• Student Judiciary Justices are not elected, nor are they appointed by elected representatives.
• Student Judiciary does not need to follow its own case precedent.
• Student Judiciary is run by College Student Affairs "Professionals," not by experts in law.

The New York Times, May 5, 1996
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company The New York Times
May 5, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Correction Appended

College Campuses Hold Court In Shadows of Mixed Loyalties
OFFSTAGE JUSTICE -- First of two articles.
By NINA BERNSTEIN

In February of last year, two rapes were reported to the police in this classic college town framed by cornfields.

A police sketch of the first rape suspect appeared on warning fliers inside the red brick residence halls of the college, Miami University of Ohio, and near local bars, where fraternities hold "grab-a-date" parties and beer costs a quarter on Wednesday nights.

The suspect in the second rape was never on a poster. But he was everywhere else, free to come and go on a campus where university officials knew his identity, but most of the women he met did not.

The first man was pursued for months by the criminal justice system, and he was eventually arrested and charged with a felony that carries up to 25 years in prison. The outcome of his case -- the gunpoint rape of a student in an off-campus house -- will be a matter of public record.

But the case of the second man vanished into a separate judicial world so secret that many Americans are unaware that it operates behind closed doors at most of the nation's 3,600 colleges and universities. As the man prepares to graduate from Miami University this month, not even his mother knows that he was officially placed on "student conduct probation" for sexually assaulting an 18-year-old freshman who was sleeping.

The story behind the Miami University case is emblematic of a pattern of campus injustice that emerges from confidential case files, police records, civil litigation and more than 200 interviews at a wide range of institutions, like Salem State College and Harvard in Massachusetts, Fordham University in New York and the large public universities of California, Georgia and Colorado.

At a time of crackdowns on crime and adult sentences for many juvenile offenders, campus justice is a kind of parallel judicial universe where offenses as serious as arson and rape can be disposed of discreetly under the same student conduct codes that forbid sneaking into a university dance without a ticket.

To be sure, most non-academic college discipline still involves infractions like drinking by underage students and disorderly conduct. But increasingly, systems designed to deal with youthful misbehavior are investigating and judging serious student-on-student crime. The proceedings range from elaborate trials with student judges and advocates to mediation sessions before a single administrator.

For more than 70 percent of the colleges across the United States, state laws, college charters or local governments give campus police forces full-fledged arrest power -- and enormous discretion to decide whether to refer cases directly to district attorneys or leave them to quiet campus justice.

Many serious offenses reach neither campus police officers nor their off-campus counterparts because they are directly funneled to college judicial administrators by student resident assistants, who get free rooms or tuition discounts in exchange for serving as the enforcers of dormitory life.

Though college officials say victims are always free to seek redress in the real courts, many prosecutors complain that campus justice systems usurp and undermine such cases before they can get them.

It is a system, critics say, that is tailored to the politics of public image and the power of vested interests, from athletic departments and fraternities to the local businesses that benefit from a student culture of binge drinking. In many college-dominated towns, law-enforcement agencies seem only too happy to look the other way.

College officials say campus justice is needed to create a safe educational community for students, if only because the criminal justice system is too slow at getting results. But R. Keegan Federal, an Atlanta lawyer who successfully argued a 1993 Georgia Supreme Court case that opened the University of Georgia's internal judiciary system to public scrutiny, sees the patchwork of students, teachers and administrators who judge these cases as a fourth judicial branch without accountability.

"What we've got here," Mr. Federal said, "is people across the whole United States, people who are selected by a process we don't know about and sit on hearings that are secret and make decisions affecting people's lives and freedom and careers, and yet nobody knows about it. Frankly, it scares the hell out of you when you read some of these things."

