, by giving themselves to others. It’s actually a win-win when men do this. And the history of men and masculinity since the beginning has been primarily this, giving themselves to others for the benefit of others, and in doing so the man finds his own purpose and meaning and significance.
Brett McKay: How is this others-oriented idea of heroic masculinity, how is it different from being a doormat?
Anthony Bradley: That’s a great question. So the doormat is people pleasing for the sake of receiving love, receiving validation, receiving affirmation, because they don’t think they’re worthy of it unless they please other people. The heroic vision, the heroic man knows he’s a person of value. He’s a person of power. He’s a person of strength. He is a person who has something to offer. So he’s not people pleasing. He’s serving people because he knows he brings something of weight to contribute. He knows that he is doing something and has real capacity and agency and self-efficacy that he can do something to change the course of history. He has a weightiness about himself. He is confident, and he is secure, and he is stable in terms of his self-perception.
So he’s not doing it for the sake of receiving love, for receiving validation and affirmation, because he knows he already has it. So he’s offering out of abundance. He’s not simply kind of rolling over, hoping that maybe, maybe if I do what everybody says, then and only then will I get the validation and affirmation that I need to feel good about myself. I’ll say this lastly here. The doormat, the people-pleasing person, is so pathetic and neurotic that he is willing to be hurt and abused and manipulated in order to receive love, affection, and validation, and significance, and community, and connection. The heroic man will never do that because he knows his value. And so if someone tries to manipulate him, abuse him, he’s gonna protect himself. He’s gonna fight against it. And if necessary, he’s gonna walk away. The people-pleasing person will never walk away from abuse and manipulation because they need it because it gives them a sense of purpose and meaning, and they use it as a way to stay connected.
Brett McKay: I think all of us have probably encountered men who have that heroic ideal that you’re talking about here. They’re full of vitality, they’re confident, and yeah, when you’re around them, you just feel better and they improve your life. And in your recent book, Heroic Fraternities, you make the case that college fraternities can be a place where we cultivate men who embrace heroic masculinity. But I imagine a lot of people who are listening or hearing this and they think, what, fraternities? How could that be? Like, this is the place where binge drinking happens and hazing deaths and sexual assault. They’re thinking animal house. And I want to unpack this idea that you have that fraternities can be a place where we cultivate heroic masculinity. But before we do, what’s been your experience with college fraternities?
Anthony Bradley: So I got into this really… Well, two things. One, I myself am a fraternity member. So I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated at Clemson University when I was a student there. I have to give a shout out to Clemson Go TiGERS. And I was in a fraternity. I was very involved in Greek life, both in my own fraternity, but I also had a lot of friends in other fraternities. And I saw some of the benefits that I talk about in my book. And as I have been thinking about it, what really brought this to my attention in recent years, and I can’t remember, I think it was, I was teaching about fraternities in the course, ’cause we do a section in the course that I teach on the history of fraternities. And I just noticed in the news that about once a week, a fraternity was getting suspended somewhere.
And I set a news alert to have my inbox filled. And about every week, somewhere in the country, at some university a fraternity was getting suspended for the types of things that you were mentioning. And I thought, Man, something is desperately wrong. Now, what’s interesting, though, is when I began to dig in the data, and I’m following about 2200 fraternity chapters right now across the country, what I discovered is that those stories of the hazing and the sexual assault, et cetera, that’s actually the minority. I think the reason that people have that is that that’s primarily the ones that make the news cycle. But what you don’t hear are the fraternity chapters, which is the majority, where guys are really longing for brotherhood, and camaraderie and friendship. And guys are helping each other do great things.
It is a mixed bag. And I think that reputation does sustain at some universities more so than others. I think it has a lot to do with the campus culture, particularly, sort of Power Five football schools, ACC, SEC, Big 10, Big 12. I mean, that sort of Greek life is different than you might see at some of the smaller liberal arts schools. But right now, things are a bit up in the air. But I just want to say for the record that largely, primarily, those negative stories are really more of the minority.
