The peculiar status of PhD-employees

As usual, the caveats apply that this is about *most* humanities PhDs but not science PhDs who do get paid. I am not sure what people who are doing humanities research consider themselves to be doing, but in Science I would not consider myself to be ‘pursuing a PhD’, per se. Rather: my job is to do research and a PhD is an accidental byproduct of that.

Does this effect working conditions? Traditionally employment don’t give much autonomy; someone can tell you what to do, when and how, fix hours, move you between tasks. As a student requirements are mostly just handing in acceptable work by deadlines.

The past few years the Netherlands is seeing a large influx of foreign students pursuing a Phd degree. Students rather have a guaranteed job for 4 years with possibility of degree than face 27% unemployment in Greece or other southern countries. I think this might also be detrimental to research quality.

As a phd student in the uk i frequently wish we had the employment contract system. For one thing, a major point you miss is that you actually have to pay to live – without being am employee you find yourself constantly chasing funding to the great detriment of your work. As for whether phds are doing real research or not – if they are not, then your phds programs are poorly thought out. As a rule phd students contribute significantly to work of labs and insitutes – everything from the core content of their theses, contributions to papers, to even just explaining how computers work to some of the more “traditonal” professors. Frankly given the amount of work i see done by phd students doing anything less than paying them as employees amounts to exploitation.
As for where contract work is less flexible, that is entirely between the student and staff to arrange, much like it might be in a startup company. I know of labs that dont care whether the employees are in the office or not so long ss what needs to get done is done when it is supposed to.

This is far from my area of expertise, but my impression was that no one in their right mind pursued a PhD in the US without some sort of grant or scholarship from the school that paid for their living expenses, and that they all were required to teach or assist as part of the program. Again I could be wrong. So my impression is that they functionally are employees, but due to tradition or a scheme to get around employment laws everyone pretends they are students, though I can’t see how it is in the interest of the PhD candidates to keep up this pretense.

Who retains ownership of the dissertation, the PhD candidate or the university? Can the PhD candidate get the dissertation published elsewhere and earn royalties? Does the university press publish the dissertation and pay the PhD candidate royalties? Is there some sort of obligation to teach or assist in a lab? All of these are relevant questions.

Since the process ends in some sort of publishable paper, the implication is that its best to treat PhD candidates as employees working under s contract to deliver the paper, or to use a commercial publishing house model, would be best. Students should be people paying or paid for to receive instruction, which they can then use to somehow make their life better once they leave the academic system.

If you’re going to have the same number of paid PhD places and some new lecturers then you have increased the total funds allocated to universities, you’ve just done it by taking the money out of the social security budget that got there via the universities budget.

i know the us system (ucla) and have friends how got PhD in England (cambridge, kings clg) and all of those cases it works exactly as you describe for the phd-employee.

except that in america there is no worker benefit included because well there is none in the country anyway…

but in none of those cases the student paid for the PhD. and always had to teach. except the last year where the university pays him to write only.

I might add: it’s very tiresome to hear condescending remarks from science PhD students, either in the U.S. or elsewhere, who seem to be clueless about what their humanities counterparts are doing, as if what we do isn’t labor, that we don’t consider it work, and that we don’t expect it to be valued accordingly. It would be nice if we could just ditch the caveats about the differences between the humanities and sciences and acknowledge that all graduate students do labor and many of us want it to be viewed as much.

As a current graduate student, it’s hard not to find this objectionable!
You suggest that graduate students shouldn’t get paid maternity leave. In the US maternity leave is more a dream than a reality, but why shouldn’t grad students get it? It’s not as though grad students are so financially stable that they can handle a few months without pay. Other benefits such as paid holidays are harder to translate into the graduate experience. But I wonder if eliminating holidays would really translate into high cost savings.

Flipping this on its head, why should professors be considered ’employees’ for their research while graduate students shouldn’t? It’s not as though professors are doing radically different work–as you point out, graduate students are often doing professor’s research projects for them (at a significantly lower cost). In the US, once coursework is over graduate students basically cost their depts $20/hr + administrative costs. Your argument seems to be that the university should look for cost savings in the graduate population, which is already fairly inexpensive and low-status.

And I second the fact that grad students in the USA are in a tricky position, because the universities refuse to call them employees, and so won’t recognize any legal protections due to employees. ‘It’s not a job, it’s a relationship’ (where the obligations are hugely on the students’ side, especially if the university wants to get rid of troublemakers).

