TAKE THEIR TICKETS
Bob Stoops did a good and right thing that we should all know was right and good. Oklahoma football cancelled practice and instead made a silent display of walking out and praying together as a team. OU as a whole reacted grandly to a video of a University of Oklahoma SAE member singing a racist song with a bus full of his friends: a day after it hit the internet the fraternity was booted off campus and their letters were torn off the house. The President of the university called them a "disgrace." That happened, and should have happened.
That's all good. The weirdness that remains for us is considering why fraternities exist at all on a college campus. This is an honest curiosity: we have no idea why they exist, or why anyone would pay to belong to one-- or most importantly to the concerns of this website, why you'd ever allow them to have a seating block in a football stadium every damn year.
And before we go there: no, we didn't ever want to pledge one, as the idea of paying for friends seemed weird. Any professional concerns about the value of networking were eliminated by having no professional concerns that made any sense, or had any hopes of making any money whatsoever.
More importantly: we never wanted to hang out with a bunch of dudes. That made zero sense for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that women could get into parties and acquire booze and contraband way, way more easily than a guy could. Women, for a dude living alone for the first time, were a godsend: they reminded you to behave like a human, wash your clothes at least bi-monthly, and not to do things that...well, that fraternity members were known for doing.
We knew one reason to join a frat, and it's one that made only marginal sense if you wanted to sit with a bunch of people you paid to be friends with: you got a block of seats at football, and those seats would be sort of the same each time. Why they got these was a matter of sad campus politics too tedious to recall, but they got them, and get them at other schools across the SEC and beyond. (And in some cases, lose them when they don't show up to games, or leave early.)
So SAE's probably been punished enough, save one thing: if they have a seating block at SAE, break it up and take their tickets. If we were an OU fan, it's what we'd want. Not that they be banned forever from the stadium just so we could feel better about ourselves, but for a season because that's not something we tolerate as fans of [INSERT TEAM HERE].
If they take it a step further and take their tickets, we'd prefer that they refund them, of course. They don't deserve to have money their money stolen, as tempting as it might be to consider. But like football clubs in Europe do to racist fans, you do quietly take them, and hope that they apply next year for general admission seating like everyone else. It's a symbolic gesture that serves as a reminder of how equal we all are in the eyes of the lord, and more importantly in the sight of your local football ticket office agent.