When I went to college, fraternities and sororities provided two things that were considered vital to a college education.  First, they gave students a place to live, which always beat the crap out of not having a place to live in schools where there weren’t enough dorm rooms to house all their students. Second, they threw parties.  Back then, this was considered a good thing by all. Without parties, weekends were a drag. We wanted to have some fun. Everyone, of every gender, color and sexual preference, wanted to have some fun. Parties were fun.

Somewhere along the line, fun went out of fashion.  Well, maybe the kind of fun that could be found at a fraternity party.  Fun morphed into live-twitting a lecture on social justice while in a state of total sobriety. Good times? To each his own, I suppose.

But the University of Alabama has taken the Greek life fun to a new depth of cleanliness that only a grandmother could love.  Quietly, they’ve instituted mandatory drug testing for fraternity members.

Six current and former members of the impacted chapters told AL.com over the past month that they now require their members to submit to periodic urinalysis at a UA facility in order to maintain good standing with the organizations and the school. The university confirmed that it is drug-testing members of some Greek organizations, though it declined to say how many or which ones. In addition to testing urine, the university has played a role in testing samples of some fraternity members’ hair for evidence of drug use over a period of months.

The testing has no basis in reasonable suspicion, nor any contention that there is an overarching necessity that might conceivably justify a broad-based, suspicionless requirement, as is the contention with student athletes.  Nope. It’s just that the school assumes that dude bros are inclined to use drugs, and it’s going to test them to put an end to it.

At the beginning of the school year, every active member of the Greek organizations participating in the drug-testing program was required to pass a comprehensive drug screening. The tests were coordinated by the organizations in conjunction with the university and carried out via the MPACT (Maximizing Potential through Academics Community & Treatment) substance abuse program, part of a collaborative effort between the university’s Student Health Center and the Dean of Students’ Office of Student Conduct.

After the initial assessment, several members of each of the Greek organizations – all of which cooperated with the university on the rollout of the testing regime – are chosen at random each week throughout the school year to undergo another round of urinalysis.

While there are individuals who appear to bristle at the command to pee into a cup, fraternities appear to be cooperating in the venture. Indeed, some had instituted their own drug testing requirements before the university decided to impose the requirement.

Greek organizations independently electing to undergo drug-testing is not a new phenomenon at the University of Alabama. But this semester appears to be the first in which the university has carried out mandatory urinalyses of fraternity members in accordance with its rules instead of fraternities selecting third-party providers to implement in-house drug-testing protocols determined by their members and leaders.

Though the practice has become much more common in recent years, individual fraternity chapters have required their members to submit to drug tests under certain extreme circumstances for years. In 1991, for instance, members of UA’s Alpha Tau Omega chapter “voted to voluntarily submit to drug testing to clear their organization’s name” in the wake of a major hazing, alcohol and drug scandal, the New York Times reported at the time.

While it’s somewhat more understandable that a fraternity in trouble would offer up testing as a way to convince a college that it wasn’t totally out of control, a concession to the school marms, the fraternities had gone well beyond that in recent years on their own. Maybe being the “clean and sober” house was a selling point during rush?  Maybe they feared that Greek life was about to be crushed in the current campus climate, and it was a Hail Mary to keep the house alive?

In any event, it’s one thing for a club to decide to make membership contingent on clean urine, and another for a public institution like the University of Alabama to impose a suspicionless requirement of drug testing upon a discrete group of students.

While fraternities seem to be institutionally cooperating with anal probes drug testing, individual students are less than thrilled by the mandate:

“They’re killing the fraternity from the inside without even knowing it. It’s just a little too babysitting-like. We’re 21, we’re adults,” said a current Alabama student who didn’t want to be identified criticizing the Greek system. He was a member of SAE for more than three years before quitting the fraternity after the chapter announced it would be testing brothers’ hair for drugs beginning this past spring semester.

“When they switched over to wanting to hair-test everybody – they did test everybody – I was like f*** that. I didn’t want, like, a fat bald spot where they f***ing shaved my head. You can feel it. It’s like a little chunk of hair so they have enough samples because it has to be conclusive. It’s got to be, like, three months’ worth.”

The retort of the humorless is that drugs are bad (even Nancy Reagan said so), and should be eradicated from campus and the lifestyle of youth. Who can argue against that?  And if any group exercising a First Amendment right to freedom of association deserves to be subject to mandatory good behavior scrutiny, it’s fraternities, as everyone knows they’re hotbeds of rape and debauchery.

But there appears to be no one willing to question the violation of the Fourth Amendment right to be free of government-mandated suspicionless search.  After all, the Greek system is caught in the crosshairs of controversy, struggling to survive an onslaught of criticism that attacks its very existence.

Getting along in the climate of political correctness means suffering the indignity of drug testing, whether constitutional or not, just to put off the haters for another day, as fraternities seem to embody every -ist condemnation a modern American institution of higher learning can muster. To challenge what is facially a violation of the constitutional rights of members would be to risk the full wrath of the nannies of all quarters.

That fraternity dudes are willing to give up their right to pee wherever they prefer for the sake of maintaining a Greek system until after the current wave of political correctness passes is understandable.  That they do so at the sacrifice of constitutional rights is unfortunate.

That this emboldens schools to flagrantly violate the Constitution, much as they do when pronouncing that hate speech isn’t free speech, however, is a problem that may be far harder to overcome.  But hey, at least the frats can save money on handing out paddles to their new pledges, providing bubble wrap instead to ensure a safe and appropriate college experience.  That will certainly preserve the fraternity experience for generations to come.

H/T Josh Blackman