A sample of cases from around the country illustrates why critics contend that confidentiality hides irreconcilable conflicts of interest:

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA IN TAMPA. A male student kidnaps and rapes a freshman woman who has refused to testify on his behalf at a disciplinary hearing, then shoots her brother and kills himself. Despite previous complaints from three other female students that he had stalked or hit them, he had never been suspended by the campus judicial system. Two years before this incident, a state panel found, the university covered up a complaint of rape against a star basketball player, ignored the harassment that persuaded the victim to drop her charges and overlooked subsequent complaints of assault that three other women made against the same athlete.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY IN CAMBRIDGE. A male medical student is accused of sexual assault by three female classmates, and he is also caught watching women in the residence-hall showers. An administrator refers him to a psychiatrist, and a disciplinary committee of senior faculty advises him to take a year off. "He worked in an impoverished African country and got the most raving reviews, helping the poor," said Carola Eisenberg, the former dean of students, in confirming the facts of the 1989 case, never public until now. "Was he helped through psychiatry? I really couldn't tell. Would he do that to patients? I don't know."

UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA IN ATHENS. A 19-year-old man is found battered and unconscious in the street outside a fraternity house; an investigation by the university's fraternity advisers finds that fraternity members beat him up and held a fraternity meeting to coordinate their stories before the police came. But university administrators, overruling their own staff, throw out the conspiracy case for lack of evidence before it can be heard in a student court open to press coverage. Earlier, when student court proceedings were still secret, a man who set fire to another student's door in a gay-bashing campaign was referred directly to the university judiciary by a resident assistant, with no call to the campus police; the incident came to light only because the editor of the student newspaper happened to live on the same floor.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IN SANTA CRUZ. Several male students are found to have committed multiple sexual assaults on freshmen women. But they are allowed to transfer to other state campuses with clean records after a kind of academic plea bargaining between their lawyers and lawyers for the university. The women, who report being threatened and harassed by the accused students during the investigation, are told that they have no right to know the results of their complaints.

"What you're saying is purely anecdotal, based on some notorious kinds of cases that can become sensationalized," countered Dennis Gregory, past president of the Association for Student Judicial Affairs and associate dean of students at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. "The large majority of the cases that are dealt with are dealt with appropriately, are dealt with professionally. Making it a public system is not the way to deal with the abuses."

Colleges have to maintain discipline on their campuses, Mr. Gregory said, or they would leave themselves open to civil liability. "We're damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't," he declared, adding, "I know of no situation where a student would not have the right to go to the criminal justice system in addition to the campus justice system."

Typically, student victims are asked if they want to press criminal charges. But the same college personnel advising them of their options have a potentially conflicting need to protect the institution from bad publicity and liability, says Jeffrey Newman, a Boston lawyer on the board of the national nonprofit advocacy organization Security on Campus, founded by the parents of a woman who was raped and murdered by another student at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Mr. Newman, who specializes in civil litigation for student crime victims, said that colleges dissuaded many from pursuing criminal prosecutions.

Even when victims do prosecute, the campus justice system is likely to conduct its own parallel proceedings. And those who skip the college disciplinary process pay a price: without it, even a grand jury's felony indictment will not necessarily persuade college officials to restrict a suspect's access to classes or dormitories.

"We're all afraid of being sued," Dan Abrahamowicz, the dean of students at the University of Toledo, told fellow administrators in a candid moment at a recent conference of the 1,000-member Association for Student Judicial Affairs. Within their own world, Mr. Abrahamowicz said, administrators of campus justice are comfortable representing university interests while defending student rights and acting as "investigators, juries, judges, presenters, counselors -- and educators, most of all." The question, he said, is "can we sell this outside of the milieu of higher education?"

The Pursuit of Justice Victim and Accuser Confront the System
 

In the Georgian-style residence halls of Miami University of Ohio, wing chairs and fireplaces create an aura of private gentility unusual in a public institution. Here possession of a beer by an underage student results in an automatic suspension on the third offense, and so does academic dishonesty. Yet sexual assault is considered suitable for mediation or probation, as the woman who reported the second February rape last year discovered in a bitter lesson about campus justice.

