To the Editor,

I am a recent graduate of Binghamton University and I, like 90 percent of the students at the school, was never a member of a fraternity or sorority. But thanks to a recent article in the New York Times, the actions of a small group of students have been exposed. This reflects poorly on not only the entire Greek community, but the entire Binghamton University student body.

I was extremely disappointed by your reaction to the Greek Life scandal. Instead of challenging the administration’s claims and doing independent research, you chose to deny, deny, deny and stick your heads in the sand, which is what got BU (and many others) into this mess in the first place.

I realize there is no easy solution to this problem. If you do nothing, fraternities and sororities will feel like they “got away with it” and continue the hazing. If you ban them entirely, they will continue to exist underground and become indistinguishable from sadistic and unprofitable street gangs.

We can agree that Greek culture at BU is toxic and no amount of mandatory PR rallies or administrative plausible deniability will fix it. Drastic action is needed.

We are all culpable here: the fraternities and sororities that choose to treat their pledges in this manner, the pledges who tolerate the treatments and later encourage this type of behavior, the administration that pretended that nothing was going on until it realized that there may be a death if these shenanigans continue, and students who were more than happy to gleefully exchange rumors about “those crazy, cult-ish Greeks” and laugh at the poor bastards camped out in the Food Court.

I had the “pleasure” of living in Newing, next door to members of an on-campus fraternity. One morning I decided to go to the library extra early to study for a test. (God, I just sounded like the antithesis of a Newing resident here.)

I opened my door and saw several young guys (pledges) sitting down against the wall, wearing dirty, ragged sweatsuits and matching bandanas. They were horribly filthy with dirty faces and hands and smelling absolutely putrid. Remember that scene in “Slumdog Millionaire” in which the boy falls into a sewer? If that boy also got sprayed by skunks, he would have smelled like those guys.

Some of them were sleeping, but others had thousand-mile stares (normally reserved for POWs and concentration camp survivors) that I will never forget. But when I saw them I didn’t feel pity. Instead, I felt schadenfreude. These rich kids from Long Island were dumb enough to willingly subject themselves to that treatment. I held my nose and pretended I didn’t see them.

That’s what we all did.

Alex Turner

Class of 2012