I think I’m going to mostly disagree with your position. Not 100%, but largely. Background: I got my original degree in Germany (I’m German) in the 90s in a very mathematical scientific field, then had an unsuccessful time as a PhD student in France, where cluelessness about what I was doing and bad choice of host lab and advisor led to my dropping out, then taught a while, finally getting a career in computing. After getting a job at a US public university, science called again, and I am now, after some solid private sector experiences, back about half-way through a PhD program in a different science field.

A few aspects relevant to your text. I’ll call the group of people “PhD-seeking researchers”, to cover both the student and the researcher/employee aspect.
1. I believe that being considered an employee first is the appropriate status for a PhD-seeking researcher. Yes, an employee who will spend substantial time learning, but from the level of professional maturity is, or should be, that of someone who has attained a qualification *already*. In a German Doktorandenstelle, and in the Research Assistantship that finances my stipend, this works out to a part-time (20h/week eg.) job, paid as such.
2. Treating the PhD-seeking researcher as an employee first clarifies expectations for the individual. Where I am right now, complaints by graduate students about being students when it suits the administration (eg, absence of benefits) and employees when THIS suits the administration (eg, for obligations of presence in the office and discipline) are common.
3. My dual status as a graduate student an as a research or potentially teaching assistant (employee) is a source of no end of hassle. For example, I managed to attract myself the fellowship that funds most of my post, though it is (by rules of the granting instutution [NASA]) in the name of my PhD advisor. A second, smaller, grant, is in my name in the instution’s grant management system. Neither completely covers my tuition, which leads to odd financial scrambling every single semester. I’m sure larger universities with better higher quality of managing their graduate students this sort of thing may be hidden from the individual, but even so tales are common where a PI goes to a graduate student 2 months before the end of a semester to announce that money has run out. This can have dramatic impacts on the PhD-seeking researcher that are entirely undeserved and leave them in substantially worse positions than scuffles in private employment at similar levels.
4. It is true that the habitus of a PhD-seeking researcher is an odd one. Somewhat of an apprentice, but an apprentice into the community of people who work (research, but not only) at the current state-of-the-art of one’s chosen field. Note that I don’t think that freshly minted PhD should go into academia by default. In some fields (network security, power systems engineering, many flavours of geology, chemistry) this sort of research is done to a large extent in private companies anyway. For myself, academia is not the most realistic of future options, either. The above doesn’t contradict preparing PhDs for a future that may well be outside academia.
5. Your main argument seems to be that the system is too expensive. Maybe. But I wonder, too expensive for whom and why? Is it the general lament of vanishing funds for public education? In which case I think there needs to be a little more resistance as this comes down to: corporations want to keep more of the profits for themselves and in general distribution towards the top 1-10% is the flavour of the day. I think it’s pernicious to give in willingly in the game to impoverish oneself.
6. Your other argument seems to be that the PhD-seeking researcher has less of an opportunity to define the topic themselves. Maybe. Maybe that could be fixed with attaching some of the positions to meritorious new graduates, who then can take them where they want, instead of the PIs. Also, it’s often not a bad idea to insert newly graduated apprentice researchers into existing research programmes. In retrospect, when I decided to go for a PhD on my old days, I wish I had thought about it from the angle of “I want to do a PhD — who has an open job and could fund me?” instead of just going along what one of my professors said (“your work on X is very interesting — have you thought about pursuing a PhD? I can’t fund you but we could attract soft money for the project…”). I’m doing well now, but it took me a long time to define the project because, frankly, I had no experience yet in the field. I see those of my peers who get funded under a large NSF grant, for example, getting done much of that work by the general thrust of the overarching project. I think if you want to be in research long-term, the post-doc time is just right to really fly with your own wings.

But I think the argument for those types of rights is quite strong. Do we really keep, for example, paid maternity leave from people who are often in their late 20s/early thirties? Is it a good idea to have them fall back to minimum welfare payments if they do end up unemployed after their PhD? I’m not sure what the case is for that.
I benefited greatly from a lot of the things that US PhD programs do right–access to a broader range of faculty, lots of freedom to choose a topic, etc. But I don’t see how that would have been affected by a different employment status (though, of course, in the US the rights that come with that are significantly fewer).

But even if we grant this case–while no doubt there are saving for the universities, I do suspect with djr and others that much of this is a bookkeeping trick. So, for example, I’d assume that there are, in fact, very few unemployed PhDs, so their (and their employers) contributions to unemployment insurance would for the most part just be lost to the unemployment insurance if you take away their employee status. I suspect the same is true for pensions, since most of them are going to qualify for full pensions once they’re at retirement age. So a lot of this “saved” money will just be missing at other points of the welfare state. You could make a political argument that it’s easier to get it back there, but that seems quite fishy.

