In October 2008, a Princeton freshman should have died. During a reunion of Sigma Alpha Epsilon alumni at a campus tailgate, a freshman pledge was made to consume dangerous amounts of Everclear. Later that day, the pledge was rushed to the University Medical Center at Princeton, where doctors found he had a blood alcohol level of 0.40.
Each Thursday evening, 45 Princeton students cloaked in black robes meet by candlelight and swear an oath of loyalty to a hooded figure known to them as Most Noble Archon.“Si vis perfectus esse, vade, vende quae habes et da pauperibus, et habebis thesaurum in caelo; et veni, sequere me.”
Six years ago this spring, in a second-floor classroom in Frist Campus Center, there was a meeting that may have been the first of its kind. It was also the last.
Stereotypes surrounding Princeton’s sororities and fraternities are not uncommon on a campus with an unusual and often hostile relationship to its Greek organizations.
One night during the fall of his freshman year, John Burford ’12 found himself at the Show & Tel strip club on the south side of Philadelphia with six other Princeton freshmen. All seven were pledge brothers in Princeton’s chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and they had made the 45-mile trip south because Burford had specific instructions from the older brothers in the fraternity: Make a visit to “the hot seat.”
