Introduction

Abstract

National Lampoon’s Animal House, a well-known 1978 movie about college life, now appears quite outdated. The reason why has nothing to do with the wild members of the Delta Tau Chi fraternity depicted in the film. For 800 years students have always posed moral challenges to university leaders and these leaders have always grumbled about the moral lives of students. Even from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, Rainer Schwinges tells us university leaders complained:

Students are bawling and brawling, carousing and whoring, singing and dancing, playing cards and chess, are addicted to dice and other games of chance, are up and about town day and night, are swanking around in inappropriate, fashionable clothing, are behaving provocatively to burghers, guild members, and town law-and-order forces, are carrying arms, and are even making use of them.³

Life at American universities proved no different. In 1849, soon after the creation of fraternities, University of Michigan professors complained about this “monster power” that threatened to bring “debauchery, drunkenness, pugilism, dueling … disorder and ravigism.”⁴ Complaints about the moral conduct of students and the negative influence of their organizations have always existed.

If trees or wild beasts grow, men, believe me, are fashioned …If this fashioning be neglected you have but an animal still.

—Desiderius Erasmus, 1529¹

We bring all of you here, brim full of needs and desires and hormones, let you loose on each other like so many animals in a wildlife sanctuary and hope for the best.

—Professor Andrew Abbott to the University of Chicago’s Class of 2006²