How Closely Do We Draw Line On Our Rambunctious Young?

A member of a Washington State University fraternity - make that former WSU fraternity - regrets that university officials allow the frat’s community service to be overshadowed by “every little negative thing.”

Joe Lokis’ comment came in the wake of Kappa Sigma’s suspension in a joint action by WSU and the fraternity’s international headquarters.

Among other effects, that move dislodges 62 students living in the house. Lokis, the Pullman chapter’s community service chairman, touts a list of good works he and his brothers have done on behalf of children, senior citizens and cancer patients. Not listed, however, were Kappa Sigma members’ role in last May’s drunken riot at WSU. Nor a midsemester party held at a private house in violation of sanctions imposed following the riot. Nor a Dec. 6 incident in which six freshman members were found partying in a vacant apartment police suspect they broke in to. Those are the “negative little things” on which fraternity and school officials based their actions.

But, as Kappa Sigma alumni adviser John Harvey put it, the suspension was preceded by 20 years of off-and-on turbulence.

More significant, Greek life at WSU offers crackdown-minded officials no shortage of incidents to investigate. One sorority and no fewer than 14 frats are under sanction this semester for drinking incidents and some of them are attributed to parents and alumni who were on hand for Dads Weekend. Such intergenerational complicity makes one wonder if campus life is any more out of control at century’s end than it was a few decades ago. Or is it merely that university officials are less tolerant of late-adolescent debauchery?

Of course it’s also possible that today’s communications technology makes it harder to keep such high jinks quiet and thus avoid the pressure which public awareness applies to the heads of public institutions to act.

In any case, we wonder how realistic it is to expect a campus full of college students to exercise exemplary self-restraint when many of them are experimenting with the most freedom they’ve known in their lives. When you go (or went) off to college, or when you send your children there, how much maturity should be imposed from above in the form of tight restrictions and how much of the growing up should be up to the individual?