The woman, Erin R., who asked that her last name not be published, is a sophomore now. The long fair hair she had last year is gone. She cut it off, dyed it black and shrouded her slim body in baggy clothes after seeing her assailant in her dormitory and cafeteria and confirming that the disciplinary board that had found him responsible for sexually assaulting her had not suspended him. "I don't know what it takes," she said, looking bleakly at the campus that she used to consider "this little safe place, out in the middle of nowhere."

In the official brochure of crime statistics sent to the 16,000 students here last fall, the university reported no rapes between January and June 1995. The two rapes reported to the police that February were not counted because the incidents occurred in off-campus housing, only blocks from the campus lawns. Nor did the brochure refer to 21 rapes between January and August 1995 on a separate university list. Many of these rapes, all involving the university or its students, were not reported to the campus police but were reported to a variety of university agencies, hospitals and community counseling centers.

Last April, in a small room in an administration building, Erin told two students and two professors on a disciplinary board panel what she had already told campus and city police: how she had fallen asleep in her clothes on her stomach after a drinking party at an off-campus house and had awakened to find the host, a 190-pound wrestler who she barely knew, pinning her down and penetrating her from behind. A male friend from her dormitory who was asleep beside her woke up to her cries and witnessed the scene. The evidence included a handwritten letter of apology that the accused, pleading extreme drunkenness, wrote to her four days later, after the woman's friend had confronted him about the incident.

"I can't believe what I did," the two-page letter by the accused student, Aaron Grossman, reads in part. "Although I hurt you very seriously, I pray to you that you won't destroy my life. . . . My Mom used to work at the Rape Crisis Center in Cleveland & I have seen many women scarred by men doing the things that I guess now that I've done. I realized then as I do now the effects that rape has on a woman & would never knowing want to hurt someone like that. . . . I know you'll never forgive me for this, & I understand why."

Mr. Grossman said at the hearing -- and maintained in an interview in March -- that he had been confused and scared when he wrote the letter and that he had since remembered that the sex had been entirely consensual.

The Oxford police say they strongly encouraged Erin to press criminal charges. "Like we told her -- you've got a conviction here," Lieut. Richard McVey said in an interview at the small station house, where he has kept the original letter of apology. But Erin said a five-minute interview with an impatient and hostile assistant prosecutor had dissuaded her from that course.

John Holcomb, the Butler County prosecutor for 32 years, said he could not recall an acquaintance-rape case prosecuted by his office recently, let alone a conviction when the woman had been drinking. He reminisced about the days when women students had 10 P.M. curfews, and he explained that if a woman was intoxicated and voluntarily stayed in a young man's place late at night, "most people would ask themselves, 'Well, what did she think was going to happen?' "

Erin turned to campus justice, but it was not easy to be heard. At one point, she said, Susan Vaughn, the university's judicial affairs coordinator, suggested that the case be handled through mediation as "a misunderstanding" instead of in a disciplinary hearing.

Though neither Ms. Vaughn nor James Slager, the dean of student affairs, would discuss this case, Mr. Slager acknowledged that they considered mediation a suitable way to deal with a student sexual assault case if the victim agrees.

But Erin did not agree. She said Ms. Vaughn had told her, " 'You need to understand that even if we do find him responsible, he may not be suspended.' I heard her say that, but I didn't think she really meant that would happen."

At the hearing, the disciplinary board sat at one end of a conference table, with the accuser and the accused on the other. Erin was flanked by two companions: her 26-year-old sister and Cameron Peebles, an 18-year-old male friend. Mr. Grossman, 22, brought a wrestling teammate.

At some colleges, the accused can bring in a room full of friends for support if he wishes, and he can be represented by a lawyer, while the complainant, as a witness, has no right to an advocate. At other places, both have a right to counsel, but the lawyers can only prompt their clients, not speak themselves. Some systems have student prosecutors and assign each participant a student advocate, and some have a staff member make a presentation. In Erin's case, Ms. Vaughn and Mr. Slager only listened.

At the hearing, "Erin was very emotional, just constantly crying," her 26-year-old sister recalled.