Brett McKay: We’ll talk about the state of fraternities here in a bit. But let’s talk about the history of fraternal life in the United States. When did fraternities start and why did they start?
Anthony Bradley: So it’s really fascinating because when we look back at the history of them in light of the way that we see them. It’s gonna be a real head scratcher. So in the early, early 19th century at Union College and in 1825, a group of veterans were missing the camaraderie of serving together. They were missing their brotherhood experience. And so there at Union College in Schenectady, New York, there were a group of five men who decided to form a secret society. And the society was for the purpose of being social. It also served the purpose of increasing their literacy. They wanted to refine themselves as men.
And they really wanted to sort of sort out how do we maintain some sense of fun and brotherhood and camaraderie, the kind of things that we had when we were doing our military service. So that very first social fraternity there at Union College was named Kappa Alpha Society. And that was the beginning of the social fraternity life in America. Now, remember the year is 1825. So this is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And that’s when life really began to change in the lives of men. Men started, for the first time in American history to primarily work away from home. They were not in close proximity with their children. And we also had a situation where boys were going off to college in really, really high numbers. Now, they were leaving home and they were also disintegrated from community.
So they needed some camaraderie and they needed some friendship. And this is one of the things that fraternities really came to provide for these men, was a way to have a home away from home, a surrogate family, but also continue to be refined in terms of their skills. So in the early days of fraternities, singing was a requirement. It was necessary. Most fraternity houses in the early days had a piano. Somebody could play the piano. And so they would sing together all the time. You could think of glee clubs back in the ’30s and ’40s was a major, major part of college life. They were also literary societies, so they read the classics together. These guys would get together on the weekends and debate the classics. They would debate philosophy.
They would debate Shakespeare. Rhetoric was really also huge, so they had to learn how to speak. They would practice public speaking. They would critique public speaking. In most fraternity houses in the 19th century, the libraries in the fraternity houses were actually built better than the libraries at the university in terms of their holdings. So they were mainly literary societies that were forming these virtues and values in men preparing them for statesmanship and preparing them to be the leaders of business and politics and culture. And that really was the framework that explains so many of every fraternity’s vision and mission and values. If you look at all of them today, they all are going to have some variation on the theme of character formation and camaraderie and friendship and brotherhood, just like they did when it began back in 1825.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
Okay. So fraternities served a bunch of different purposes. One was, it was a home away from home, a second family when a young man went away to college and went away from his family of origin. And then it was also a place where they could cultivate themselves, learn how to become well-rounded gentlemen. So a place to develop character and also to a place to develop intellectually. They read, they debated, they studied the classics together, and the Greek names of fraternities, they hearkened to that classical education. So that’s why fraternities started. How did college Greek culture develop the bad reputation that it has today?
Anthony Bradley: So the first major dip in Greek life was in the 1920s. You might think about the Roaring Twenties. And unfortunately, so much of that culture began to spill over into fraternity life. Now, what’s really fascinating, particularly as colleges and universities in the country in the 19th century, some had began to be co-ed. Fraternity men were fairly certain, very clear on this. They were never going to dishonor the reputation of a girl on their campus. I mean, that was an absolute… A non-negotiable principle. We were never going to treat women poorly on our campus. Now, off-campus was different. So there’s some times in the Roaring Twenties where guys would leave the campus and go down into the city and things like that. Bars and brothels and things like that. So the Roaring Twenties was sort of the first step.
But as soon as World War II started, as soon as the Depression started, as soon as we got into World War II in the late 1930s, early ’40s, things changed. A lot of those men, of course, during the war were fighting, they came back and were different men. So after the 1940s, fraternity life almost died. It’s really fascinating to think about a World War II veteran who came back and to think that a bunch of lads who maybe didn’t serve was gonna have him do pushups was just unreasonable. It’s like, No, I’m not doing that. I’m not gonna be hazed or whatever by a bunch of guys that didn’t even serve. So there was this major, major dip. So fraternities were in decline after the war. They were also in decline in the 1960s because they were part of the establishment. So there was a rebellion against institutions.
