Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America

by Anthony B. Bradley

What makes a fraternity great is the character of each man in a chapter committed to self-improvement and dedicated to the pursuit of honor, virtue, and excellence.

College campuses are desperate for a generation of men willing to pursue “the heroic,” and college fraternities are logical organizations to cultivate. For chapters rebellious enough to forge a countercultural path, they have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to foster unprecedented greatness at scale.

Men join fraternities because they want to be great men, and they seek a community of like-minded men in the pursuit of excellence. Men join fraternities because they want to be around men who are going to push them to better themselves. Men join fraternities because they want to see good men transformed into great men who leave their mark on the world.

Reckless fraternities are “Peter Pan” fraternities, brimming with men who don’t want to grow up, and it is these irresponsible and immature boys who make it a regular practice to recruit terrible men into their brotherhoods.

The self-serving man focuses his relationships on what other people can do for him. He’s primarily concerned with how other people can add value to his life, and uses people to that end. Everything he does is for the service of self. His own advantage leads his pursuit of relations, and dictates his choice of major, friends, and so on. “What’s in this for me?” is the question driving his decisions.

Heroic men are driven by questions of “How can I help?” and “What can I learn?” They seek reciprocal relationships, but are confident enough not to keep score.

Despite the bad press, research proves that fraternities foster positive mental health, serve as a success accelerator for students, and engender tremendous loyalty and connection among alumni to support their alma mater.2

Aimless violence is, of course, at the heart of self-serving, self-centered, and self-preserving misconduct, and we will only eradicate it if we find a solution to the problems of disordered fraternities that frees those involved, rather than restricts them.