Mr. Peebles said that Mr. Grossman "came across like he didn't take it seriously -- 'She wanted it, like why am I here?' "

When Mr. Grossman was asked in a recent telephone interview to repeat his account, he said, "Whatever you've heard is what I said. It was more than a year ago. There was no evidence."

And the apology? "If anything, I lied in the letter," he said.

The panel deliberated for about 20 minutes after a four-hour hearing, then announced that they were holding Mr. Grossman responsible for violating Section 103 of the student code, entitled "Physical or Psychological Abuse of Others," specifically paragraph A: "Sexual Assault."

But the next day, when Erin asked to know Mr. Grossman's punishment, the judicial affairs coordinator refused to tell her, records confirm, claiming that the Federal Educational Records and Privacy Act forbade disclosure.

In fact, a 1992 amendment to the act explicitly gives victims of sexual assault a right to know, and an older exemption allows the release of information about the accused to victims of violent crimes. Both provisions are widely ignored. In one survey, 41 percent of colleges responding said they did not tell victims the results of disciplinary hearings at all.

After Erin's father protested, she did get official notification in a letter dated June 20: "The sanction imposed by the Disciplinary Board was that Aaron be placed on Student Conduct Probation for as long as he remains a student at Miami University." That meant if Mr. Grossman was found responsible for any other serious violation before graduation, he would be suspended.

The Police Chief, Steven Schwein, called it "a slap on the wrist."

In Defense of Discretion College Administrators Often Overlook Police
 

Defenders of campus justice say that at its best, it offers students swift, sensitive and private resolutions that would not be available from prosecutors and juries. "Is a jury as well trained as my judicial board?" asked Lee Bird, who directs the judicial program at tiny St. Cloud State College in St. Cloud, Minn., which won a national award last year for its unusually victim-friendly process. "I don't think so. I don't allow people to be badgered. There's no yelling, screaming, objecting."

On the other side, prosecutors and police officers cite campus proceedings that have damaged or destroyed viable cases. At Salem State College, a recent student rape trial ran for 11 hours, until 1 A.M., with no rules of evidence, and produced a tape recording that the local prosecutor had to study word by word because the criminal case could be dismissed if she withheld anything exculpatory from the grand jury. It declined to indict.

The illusion that campuses are self-contained communities often keeps administrators from even thinking of referring cases to the criminal justice system.

In the case of the Harvard Medical School student accused of forcing unwanted sexual acts on several classmates, for example, Dr. Eisenberg, the former dean of students, seemed astonished when she was asked if criminal charges had ever been considered. She had already described the student as "any mother's dream:" a handsome, bright, violin-playing Ivy League graduate.

"Oh, no, absolutely not," she said. "This was an in-house sort of an accusation. The only reason we consulted the lawyers is that if the committee had decided to expel him, we would have had a suit on our hands in no time."

Exactly, said Maria Blanco, a lawyer who brought a class-action law suit on behalf of the women in the University of California at Santa Cruz case. "They're concerned about who has the juice," she said. "If they expel somebody, they might get involved in a lawsuit. Until we brought the complaint, they had no inkling that the women had that kind of clout."

At Santa Cruz, the university's judicial administrator even threatened one victim that her assailant's punishment would be nullified if she told anyone about it, according to a 1994 investigation by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. The six-month investigation examined 92 complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault at the Santa Cruz campus made over a two-year period and found that the handling of such complaints was so lenient and biased toward the accused men that it had created a discriminatory environment for all women on campus.

The university adopted new policies, including a system of coded transcripts that alert other state campuses to students' disciplinary history. But few other institutions have followed suit.

"You could be a serial rapist here, and it wouldn't show up on your transcript," Dennis Donham, the vice president for student affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, said recently. "A transcript is considered practically sacrosanct, like a holy document."

A Case's Aftermath For Some Onlookers, Shock or Satisfaction
 

Campus justice in Erin's case taught some more than others.

