I paid my way through college with a combination of a Stafford Loan and working menial jobs. But often, there were shortfalls, and I couldn’t afford some expenses that would come up, like food.

Fortunately, when I was a fraternity pledge in the first semester of my freshman year, I was sent to cover for one of the brothers as a busboy for a sorority. I went the...

Each year, our fraternity house in College Park, MD, had to undergo city inspections to ensure compliance with housing and life safety codes. These inspections were conducted by the City’s Department of Public Services.

The list of things to repair in the house was long. If I remember correctly, we’d have around one-hundred or more items to fix or replace around the ho...

My college career kicked off in the fall of 1988, the day my dad dropped me off at Cumberland Hall-affectionately known as “Scumberland”-at the University of Maryland.

From the start, I had one clear goal: join the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. The parties and the lifestyle were intoxicating, and I knew I wanted in. Beyond the fun, the recruitment literature promi...

I decided to join a fraternity sometime during the spring of my junior year in high school.

The town where we lived, Laurel, MD, was a generic strip mall suburb. We lived in the central part of town, a predominantly middle-class area of townhouses, apartments, and run-down single-family homes.

On a typical Friday night, if we weren’t working as cashiers at Peopl...