I did an apprenticeship.

I believe that it’s the universities’ attitude toward teaching that is problematic, rather than the system of funding PhD candidates. Universities could allocate more funds to teaching staff, and less to hire PhD employees. But that’s decreasing universities’ publication output and, hence, their citation counts. We, in the Netherlands, sometimes tend to forget that education is the most important societal function of a university, and the reason why so much public funds are spent on universities.
I also believe that disqualifying the system of PhD-employees in a public debate will never convince policy makers to spend more money on lecturers. Probably, a more positive attitude toward the benefits of intensive teaching will yield more favorable results.

Chris Bertram @2:

Very often, we have really good people who want to come and study for a PhD but who lose out in the competition for public funds and who can’t afford to self fund. We end up with a postgraduate population (whose members meet a minimum quality threshold) which is skewed towards people who can afford to pay for themselves. I wish I had “jobs” to offer to the most talented.

Whereas, at the other end of the rainbow, tenured positions are offered to the most talented and not skewed toward people who can afford to self-fund. The contrast suggests an agency problem; if graduate students were running the system, many of them would be willing to be supervised by a more numerous and less financially secure faculty, and to later compete to join that faculty.

Daniel Davies made a modest proposal many years ago, arguing some clear benefits of a tenure system like this. Chris would (consistently) oppose a culture of self-funded “gentleman scholars” at both the predoctoral and faculty levels, but it’s illuminating that this is a live issue in the former case, and a mere whimsical dig in the latter.

I had some friends doing PhDs in Leiden, where their university department tried to reduce pay for PhDs as much as they could.

For example, they would hire people for a ‘part time’ PhD for 4 days per week, so the PhD would take 5 years instead of 4. Naturally, the workload was not adjusted and people were expected to work the same hours, just for 5 years at 80% pay. And theses would generally be considered insufficient at the end of the 5 years,an extra half-year without pay was an unspoken part of the deal.

PhDs were quite aware of this, and considered it an unavoidable aspect of doing a PhD in a field wihout much funding.

Thing is, I never heard anyone say that the saved money would go to fund more postdocs and lecturers. The claim was the money was used to create more PhDs position than would be possible otherwise. Which makes sense, also for Ingrid’s proposal to create PhD positions without benefits. If PhDs become cheaper, it becomes attractive for instituions to get more of them, and cut back on the more expensive positions

Even if an instutution starts out with the aim to create more downstream positions, I am not sure they can keep that aim under pressure. Once the budget starts to bite, there must be a tremendous temptation to reverse the policy of downstream jobs.

No. In many fields, if you don’t pull in the grants, you aren’t getting tenured.

A quibble, at least where grants are peer-reviewed. (I suppose the “gentleman scholar” category could be extended to researchers who come in with a bespoke corporate grant where the PI was chosen opaquely, but that’s a rare and broadly despised corner case.)

Joshua W Burton, @35: “if graduate students were running the system, many of them would be willing to be supervised by a more numerous and less financially secure faculty, and to later compete to join that faculty.”

This may be true but it doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea for the graduate students. Where I am, substantial numbers of faculty are non-tenure-track — not adjunct but research professors, who basically attract grants that fund their salaries, with some redistribution built into the system. This system has attractions for early career researchers and also many downsides that would need to be carefully managed, but in practice aren’t. The most salient one is the wall between academic faculty (involved in teaching and service, in addition to research) and research faculty (no teaching, very little to no service, all research) for such things as offering courses and advising students. My main advisor is in this situation, and he is uncomfortably (to me) aware that none of the tuition that is being paid into the university’s tuition pot under my name goes towards his salary. Most of that tuition is not for coursework, after all, but for “thesis advising”. Some research faculty set their eyes on a tenure track position, get it, and get into that (those that succeed tend to be pretty good professors, for research, teaching and advising). Others do extremely applied stuff, basically highly specialized scientific consulting to government and industry. They lack power and experience advising, and are explicitly discouraged from acquiring it.

” tenured positions are offered to the most talented and not skewed toward people who can afford to self-fund” — I’m still unsure if this was meant straight or ironically. Obviously people who are as early career researchers able to self-fund some small part of their research life (such as, can afford not to take a summer-school teaching appointment, self-fund conference participation and part of publication fees) have a small advantage in getting themselves into the right positions.