Mr. Peebles, Erin's friend at the hearing, was especially shocked by the result. Three days after the hearing, he himself was automatically suspended for a semester for possessing a beer while underage. "The irony was so thick," he said.

Mr. Slager, the dean of students, would not talk about either case. "I certainly am satisfied with the way we're handling things here," he said. "I wasn't born and bred to be a disciplinarian. I just want a system that is fair."

Mr. Grossman seemed to shrug off the verdict. "I was found responsible, but I was allowed to continue on," he said. "You don't have to be totally guilty to be responsible."

Asked his mother's reaction to the episode, he showed his first sign of concern. "She doesn't know," he said. "I never told her."

Meanwhile, the police sketch of the gunpoint rapist is gone from the uptown taverns. Erin's sorority recently threw a "crush" party at one bar. After making sure that Aaron Grossman's name was not on the invitation list, Erin went to the party, but she left early. Later, she learned, he showed up anyway.

NEXT: At the heart of the campus justice system is a protected place for university fraternities.

A second article last Monday about the role of fraternities in the student judicial system misspelled the name of the director of Greek Life at the University of Georgia. She is Claudia Shamp. The article also misidentified two universities. They are Indiana University in Bloomington and St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.

ATHENS, Ga.

No one was supposed to know that John Higdon almost died that night three years ago -- not the national office of the fraternity that nearly killed him, not the University of Georgia, where he was a student, not his parents, and certainly not the public.

But after a hazing ritual left the 19-year-old pledge too drunk to breathe, a nurse who had helped save his life broke hospital rules and called his mother. Four days later, a Georgia Supreme Court ruling opened the university's secret student court to public scrutiny. And within weeks, what would have been a closed-door disciplinary hearing about the near-fatal incident was thrown into the public spotlight.

The case remains a rare window on a secret within a secret: the protected place that fraternities occupy at the heart of a campus justice system that operates at most of the nation's 3,600 colleges and universities. Behind those closed doors, thousands of criminal offenses virtually disappear each academic year.

At the student court hearing in Georgia, it emerged that Mr. Higdon, a tall, thin young man, had been made to drink a fifth of Heaven's Hill whisky in 45 minutes. An off-duty security guard intervened to get the sophomore to the hospital before he could die of alcohol poisoning, and doctors had to put him on a respirator to resuscitate him. So no one else would know, a fraternity brother put the hospital charges on his personal credit card, expecting to be discreetly reimbursed by Sigma Phi Epsilon.

The fraternity men had every reason to believe that they could keep the case quiet and the consequences minor. Sigma Phi Epsilon had been on some form of probation or social suspension at the University of Georgia for six of the previous seven years. Its violations had been handled through the campus justice system and its history of hazing -- which is illegal in Georgia and 36 other states -- had never been mentioned in the glossy brochures the university sent incoming freshmen to promote fraternity membership.

To be sure, fraternities are not the only groups with special status in the closed world of campus justice that emerges from an examination of confidential case files, police records, civil litigation and more than 200 interviews at colleges around the country. But the treatment of fraternities most clearly reveals the fault lines of a system where panels of students, teachers and administrators judge serious offenses without public accountability.

With 400,000 members at 800 campuses nationwide -- more than double the number at the low point in 1971 -- fraternities now spend a third of their budgets, or some $30 million a year, to pay liability costs, national fraternity executives say. The vast majority of claims are settled out of court and never become public, and there is no record of the number paid each year. But an insurance analysis of more than 900 claims against fraternities in a six-year period reveals that one out of four resulted from a death, paralysis or other serious injury.

That analysis, produced by Harris & Harris of Kentucky Inc., an insurance brokerage, as a tool to teach fraternities risk management, found that alcohol had been an important factor in more than 80 percent of most types of claims, including claims for sexual assaults, fights and falls from the roofs of fraternity houses.

Research by Harvard and Columbia Universities shows that 95 percent of all violent crime on campuses around the country are alcohol-related, and it documents the destructive secondhand effects of alcohol abuse on other students, especially at colleges with a high prevalence of binge drinking. Studies also confirm what many college administrators know: fraternity members are the students most likely to engage in binge drinking.

