Dispiriting news from my alma mater: University of Oregon receives five sexual assault reports within first week of classes.
Students began the fall term at the University of Oregon in Eugene on Monday. But by midday on Wednesday, university officials sent out a community safety warning about five reported sexual assault attacks on or near campus in the past week.
According to the safety alert, officials said four of the incidents involved university students, and the fifth occurred near the Alton Baker Dog Park, adjacent to campus. They said police arrested someone in the fifth case and that all students affected have been offered university support resources.
The UO must still be on the quarter system if classes start this late (we’ve been open for about 6 weeks already). This sounds familiar and universal, though. The school year starts, a lot of new students arrive, free of familiar constraints, and the asshole fraction of students (often frat boys) take advantage in horrible ways. I hope my former university follows through and culls the student body of these jerks, rather than giving them another chance to abuse. They should know that this behavior is not permissible or forgivable.
In case you didn’t know, the movie Animal House was set at the University of Oregon, in an actual frat house I lived several blocks away, on E 13th, and remember seeing the rather dilapidated old house, before it was finally torn down about the time I graduated. Tearing it down was probably a wise decision — it represented a poor example.
I spent my first semester at the university working too hard and earning straight As. Too many students think university is time to party. Tell your friends and family it’s not.
This is the mark of a sportsball school. Can’t have any of those football players declared academically ineligible before the bowl season is over.
While I was there, in the early ’80s, I actually lived in the Animal House house for a year. At the time, it was a share run by a couple of grad students and hadn’t been a frat house for years. I next moved into one of the great student co-ops down on 13th, which are still there today (AFAIK, erm, as of 3 years ago). Very much the opposite of a frat house, and a great experience. Frats have been a rape problem for a long time, they were then too.
@R. Selkirk
U of O does sportsball, like all big state universities, but it’s fame and focus is (was?) really on track/running. World-famous for that. Also has/had a great biology department, tho I went to computer science grad school there.
Back in the mid-’70s, at a Catholic university, we saw some of this rape culture.
Our dorm had a toga party, with trashcan punch.
My boyfriend (husband for 50 years now) and I watched as a pretty young lady was encouraged to get very drunk.
Guys would talk to her and move her “toga” down. They were offering to walk her to her room.
That’s when the geeky couple swooped in. I got her to talking, then we both walked her up to her room.
We encouraged her to lock her door and go to bed, then went to our room and did the same.
It has been happening a lot at U of Oregon.
Xpost from the previous Cornell thread. Looks like U. of Oregon still has a serious problem with their fraternities.
There are recent reports of 6 women being given drinks with date rape drugs at fraternity parties.
Looks like they are trying to compete with Cornell in crimes against women.
This happened two years ago.
Yesterday a report came out about another fraternity atrocity.
This frat in Arizona managed to kill a pledge by an overdose of alcohol.
That happened every few years at my old university, always involving a fraternity.
Finally, the administration had enough and set up a entering program featuring alcohol intoxication overdosing, what it is and how to avoid it. I haven’t heard of it happening since.
I did see a few cases of acute alcohol overdoses as an undergraduate that weren’t fatal but probably came way too close. At the time, it wasn’t really known by us kids that this could happen.
To be fair, it’s not a frat-specific nor a USA-specific thing, not just ‘It’s not just Cornell’.
Apparently, when institutional privilege, elite subcultures, and toxic peer dynamics mix, it becomes highly volatile.
cf. https://cheekmedia.substack.com/p/the-cornell-rape-case-is-not-an-outlier
(The Cornell rape case is not an outlier; it is a product of the same broken culture that pervades Australian colleges today
By Josephine Gazard, Oct 01, 2026)
or
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/25/sydney-scots-college-boys-charged-sexual-assault-appear-in-court-ntwnfb
(Scots College trio who allegedly sexually assaulted teen girl have faced ‘repercussions’, judge says
Three boys, two aged 14 and one aged 13, on bail and yet to enter a plea after alleged assault in Sydney’s east)
Society-wide still, big deal in India right now:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/30/rapes-triggers-mass-protests-indian-universities
CLEARLY, there are many Frat houses that are lacking a “Sexual Offender” warning sign outside.
