Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road [View all]

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Rush After 'A Rape On Campus': A UVA Alum Goes Back to Rugby Road

Jia Tolentino
Today, 11:10 a.m.

It's a blue, cold Thursday in January and I'm walking down Rugby Road on the first night of fraternity rush at the University of Virginia, brushing past groups of identical gossiping boys in matching preppy outfits: fleeces, checked oxfords, khakis, boots. "Excuse me," they say politely when our coats touch, then turn back to each other and their offhand drawling: "What was that back there, Bronyfest?" "Not enough of a tobacco enthusiast for that house, I can't just sit around ripping cigs." "I wasn't feeling them, dude, they had, like, a serial rapist vibe."

I am startled at the boy who just threw that out in the winter night to his two friends, because all four of us are crossing the street on our way to Phi Psi, the fraternity whose huge Christmas-lit mansion is a landmark in the middle of the physical fraternity scene in a way that the fraternity itself—until Rolling Stone—was not. But the boys were talking about a druggier, prep-school frat; they're not talking about Phi Psi.

No one here is talking about Phi Psi, at least not "Phi Psi," the figural fraternity or the true, unchecked scourge of sexual assault that it was used to represent. (The frat has since been cleared of charges, with "no basis to believe that an incident occurred.&quot In fact, if there is a single male interacting with the Greek system—or even one human on campus generally—who wouldn't rather tuck away last semester as a bad dream, I won't hear about it over the next five days. It was enough that Sabrina Rubin Erdely's egregiously misreported gang rape story put everyone at Thanksgiving dinner with Grandma asking about consent mechanics between bites of mashed potato, but there were three undergraduate suicides, too, and Hannah Graham, a first-year girl found dead a month after she went to a party and then disappeared.

It was a lot. Everyone's ready to move on. Rush numbers are robust and steady, both for frats and sororities, which rope in a third of the undergraduate population: the boys in fleeces on the street are just trying to hurry up, bro, and belong. "Those guys are so Southern I felt racist just walking in," one says. "That one dude was gay as fuck," says another. Their elementary language belies both the bigoted underpinnings of the Greek system that are common to every Southern prestige structure—classism, racism, homophobia, sexism—as well as the genuine desire among many participants in these structures to process and transcend the bad blood that stains the corners of their party.