Yet many of the same institutions now waging educational campaigns against alcohol abuse and student violence continue to handle fraternity crimes with all the leniency and discretion a closed-door system of justice can afford.

Where fraternities are strong, they are often disciplined in courts of their own or in student-organization courts, responsible to the same university administrators who promote Greek life. Fraternity codes of silence, demands for group loyalty and opportunities for group retaliation often frustrate investigators and intimidate witnesses, critics say. And when student courts do mete out significant penalties, a fraternity appeal to the administration -- bolstered by fraternity alumni -- often results in the sanction being reduced or overturned.

"They'd be crazy not to appeal," said Claudia Schamp, who directs the Office of Greek Life at the University of Georgia. "We run around here like Rambo trying to figure out the facts -- you almost become like a pseudo-police officer and lawyer to get at the truth -- and then we get the rug pulled out from underneath us. It's very, very frustrating."

All elements of a campus justice system, including the campus police, ultimately answer to top college administrators. Seventy percent of campus police departments have full arrest power, giving them great discretion to send cases straight to district attorneys or to keep them in-house for proceedings that range from elaborate trials before student justices to mediation by a single administrator. Most offenses handled by such systems involve infractions like drinking by underage students. But increasingly at colleges across the country, administrators say, they make use of student conduct codes to judge student crimes as serious as assault and arson.

William R. Bracewell, who presides over one of the most elaborate student judiciaries in the country as director of judicial programs here at the University of Georgia, denies that fraternities are favored. In fact, he said, fraternities on campus "perceive us as very anti-Greek." But he proudly proclaims his own fraternity ties, acquired as a late initiate because he could not afford to join when he was a student. He said he had served on his fraternity's national board and in the national conference that represents 62 American fraternities with 5,500 college chapters.

Like other supporters of fraternities, Mr. Bracewell said the problems of a few were too often used to discredit a system that offers lifelong friendships and personal growth to the vast majority of its members.

Mr. Bracewell makes no secret of his loathing for the Georgia Supreme Court decision in The Red and Black v. Board of Regents, which opened the door to the coverage of student court hearings here -- in theory. In practice, complains the newspaper publisher, Harry Montevideo, the university has done everything to frustrate coverage, from scheduling fraternity cases late at night to charging up to $50 a case in copying fees.

"I am an educator," Mr. Bracewell declared, looking very much at home on a campus where the Corinthian columns are three stories high and incoming male freshmen are asked their grandfather's fraternity. "I am not part of the criminal justice system. I am not a prosecutor. I've been pushed into a role that I am most uncomfortable with."
 

On Fraternity Row Patterns of Crime Called 'Frightening'
 

The center of gravity of fraternity life at the University of Georgia is a few blocks off campus on South Milledge Avenue, where antebellum-style homes sport Greek letters above white-columned verandas. The campus police have no jurisdiction here, and the local police tread gently.

In the last academic year, when two unrelated rapes were reported at one fraternity on this tree-shaded street, the Athens-Clarke County police refused for weeks to reveal the name of the fraternity, Beta Theta Pi. No charges were ever filed.

The university's official crime statistics brochure, "Safe & Secure," lists no rapes in 1994. But just down the avenue in a plain brick office building, the nonprofit advocacy organization Safe Campuses Now has a different set of numbers. In an unpublished survey of 918 sorority women and 240 fraternity men conducted at their houses one night this year, 79 of the women, or 8.6 percent, said they had been the victims of acquaintance or date rapes, and 5 percent of the men -- 12 of them -- said that they had committed such rapes.

The survey, conducted by Michael Parker, a graduate student in psychology, showed even higher percentages when the question was more oblique: nearly 11 percent of the men, who were surveyed anonymously, agreed with the statement "I have continued sexual activity even after my partner said no," and 18.8 percent said they had engaged in sex with someone they felt was reluctant.

