Once upon a time, I was briefly exposed to the university fraternity system. My first year of college, I attended Depauw University in Indiana, which had a fairly conservative policy: your first year were required to live on campus, segregated dorms, and we could only apply to a fraternity or sorority in our second year or later, and I transferred to the University of Washington in my second year. When I arrived in Seattle, I got so many invitations to fraternity parties before classes started, I think because I had a 3.9 GPA and was a National Merit scholar — I had the potential to raise the average house GPA. I was popular, a novel experience! I attended one party, and that was enough.

The party started with beer on the front lawn. They were having a casino night inside, and they also had a giant slingshot on the roof for firing water balloons at people walking down the block…for fun, you know. Their house was adjacent to a sorority, and the two groups were taking turns flashing each other through the windows. As the party started, they started serving rather potent rum-and-cokes, and I was not in any sense a drinker, but I had to down a couple of them. I was totally blitzed early in the evening.

One thing I learned is that I cannot hold my liquor. Another thing I learned is that I am the most boring drunk on the planet. I spent the whole night at the craps table, throwing dice and staring owlishly at the results, estimating probabilities with a brain that no longer worked. Don’t invite me to your party if you expect an antic, table-dancing maniac, sorry.

I did not join any fraternity, was never invited to join one, and never attended another frat party. They were not my thing at all.

But I am not at all surprised at the news that a hazing event at Iowa’s Alpha Delta Phi was raided by the police, who found 56 shirtless young men standing in a basement, wet and covered with thrown food.

The willing victims were stupid sheep, reluctant to speak up about what was going on. The leaders of the fraternity were arrogant, truculent, and trying their best to avoid responsibility. The adults who were supposed to be in charge of managing the house were unavailable and the student leaders pretended to not know how to contact them. It was a beautiful example of what fraternities are actually for, for indoctrinating young people into a hierarchical culture of subservience, and it produces some of the snottiest chickenshit lackeys who will use the hierarchy to diffuse responsibility and allow stupidity to run wild. These are the future leaders of the United States.

I lived in sane, clean, dormitories for four years where we learned to get along in an egalitarian manner, and avoided the more stupid nonsense that the frat cultures demanded of you. They aren’t places for learning, or becoming a better person, or experiencing a good community — they’re for chiseling you into a corporate drone who will reflexively obey. They’re tools for churning out Republicans.

P.S. The fraternity was suspended for four years, and the national chapter is already complaining that that’s not fair.