And what’s fascinating is that as they were declining in the 1960s, those numbers went down. There was a film about a particular fraternity at Dartmouth that really did change the nature of Greek life. It was called Animal House. And anyone who is a Gen Xer or older will know that movie in 1978. And Animal House single-handedly, and there’s really good data on this. It really does speak to the power of film. Animal House is the reason. I can say this confidently that Animal House is the reason for the negative stereotypes that we see in fraternity life across the country today. So that movie was watched by us. I’m a Gen Xer. So what happened in 1978, a bunch of Gen Xers watched that film. We watched Animal House, and we also watched a bunch of other films in that same time era, that same genre, sort of coming of age, like Porky’s and movies like that.
So a bunch of guys saw that movie and said, when I get to college, I wanna do that. And that’s what they did. A bunch of Gen X guys went to college in the ’80s and the ’90s and did exactly what that movie did. And that was the beginning of it shifting. And so every fraternity film after Animal House is a variation on that culture that was really normed and embedded by that one media production. And that’s when we began to see things sort of get off the rails, so to speak, and Greek life becoming something that it was never intended to be. And we see some of that in the sorts of negative stereotypes that you mentioned earlier.
Brett McKay: Yeah, on that chapter about the influence of movies on Greek culture, it reminded me of the influence that mob movies had on mobster culture, like The Godfather and Goodfellas. What’s interesting about those, we did a podcast with a guy who did a book about the history of The Godfather. And so The Godfather was based on mob culture. The author of it, Puzo, he looked at mob culture and he put stuff in there. But what ended up happening was mobsters started imitating the godfather as well. We got to act this way because like the godfather, that’s what they do in The Godfather. So I thought the parallel was interesting.
Anthony Bradley: Yeah. It basically became a social contagion. And this is what we do in America. This is what happens when adolescents consume media products. They take them, they embed them, they imprint them. And then later on they act them out.
Brett McKay: And so I think what happened was you had men who maybe had a type of disordered masculinity. Maybe they’re like the self a grandizement type of man. And they saw fraternities as this place where I could go there and act this out. And because fraternities were diminishing, their numbers were small, they’re like, Yeah, we’ll let you in. And so those men with disordered masculinity in some fraternities took over the fraternity.
Anthony Bradley: Absolutely. What’s interesting, and this is something that I learned from Chad Frick, he was the president of one of the fraternities at Clemson. He made this point really, really clear that fraternities don’t make men terrible, terrible men join fraternities. And they use the fraternity context and culture as a place to exercise, I would say, being self-expansive. Being disordered. They were disordered before they came and they were looking for a place to exercise their disordered behavior.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned earlier the state of Greek life today. I think the point you made is that a lot of our ideas about what fraternity life is like we get from the big, the power schools. So I went to the University of Oklahoma where Greek life, I don’t know what it is like today. I’m sure it’s still big, but it was really big when I was in college. I imagine the Greek life at the University of Oklahoma is gonna be different than Greek life at, say, a smaller liberal arts school.
Anthony Bradley: Yeah. And that’s in part because the chapters are smaller. So, I mean, there are some chapters across the country where there’s like 20 guys in the whole chapter, whereas at some of the big football schools, there might be 200. And so managing a chapter of 25, 19, 20-year-olds is different than managing a chapter of 200.
Brett McKay: So from the research you’ve done, the statistics, what’s the state of things like drinking and drug use amongst fraternity members?
Anthony Bradley: This is really fascinating. I think Gen Zers in general are drinking less. And so one of the things that surprised me when I was doing these interviews and the data is that I found more and more fraternity members who don’t drink at all. In fact, I found fraternity presidents who don’t drink at all. So overall, what you see in Greek life is gonna mirror some of the trends that we see with Gen Z in general. So there’s gonna be less alcohol use. There’s actually declines in sexual activity. One of the alarming trends, though, is a tick in substance abuse. So taking pills and marijuana and things like that, those things are on the upswing. But things like drinking are actually on the decline.
