For Patrick Williams, his ideal of fraternity brotherhood was shattered before he could even be crowned a full-fledged Sigma Chi brother.
“Pledging was one of the worst experiences of my life,” the 46-year-old marketing consultant told The Post about his Greek experience, which happened 25 years ago as a freshman at the University of Utah.
“The sh-t that they did” — including dunking the young men in ice water until they couldn’t feel their legs, he recalled, and then forcing them to march across campus — “was bonkers.”
Williams has become one of a growing number of former frat boys vocally criticizing the collegiate Greek system on social media — in the wake of a host of allegations against fraternities at Cornell, Arizona State and Penn State, where a frat house drug ring was busted in August.
His hope is to shine a light on practices that derail campus life altogether, and convince young boys to steer clear of fraternities.
Before he pledged, Williams was a bright-eyed 21-year-old who was starting school just after completing a Mormon mission.
Growing up hearing his family’s positive experiences in the Greek system — Williams’s father and cousins were in Sigma Chi; his mother was a Delta Gamma — he was excited to join the same frat as his family with hopes of making lifelong friends and meeting girls.
“I had a lot of respect for my dad and my cousins, so I thought, ‘Hey, this would be a really cool, stand-up thing to do,’” he said.
But then, Williams told The Post, the horrific pledging process began.
To start, Williams and his fellow pledges were instructed to clean up “poo and pee and sh-t” in the fraternity’s then brand-new house. “They purposely threw up all over the place because they knew we were going to come in and clean it.”
“We were spit at, we [got] thrown beer on us — they made us run around the campus half-naked,” said Williams.
The worst, he said, were the “Friday Night Fun” sessions where his pledge class was locked in a dank basement for hours as fraternity brothers screamed low-blow personal insults directly into their faces “just taking turns telling us how sh-tty we are, just to make us miserable.”
Sometimes the abuse also turned physical.
Williams described being dunked in an ice bath repeatedly after forgetting the answers to fraternity “quiz” questions like Sigma Chi’s founding date and original members. “One time I was borderline hypothermia… I couldn’t even walk because my feet were like so frozen.”
Another time, the brothers were shoved, blindfolded, into the back of a car and made to walk barefoot down a snow-covered ski slope.
“I kept thinking how weird it was,” said Williams. “If you wanted to attract new people into your organization, why would you treat them like sh-t?”
In the end, the final straw for Williams came during the last week of pledging, when he says the group was “kidnapped,” taken to a cabin and told to fight in the snow to prove their loyalty.
“I walked out right there in the middle of the whole thing,” he recalled. “I had like all these other brothers like come chase after me and I was like ‘No, dude, I am done with this. This was so wrong.”
But while Williams remains anti-fraternity life until changes are made, other former frat bros with mixed experiences on Greek Row are mobilizing to try and reform fraternity life from within.
Among the “fraternity fixers” is Dr. Michael Ayalon, a 51-year-old Sigma Pi alum at the University of Buffalo. Ayalon remains proud of his fraternity affiliation even though he was physically assaulted during his own hazing process.
He told The Post that in 1994, he was blindfolded for his fraternity initiation ceremony, then swiftly branded on the chest with a hot wire hanger without his knowledge, much less his consent.
“I had a difficult time with it,” Ayalon recalled, sharing that he broached the abuse with his new brothers the next day and vowed it would stop with his pledge class. “I immediately knew that it needed to end.”
But after the hazing stopped, Ayalon says he “loved” the rest of his fraternity experience. He loved the raucous parties as much as the community service shifts at a Buffalo soup kitchen, and said that the general brotherly bonding was “formative” to his young life.
“There is no question that it helped with friendship, networking opportunities and leadership experience. Beyond just that, it gave me a sense of belonging in college that I desperately needed at that time,” he told The Post, noting that a sorority sister at Buffalo was even his doctorate’s dissertation chair. “It’s an unspoken bond,” he said.
Still, Ayalon now recognizes that his frat’s regular keg parties “were risk management problems” because of underage chuggers and zero education around hard drugs. “I’ve seen the dangers and it’s just not worth the risk,” Ayalon conceded.
To help fraternities move into the modern era, Ayalon founded Greek University, an organization that helps Greek chapters and their members make safer, stronger choices during college.
He insists that fraternities and sororities are still a net positive, as long as conversations on consent and bystander intervention are mandatory.
“It gives students the opportunity to practice doing the right thing before they’re faced with a real crisis,” Ayalon told The Post.
But Kyle Hall, a proud 62-year-old Pi Kappa Alpha alum at the University of Alabama, doesn’t believe frat boys have anything to apologize for.
Hall believes so deeply in the good of fraternities, he told The Post that he considers their positive contributions to society “the best kept secret in the country right now.”
Hall says social media is the real villain in the country’s frat bro reckoning — not the brothers themselves.
“I could write all these things that we said, did, or whatever-ed, versus the way it is now, and there just wouldn’t be that big of a difference,” Hall, who lives in Birmingham, a short 45 minute drive from his alma mater, told The Post.
Hall said that his own “knucklehead” drunken behavior at Pi Kappa Alpha mirrors the typical hijinx at frat houses today. including typical pranks like public keg stands and building an entire pond in their frat house backyard for a party, along with “driving intoxicated more than we should have.”
But now, said Hall, the bros have a head-scratching desire to share it online.
To Hall, the recent string of “heartbreaking” fraternity incidents — like the Cornell allegations and subsequent protests, and the Penn State drug arrests — point to a few bad apples, not a systemic danger that poisons the whole barrel.
“Am I ashamed of my associations with fraternities? Absolutely not,” Hall said, adding that his three grown sons all joined Greek organizations as college students — a decision he’d still support today. “I still believe in the process.”
Hall said that process involves young men coming together in the name of brotherhood and community service.
The former Gamma Alpha Pike advisor shared that he regularly sees frats raising money for important causes, including survivors of sexual violence. (The Delta Rho Pike chapter at Linfield University in McMinneville, Oregon held a local “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” event this past April, which raised nearly $5,000 for the cause.)
“They can get those phones out and take a video of the dumbest things,” Hall admitted. “But they can do 15 incredibly wonderful things, and never think about advertising that.”
Hall also stressed that when it comes to any assault allegations, the public should let the U.S. judicial system serve its purpose, even calling the online Cornell outcry “a witch hunt.”
“We’re going to wait until the evidence comes out,” said Hall. “We’re going to give those young men due process in our minds, because that’s the fair thing, the way we do it in the United States,” he continued. “We don’t prosecute people online.”
Williams, for his part, still doesn’t believe that fraternities belong on collage campuses, and he’s made sure to impart that belief onto his 18-year-old son, who will soon begin college.
“He told me he doesn’t want to join a frat because he wouldn’t want to buy his friends,” said Williams, alluding to the bank-breaking dues charged by many Greek organizations. His son has also said “he doesn’t want to be in that toxic environment” — a belief that makes his dad proud.
“It’s important,” he said. “I’m proud that he would stand up for himself and his morals.”
Instead of standing upside-down on the back of a keg.
