I read that article. It was pretty disgusting.
As a first year college student in the 80s, I went to frat parties at Dartmouth and Amherst occasionally. I witnessed a lot of the stuff described in that article. The frats were in beautiful old buildings with high ceilings, large windows, and gorgeous curving hardwood staircases. Incredible architecture.
And your shoes stuck to the floors because they were permeated with old beer. So were the walls (also sticky). Everything stank of stale beer. On a weekend night, beer-ponging frat boys made a point of throwing up everywhere. The beautiful buildings had been trashed. I gave up on those parties during my first semester!
But then, once, a friend with high school pals at MIT took me to Boston with her. We went to a fraternity there and thought we'd accidentally meandered into someone's house. It was clean. There were healthy potted plants. Someone took two cans of our beer and left us a note and $2 to pay for them. Talk about a contrast.
I'm not saying that MIT is perfect and I get that college kids want to blow off steam. I used to blow off steam. I returned to MIT frequently, and we had our share of drunken fun. Yet destroying buildings and acting like thugs was never part of the program. Actually, a lot of people I met were oddly proud of spending the night in the library from time to time.