"It's scary how many sexual-assault cases come from fraternity parties that people will never know about," said Ruth Anne Smrekar, who served simultaneously as an advocate in the student judiciary and as a counselor at the local rape crisis center, where she saw many student victims. "It's frightening, and you can't say anything. You know certain ones are bad, and you can't go to the sorority and say, 'You really shouldn't have socials with them.' "

For nine fraternities on South Milledge alone, police computer records show 43 incident reports between October 1994 and the end of 1995, including reports of a rape, a battery and five burglaries. None was counted in the official university crime statistics, published to comply with the 1990 Federal Right to Know and Campus Security Act. The law requires colleges to report crimes that occur at recognized student organizations off campus as well as on campus, but that provision is widely ignored. And off-campus fraternities exist in the middle of the blind spot.
 

The Response Colleges Buffeted By Many Pressures
 

Fraternities are a conundrum of university life, explained E. T. Joe Buchanan, a veteran dean and a lawyer, who recently told a plenary session of the 1,000-member Association for Student Judicial Affairs that the secret to long service in a large public land-grant institution was "never messing with athletics or fraternities."

The same fraternities often dominate undergraduate social life and the ranks of alumni donors. Alumni who belonged to fraternities or sororities are up to three times as likely to donate to their colleges, a University of Indiana study found. In an era of uncertain job prospects for college graduates, fraternities seem to offer added value: useful connections in the real world, more attractive or affordable housing than in the dormitories and the aura of fun demanded of colleges that promote themselves like cruise lines.

But social intolerance is increasing for what Mr. Buchanan, a past national board member of Lambda Chi, described in an interview as "the big three" -- hazing, alcohol abuse and sexual assault -- and bad publicity and legal liability are making colleges skittish about the trade-offs. Some institutions, like the University of Maryland, have responded to fraternity scandals with ambitious programs to set and enforce standards.

Others, like the University of Virginia and the University of Colorado at Boulder, have chosen an arm's length relationship, leaving the fraternity problem to local prosecutors. Technically, that does not protect fraternities, said Mr. Buchanan, now the dean of Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach and a past president of the American College Personnel Association.

"But as a practical matter," Mr. Buchanan said, "whoever is the prosecutor in that county probably graduated from that institution, and probably was on the student judiciary and a member of one of the three or four most prestigious fraternities on the campus. And he can say, 'We have serious crime in this county -- why should we prosecute students?' "

Both institutional approaches often lead to campus lessons in cynicism. At Miami University of Ohio, for example, when a scandal related to hazing and alcohol rocked the Sigma Chi fraternity two years ago, students saw the fraternity's three-year disciplinary suspension abruptly reduced -- without any formal appeal proceedings -- to the equivalent of two semesters.

"It's all about alumni status and their ability to mobilize funds," said Emily Hebert, now an editor at The Miami Student newspaper, who was a freshman at the time. "For two days, there was an influx of Mercedes-Benzes, lawyers and doctors with Sigma Chi bumper stickers on their cars."

While students were kept in ignorance of the details of the case, the accounts that circulated served as a powerful deterrent against future whistle-blowing. "One of the pledges turned them in, so they beat him up, hosed him down and made him eat hallucinogenic mushrooms," said Michael Sommers, who sits on the student court of appeals and also writes for the student newspaper. "He left the campus and it was never made public."

Brian Breittholz, the head of the Office of Greek Life at Miami University of Ohio, was dismissive of such stories but will still provide no specifics. He did say, "The rumor that there were the big Mercedeses and payoffs, that did not happen." The fraternity's national board "cleaned house" at the local chapter, he said, expelling most members from the fraternity and choosing about 10 to rebuild it.

Criminal prosecution was considered, he added, but in Ohio, where hazing is a fourth-degree misdemeanor, "the support you're going to find from the local law enforcement is pretty minimal." In an interview, John Holcomb, the longtime local prosecutor, was quick to acknowledge his own fraternity ties with the cry, "I'm an A.T.O., the great big hairy-chested men."