And this is, by the way, true in general, that you’re not going to see in Greek life anything different than you’re going to see in male populations in colleges in general. They’re not going to be any worse necessarily than what you see on the campus. And so as we see these trends with Gen Zers, in general, those same trends are gonna manifest themselves in fraternity life.
Brett McKay: What’s your take on the hazing part of the pledge process?
Anthony Bradley: Yeah. So again, back to Animal House, I think one of the problems with hazing, and maybe we can talk about this later, is a lack of a very clear rite of passage for men to know that they’re men. So for guys to go from boyhood into manhood. And what happens is that guys will make up their own rites of passage. When rites of passage aren’t given, when they’re not bestowed, teenagers and young adults are just gonna make them up. And what’s happened in the context of hazing, the whole point of hazing if I could talk about in a positive sense, is to use obstacles, to use challenges as a way to help men see new capacities and strengths that they did not have and to build a sense of camaraderie.
That’s the whole point of it, to make this sort of pledge class bond together. And because of disordered masculinity and a lot of recklessness, the absence of very clear markers of rites of passage. They’re just making them up as they go along. And even worse, there is a problem in a lot of fraternities of escalating. So when I was in college, they might have had us go do some sprints on the street. Well, 20 years later, we’re now, we got to do sprints on the street, but now we can’t wear shoes. 10 years after that, well, if they do sprints on the streets with no shoes, well now they have to have no shoes and then be in their underwear.
So there is this sort of odd escalation that we have to top the previous generation or the previous year’s obstacles, and there’s just no direction. And that’s what I found so sad, is that these guys have just been left to figure this stuff out on their own, and they just haven’t been given the investment of how do you do the sorts of things that hazing is meant to accomplish?
You might think about it in the same way that men join the military, just kinda strip themselves of individualism, and to see themselves as a part of a group and to be challenged to accomplish things as a group together, to build camaraderie, to give a sense of “we”, instead of “me”, and for a guy to find out that he has some new capacities about himself.
I’ve seen this across the country, when guys are given a clear vision of what that entry point is, what the rite of passage is, and they’re given a new imagination of how to introduce obstacles to achieve those ends, you don’t get the kind of hazing and the dangerous hazing that puts people’s lives in danger that we see on far too many campuses.
Brett McKay: You talk about what bull elephants can teach us about bad behavior that occurs in hazing. Tell us about that.
Anthony Bradley: So there was some work done in South Africa at a nature reserve, and because of the ways in which they have to manage those, because of the park restrictions, they often have to move populations around in order to manage that land well, and there was a section of elephants they were trying to move in and re-populate, and what they did is they moved a bunch of adolescent elephants over to this one side of the park when they noticed that all these other animals were dying, particularly rhinos were being killed, and it wasn’t poachers because the rhinos would have their horns intact. And what they realized is that these rhinos are being killed by these adolescent elephants, these immature elephants who were having massive spikes of testosterone and it was making them aggressive.
They were going into this sort of rut season fairly early, there’s a hormone that gets secreted behind their ear, and it makes them really, really aggressive. And what was really fascinating, they were trying to figure out what was going on, how come these adolescent elephants were killing… Just randomly killing rhinos. So what they did is they transported some mature bull elephants. And what was so fascinating is that the day, the very day the bull elephants showed up, the killing stopped.
In fact, it actually tempered the testosterone secretion of these adolescent elephants. They became less aggressive because the more mature elephants were just physically present, and I also heard there’s a video of one of these bull elephants body slamming one of these adolescent elephants. It was just fascinating to see that just simply the presence of maturity and the very presence of age really had a way of tempering the aggression, helping these young lads manage their aggression, manage their sexuality in these elephant populations.
And sadly, I think that’s what we’re missing on a lot of college campuses today, and what we need is simply the presence of older men, chapter advisors, alumni who are older, to just be around the guys, and that would overnight change a lot of the pathologies that we see, because the presence of older men really does have a positive effect in providing some direction and emotional regulation for young men. It sort of teaches them how to be great men.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So if there was a chapter advisor or an older alumni, if the students were thinking of doing some really crazy hazing ritual, when they have the influence of that older advisor, they might think twice.