OTOH, they’d probably be proud of it…
raven@#6:
I did see a few cases of acute alcohol overdoses as an undergraduate that weren’t fatal but probably came way too close. At the time, it wasn’t really known by us kids that this could happen.
By the time John Bonham and Bon Scott drank themselves to death, we all knew that was a thing.
Yeah, I started college in the mid-70s. We knew it was a thing. Most of us knew people who came awfully close to death, if not dead.
daulnay @3: The University of Oregon is well known for its football program, the Ducks have been a dominant team for decades. I’m not sure what the situation is now since I don’t follow sports to begin with or football in particular, but while the U of O’s track and field team is famous as well, I don’t think it’s actually as famous as the football team.
I had to look it up.
A bit after my time as an undergraduate.
I certainly know who Led Zeppelin and AC/DC are but didn’t remember these deaths.
The ones I remember well dying young were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison of the Doors, both apparently alcohol overdoses. And Janice Joplin from a heroin overdose. Those deaths hit us hard at the time.
Frats exist at some Canadian universities, but they’re no where near the thing they are in the US. I have no idea if the University of Saskatchewan had any when I went there in the late ’80s, but if they did they were pretty much invisible. But at the time The Red Eye, a paper put out by the Engineering Students Society, was notorious for its sexist and misogynist content.
There are some social clubs called “nations” on some Swedish Universities but there is no rumor of rape culture, or of more alcohol poisonings than elsewhere in the age group.
This implies it is a management problem at the places where it goes bad. Also, Swedish unis these days have students from all walks of life (free tuition) so the privilege bullshit is not around.
Apart from this, I have no advice. Except do not tolerate even a hint of the mentioned behavior. This may be harder than it sounds if the values are ingrained in asshole students from their homes.
If heavily inebriated people fall asleep, put them on their side, so vomit will not suffocate them.
To elaborate on Birger at 14, nations are social networking clubs for students who hail from the same province or region. They tend to exist at larger and older universities, in Sweden and Finland at least. At Helsinki uni (my alma mater) they are known for heavy alcohol consumption, compared to various other student clubs, because they have no other academic or hobby interest besides partying. Finnish media sometimes presents fraternities and sororities as a foreign equivalent to nations, which is quite inaccurate because there is no real Finnish equivalent to fraternities and sororities.
I didn’t get into AC/DC until Back in Black which was the debut album of Brian Johnson (not the longevity influencer). They hadn’t annoyed me yet. Then the Dirty Deeds album featuring Bon Scott was released in the US. I started getting into older AC/DC (actually not that old then) and preferred Bon Scott. The newer stuff stopped appealing to me as much. Sad that Bon Scott went out like that. They struck me as a scrappy band that might have played in fight clubs around Australia.
I recall John Bonham dying. I was getting into Zeppelin at the time. I wonder what they would have been like if Bonham hadn’t died. He’s respecyyeahyted as a great drummer, but there have been much better than him.
I always found fraternity and sorority stuff ridiculous when I went to university. I preferred to drink alone, yeah with nobody else…
In Finland (and Sweden, I think), the legal drinking age is 18 (and there are bars and night clubs which take 18-year-olds as customers) and people start university, when they’re typically 19 or 20 (the latter case for boys who have done their military service at 19). This gives the young people a better chance to learn how to consume alcohol and “hold their drink” while they are still living at home and in their original community. This could make them less vulnerable to accidentally drinking too much or being induced to do so, when they already understand how booze works.
To continue, the onus should still be on the frats, sororities and the university administration. I just think that the U.S. 21-years legal drinking age makes the problem worse and freshman students more vulnerable to be victimized.
Ice Swimmer, a bit to do with drinking culture.
Like, when I was in Spain age 10, my grandpa would stop and get me a caña (maybe 300ml of beer at most).
When I was in Adelaide (Australia) in 1973, for the last fiery Guy Fawkes’ Day, I was at the bonfire and got with some local kids.
They had some ‘longnecks’ (750ml beer bottles) and passed them around the group; each participant gurgled down and passed it on.
Difference: in one case, drinking is social, in the other, it is to get pissed.
Anyway. Drinking age in the USA basically promotes the binging. Peer group pressure right there.