Dr. Anthony Bradley is on a quest to make fraternities virtuous again. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done,” he tells me. “I’m essentially bailing out water on the sinking Titanic.” The problem he’s confronting is well engrained in American culture and media: a quick Google search yields a variety of negative coverage of campus Greek life—accounts of everything from alcoholism and sexual abuse to hazing-related injuries and even deaths.
Yet Dr. Bradley is trying to speak past the stereotypes with his new book, Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America, which makes the case for reenvisioning the idea of fraternities—from simple ways to party and network to the formation of men capable of making productive contributions to society. Bradley frames his argument against the backdrop of Abolish Greek Life, a movement calling for the removal of Greek groups from campuses nationwide His is an aspirational case for how fraternities can be so much more than what they often are. Heroic Fraternities includes several lengthy interviews with fraternity members from campuses around the nation, allowing the reader to understand the struggle of Greek life in the words of the participants themselves.
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