Anthony Bradley: Absolutely, right. One of the things that… We tell a chapter is like, You really shouldn’t do anything during the pledge process that you would not do in front of the guy’s dad or in front of your dad, because if these older men are just physically present during the process, they’re the guardrails to tell this developing brain of a 20, 21-year-old in leadership, Okay, that’s too far. You can do that, no, you can’t do that. And they need that sort of direction, and the best chapter advisors are the ones that provide that, and there are very good chapters across the country that are able to have that level of direction by older men.
Brett McKay: So in response to deaths and sexual assaults that happen in frat houses, many colleges, their response is just to suspend the fraternities, or some colleges have gotten rid of Greek life altogether, and you argue that these measures actually don’t solve the problem, why not?
Anthony Bradley: Because if you look at the data, as soon as you remove a fraternity, sexual assaults don’t necessarily decrease, hazing doesn’t necessarily decrease, because what the guys are gonna do is they’re gonna form their own little secret society and do it anyway, so you can get rid of fraternities but they might have hazing in band, they might have hazing in a club, they’re gonna have hazing… We’ve seen this at some universities with their athletes who are playing for the school, so it doesn’t actually work in terms of trying to rid the campus of those sorts of pathologies. Those pathologies happen whether a person is in Greek life or not. I think the difference is that Greek life gives more opportunities and easier access for terrible people to be terrible, but terrible people are on everybody’s campus, and so getting rid of Greek life doesn’t really help. And then secondly, and more importantly, by removing Greek life, you lose the opportunity for formation.
If I was a college president, I would think about it this way, this is the last opportunity that you would have as a college president to isolate a group of guys and form their virtues for the good. It would be virtually impossible to do that on a campus without Greek life, without college fraternities, and college fraternities really do serve as a place of formation.
Brett McKay: What do you think fraternities need to do to become this heroic fraternity that you have in mind? Walk us through the roadmap of… From rush pledge and beyond of your ideal fraternity?
Anthony Bradley: Yeah, I think fraternities, first and foremost, need to, more broadly speaking, recapture, I’d say maybe restore their original values and virtues. Whenever I travel and speak to a chapter of any fraternity anywhere in America, one of the things I do is I call them back to their original vision and mission and values. Those things are already there, every fraternity in America has heroic values embedded in its own mission and vision and virtues. So first of all, I wanna really sort of call them back to those things and think about ways to live those out. I do have sort of a six-step process, sort of six principles, these are not necessarily in order of importance, but these are sort of the six things that if fraternities really focus on, they will never get suspended, ever, and they will always add value to their campus. If fraternities do these six things, presidents will want them around and if they threaten to leave, a president will beg them to stay. Here they are.
First is Friendship and Acceptance, so fraternities that allow guys to not have an idealized self, to work through their anxieties, to be vulnerable, there’s a sense of camaraderie that you’re accepted not because of what’s on the outside, but what’s on the inside.
You can be a person that is imperfect. It’s really important for guys to have at least two or three friends that they can be completely vulnerable with, that knows all of their faults and weaknesses. One of the things that we see in the new cycle regularly are guys who get taken out because they have some Achilles heel weakness that destroys their marriage, destroys their career, destroys their company, et cetera, and when guys have at least a couple of people that know those things, that’s the best protection against that. So we wanna have context where there’s real friendship, there’s real vulnerability and real acceptance.
Second is brotherhood. One of the things that really sets guys on fire is knowing that they have a group of guys that have their back. It is the birthplace of risk-taking. If you know that a group of guys has your back, no matter what, you will do great things. And the brotherhood aspect of fraternities, to foster that on purpose, is really, really key. You can do amazing things in the marketplace, you can take a risk and ask a girl out. If you know that if you fail, if she rejects you, you’re gonna have a bunch of guys, who are gonna build you back up and put you back on the horse, sort of get you back out there, so that brotherhood piece is really, really important, and vital.
