Schools Are Tackling ‘Bro’ Culture. The Kavanaugh Case Shows Why That’s Hard to Do.

A barrage of lurid accounts of hard drinking and partying lobbed against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh this week has reminded Americans of the aggressive, hypersexualized “bro culture” that has stubbornly persisted on high school and college campuses across the United States.

It is a culture that has been on the defensive in recent years, with fraternity activities suspended or sometimes banned, and private high schools revising their policies on consent and sex education. Pressure to tackle that image has intensified in the wake of public scrutiny on Kavanaugh, who faced accusations of sexual assault and misconduct — which he denied — at a U.S. Senate committee hearing Thursday and whose nomination is now in the balance.

This strain of masculinity is an entrenched part of American life, prized by employers from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, romanticized by Hollywood, handed down from fathers to sons, and shared by many who become respected leaders in society. It persists in part because some of its traits — a sense of brotherhood that comes from withstanding a trial by fire — are seen as positive, valued by organizations like the military.

“It’s generational,” said Thomas Keith, a professor of philosophy and gender studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and the writer and director of the 2011 film, “The Bro Code.”

“They look to those guys as the American male,” he continued. “They played football, they joined a fraternity, they drank and partied, and it’s just part of Americana: That’s how you behaved as a boy. It’s excused as, ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ and never taken very seriously — until now.”

While bad male behavior endures across a range of campus cultures, fraternities are often blamed for its worst offenses. The movement against campus sexual assault, the #MeToo revelations of the past year, and a recognition that the blackout drinking and partying culture of fraternities can lead to the sexual exploitation of women and hazing deaths of men have begun to turn the tide against them.

The popularity of fraternities has ebbed and flowed. They lost favor, along with ROTC, at many elite colleges in the late 1960s and 1970s, when many college students were occupied with the civil rights movement, the draft and the Vietnam War protests.

Then came the Reagan era.

“Along comes this political John Wayne, riding a horse into town as a sheriff, and all this hypermasculine culture is coming with it,” Keith said. Kavanaugh entered Yale in 1983 and joined Delta Kappa Epsilon during a period of revival for fraternities.

According to Baird’s Manual and the North-American Interfraternity Conference, fraternity membership rose to about 400,000 in 1990 from about 144,000 in 1971, and stood at about 380,500 in 2015.

Today, what was once accepted as “boys will be boys” behavior is condemned even by national fraternity organizations, which realize their reputations and perhaps long-term survival are on the line.

In August, the North-American Interfraternity Conference, which represents more than 80 percent of national and international fraternities, adopted a rule banning hard alcohol from fraternity houses and events unless it is served by licensed third-party vendors, effective next September.

But some say that the culture change has to happen at a younger age.

In recent years, after a string of sexual assault allegations involving students and faculty members at private prep schools, a number of them made changes.

This fall, all students at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, attended small-group discussions on affirmative consent. For the first time, each student was required to sign a document agreeing to obtain “unambiguous” verbal consent at every stage of a sexual encounter.

The school has also brought in speakers to discuss “toxic masculinity” and healthy relationships. John Palfrey, the head of school, said the Kavanaugh nomination had provoked discussion among staff and students.

“The activities of a student during high school do matter and have lifelong consequences for the students involved,” he said. “We need to look at the cultures in our schools and make sure we are not repeating what has happened in the past.”

At St. Paul’s, an Episcopal boarding school in New Hampshire, all students now take part in bystander training, in which they role-play how to intervene in various scenarios, such as sexual aggression, bullying on social media or hazing on a sports team.

The main allegation against Kavanaugh — that as an intoxicated teenager he pushed a high school girl onto a bed, covered her mouth with his hand, groped her and tried to take off her clothes — dates to his time as a student at Georgetown Preparatory School, an all-boys Jesuit school, in suburban Washington, before he entered Yale. The school said in a statement that “the temptations, and the failings,” depicted in the accusations against Kavanaugh were not unique to Georgetown Prep. Like other schools, it said that it had been “wrestling with the collateral damage of an out-of-control culture for many decades” and that its “curriculum is designed to guide students away from these malignant influences.”

Testing limits has long been seen as a rite of passage for youth, condoned by older people who once did it themselves.

Those who are trying to reform fraternities and prep schools say that big obstacles are the emphasis on tradition, the attachment of alumni to their past, and the fact that men who once participated in these rituals often become prominent and generous financial donors to their schools.

The culture is “enduring in that it creates that sense of belonging,” said Gentry McCreary, chief executive officer of Dyad Strategies, which consults with universities on restructuring fraternity and sorority life. He added that a sense of belonging could be maintained without the pernicious rituals. Fraternity life is also a crucible for leadership, in which many fraternity brothers have gone on to become respected luminaries, as Kavanaugh did.

In his book “True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities,” John Hechinger describes how embedded fraternities are in the American establishment: About 40 percent of U.S. presidents belonged to one, including the two Bushes at Delta Kappa Epsilon at Yale and Gerald Ford at DKE at the University of Michigan. (President Donald Trump was not a fraternity member.) So did one-third of all Supreme Court justices, and some of the most prominent business leaders.

Part of their power boils down to sheer networking. As Keith puts it, “there’s been social capital for being a bro.”

Some see dwindling interest in fraternity life on campus.

“Starting in the mid to late '80s, there were a couple of years of really incredible growth,” McCreary said. “In the last two years that growth has begun to plateau. Everyone in the industry is watching very closely.”

He attributes that leveling off not just to negative publicity but to a shift in the mentality of college students. “With the post-millennial generation and their activism and their political leanings, there is a lot of concern that this next generation may be much less inclined to join up,” he said.

Keith sees a similar shift among his students, to the point that he is publishing a new book about it. With the caveat that he lives in left-leaning California, he has a sense that “bro” culture is evolving, “in a more pro-feminist, sensitive way.”

“Men like the idea of bros in terms of friendships, alliances,” he said. “They like the idea of bonding and the positives they get out of it. But they’re not really in line with the kind of behaviors that the culture has become famous for.”