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, where the student activities center is named for the Coors Brewing Company, administrators maintain that they have no control over off-campus Greek organizations even though they provide them with a campus center and a staff of adviser-advocates.

An 18-year-old pledge once stumbled out of the off-campus Delta Tau Delta fraternity into the arms of an administrator from the University of Colorado police department, located next door. While fraternity members shouted from the front porch not to say anything, the pledge passed out and had to be rushed to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. He had been forced to drink shots of vodka every time he made a mistake in a game of fraternity trivia. The campus police declined to bring charges.

In 1994, it was a 19-year-old Pi Kappa Alpha pledge who had to go to the hospital when the University of Colorado police found him vomiting and barely conscious in a dormitory room after a "Big Brother Week" ritual. In the same semester, an 18-year-old freshman, Amanda MacDonald, died after a drunken fraternity man lost control of a car on which she and others were "roof surfing" after a fraternity drinking party. Tighter drinking policies were announced.

But the following fall, an intoxicated 19-year-old woman at a Delta Sigma Chi party was physically forced into a bedroom and raped repeatedly by a fraternity member and his guest.

"We'd see that every year," Mary Keenan, an assistant prosecutor with the Boulder County District Attorney's Office, said of gang rapes at the fraternities' fall drinking parties. "One girl becomes so intoxicated she's not ambulatory. They put her in a room, turn out the lights, and she's being raped in the dark and she has no idea who's doing it.

"Oh, and the brotherhood is amazing," she added. "I tried to interview witnesses in connection with this case, guys who had seen the victim curled up in a ball, crying in the hall. It was like this code of secrecy. Their allegiance to their fraternity was much stronger than their allegiance to the truth."

What made the case unusual were the guilty pleas Ms. Keenan got. One man, Justin Lips, was sentenced to five years in prison last year, while the other, Daniel Clark, got 90 days in the Boulder County jail and a three-year deferred prison sentence. The case helped prompt a campaign by the police and the Boulder community called "Enough Is Enough," which made fraternities a target last year in a crackdown on drinking by underage students. Some 2,500 summonses were issued in the police raids, leading to some $21,000 in fines per fraternity party. The fraternities formally capitulated after three months, declaring that alcohol would no longer be served at any fraternity house. For the first time in memory, Ms. Keenan said, no fraternity party rapes were reported last fall.

The measures taken by the Boulder police included warning the parents of incoming freshmen as well as insurance carriers about the fraternities in violation of alcohol laws, which highlights what is not being done elsewhere by campus police and college judicial programs.
 

A Spotlight Student Records At Heart of Struggle
 

In John Higdon's case at the University of Georgia, the student organizations court found Sigma Phi Epsilon guilty on six counts of hazing, alcohol misuse and disorderly conduct and sentenced the fraternity to five years' full suspension.

The fraternity, shocked at being disbanded, fully expected Charles B. Knapp, the university president, to reduce the sanction on appeal, as he had done in many other cases. But this time, he let the punishment stand.

In Red and Black v. Board of Regents, the Georgia Supreme Court wrote: "We are mindful that openness in sensitive proceedings is sometimes unpleasant, difficult and occasionally harmful. Nevertheless, the policy of this state is that the public's business must be open, not only to protect against potential abuse but also to maintain the public's confidence in its officials."

The ruling declared that nonacademic disciplinary records were not educational in the meaning of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act. But last year, after intense lobbying by college officials around the country, the Department of Education came down on the other side: disciplinary records are educational, the department ruled, unless Congress says otherwise.

There has been neither a criminal prosecution nor a civil suit in Mr. Higdon's case. As is typical in hazing cases, he blamed himself at first and still hoped to join the fraternity. He asked for his mother's silence. Now they both believe that the public attention made the sanction stick.

"He was essentially as close to death as it is possible to be," said his mother, Laura Lee Ashley, who is herself a nurse. "I explained to John that I did not want that to ever happen to another mother's or father's child."