Guys will run through a wall, if they look behind them and see they’ve got 15, 20, 30, 100 guys cheering them on. Thirdly here, is initiation. We talked about this a few moments ago. There needs to be a sense of a rite of passage to recognize that you’re actually transitioning these young men from boyhood into manhood, and to be deliberate about these stages, to be deliberate about creating a context where there is a rite of passage where a guy knows that by the end of the four years, that he is gonna be a much stronger, better, more virtuous, more dynamic man than he was when he began, and to really plan that out. You’ve got four years, you’ve got three or four years with these guys, so what kind of things could you do to be making sure that you’re embedding and integrating the values of your fraternity throughout the entire life of a brother in the chapter, so that rite of passage, that initiation part is really important because the main opportunity with initiation is to help a guy find what he’s good at, to help him find his strength.
College is a place where guys leave their home and they can be developed and formed, they can find what they’re good at, and then they’re sent back into the community, so fraternities should really think of themselves as places where they’re forming men’s virtues and values, they’re helping them see what they’re good at, they’re helping them see their strengths, so that when they leave, they can make an even better, more deliberate, concentrated, clear contribution to the communities that will be there to receive them.
So that’s really important that their brothers really want to invest in helping other guys find that what they’re good at. Fourth here is fun. A college is supposed to be fun. I mean, heck, life is supposed to be fun. The data is really, really clear that having fun is really important and necessary for good mental health. It protects against anxiety, it protects against depression, it protects against suicidal ideation. It actually protects against, in many respects, some of the pathologies in substance abuse that undermine striving, and so fraternities need to think about ways to have fun. Now I talk about virtuous fun. Fun that adds value of people’s lives.
I am convinced that if we got these guys in a room and introduce some more creative ways for them to have fun beyond what they see in the movies, they would do it, but what happens? They default to what they’ve seen on screens instead of thinking about being creative about new ways to have fun that actually makes people’s lives better. Fifth here, is to be developmental, to work on character development and professional development, and this is where the alumni networks are really, really important.
One of the great added values of being in a chapter is to be in a context where alumni and even peers are going to set you up so that you can have a successful career and to use those networks really deliberately. So I think the best fraternities are the ones that have really involved alumni who are on campus quite frequently to help these guys manage entering and sustaining success in their career. Lastly here is character development, and this goes back to the vision, mission and values of the fraternity in general. Every fraternity, again, across the country, has fantastic values, and what’s it mean to develop virtue, moral virtue, character in these men, so that the reputation that they have on campus, and the reputation they’ll have in society is that they are the kinds of people that are going to make our context better.
I’ll give a quick example of what this looks like. One of the things that I invite chapters to do is to think about what does it mean for us to develop a reputation of being the safest place for women on campus, the best place for women on campus, the safest, the most ennobling place for women to be, and to think about that as something aspirational, what do you need to do to have that reputation? I can tell you right now, that every chapter I’ve spoken to across the country, when I invite them to have that reputation, they get excited about it, they want to have that reputation because of the negative stereotype. They celebrate that because that’s the kind of men they actually want to be.
Lastly here, I think in general, people don’t understand this, but fraternity men want to be great man, that’s why they joined a fraternity. The problem is, they don’t know how. And if we can do that, I think we can really change the trajectory of men in college and Greek life in general.
Brett McKay: Well, Anthony this has been a great conversation, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Anthony Bradley: Great, so I have two places, one, you can just Google my name, I have a website, dranthonybradley.com, but also you can also just Google Heroic Fraternities and you can see more about the book and more about the work in general.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Anthony Bradley, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Anthony Bradley: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Anthony Bradley, he’s the author of the book Heroic Fraternities, it’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, dranthonybradley.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/fraternities, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. The Art of Manliness website has been around for over 16 years now, and the podcast for over 10, and they both have always had one aim, to help men take action to improve every area of their lives. To become better friends, citizens, husbands and fathers, better men. If you’ve gotten something out of the AoM Podcast, please consider giving back by leaving a review or sharing the episode with a friend. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