Yes, G @43 brings it to the point: It’s a problem to me that basically a left-wing blog (I know, one blogger speaking for herself) of established academics (mostly) suggests to push PhD-seeking researchers into precarious employment as an answer to limited funds for higher education and research.

(Also, I’m still intrigued by the numbers. 70,000 EUR vs. 200,000 EUR looks extreme. The comparison should not be with the 280 kEUR as obviously overhead and material would apply to everyone, whatever their pay arrangements or lack thereof. I’m familiar with a factor of 2 between net salary and cost-to-the-employer, that is, payroll taxes and state-mandated social security payments such as health insurance, pension, disability, and whatever else is mandated, but not a factor of 3. Also, how would the student’s health insurance be funded if they were only given a stipend?)

Any field should recruit the number of staff it needs, and treat those staff, junior and senior, with appropriate respect (and reward them with appropriate benefits). Academia feeds off a surplus of under-renumerated PhDs who additionally have poor long term career prospects (I should note that I’m a scientist, so my experience is not strictly comparable, but I think the main difference is that in science it’s relatively easy for PhDs to move onto post-doctoral positions for a few years – but there’s still a big bottleneck to getting permanent jobs. As someone running a group, I do feel uncomfortable about being the right side of the bottleneck, and earning my living off those the other side. But at least the post-docs get paid. As a Ph.D student (on a very small grant), I had the same work and the same career insecurity, but no compensation. Trading worse early career conditions for better longer term odds seems like a zero sum game at best, and probably something worse (given the powers that be would likely take any savings and cash them in elsewhere).

Part of the problem here is “people who consider it their calling to do a Ph.D.” On one hand, this should be part of the benefit of becoming an affluent, robotised society – people with free time on their hands choosing it to study. But this is a privelege you would pay for, just as you pay to play football at your local club. It can’t be your calling – your entitlement – to a track to a professorship, any more than its the calling of an amateur footballer to play for Man Utd. But, in any career that people positively want to do, the surplus of applicants is going to drive down rewards for all but an elite. My friends in engineering got better starting conditions and better long term odds of a permanent job than anyone in academia, even though the salaries of the salaries of experienced staff are not in fact especially high (well, not if you ignore those who work for big oil). But there’s not the same market-depressing glut at the lower end.

An interesting thought – someone once told me that they considered the problem with acedemic careers was not so much the absence of permanent jobs but the presence of them – the set up of a competition that you either win or lose, whereby at a certain age, you’re either effectively certified an academic or kicked from the groves. That one could live with temporary funding (in exchange for the chance to do research for a living) but what’s rotten with the system is the caste structure and the differential level of privelege therein. A system where PhD’s have proper salaries at least has one tier removed.

G @19 I’ve read this kind of thing a lot, not from condescending scientists but from current and former humanities grad students, advising others against this path, eg here

http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846

Are there any stats on the proportion of humanities grad students who get tuition waivers and stipends? Certainly, it’s good advice not to go to grad school unless you get both: their absence is both a major financial problem and a signal of low confidence in you from the school.

@John Quiggin, 47:

Are you thinking of this line?

“If you take that path, you will be starting at the bottom in your 30s, a decade behind your age cohort, with no savings (and probably a lot of debt).”

What the author means here (I’m guessing from context clues) is debt accumulated *before* graduate school which hasn’t been paid off. So yes, you’d be beginning your 30s with debt, but it’s not from the PhD. It’s from your BA. As js. said @48, the idea that liberal arts PhDs in the U.S. accumulate debt from getting their degree is virtually unheard of. That’s simply not true. PhDs in the U.S, whether arts, science, humanities, whatever–at any decent institution that most anyone has heard of, we get paid a stipend, tuition waiver, and oftentimes healthcare. (Caveat: this is not true of “professional” degrees, like an M.D. or a J.D. But then again, those aren’t generally considered to be “graduate school” in the U.S. They’re professional, not research degrees. Different ball game.) A few schools will offer “unfunded” spots, but those are vanity degrees. They are, by custom and tacit knowledge shared by most everyone, identical with rejections. I know of nobody who has done that.

@46, 44: Sorry I know I was terse. I wasn’t disagreeing that undergrads are sometimes treated as kids in the U.S. I was objecting to the idea that most undergrads live under such things like curfews, subject to vague “regulations which continental students would never find tolerable.” I simply don’t know what regulations you are talking about. My undergraduate students act like kids–they’re immature, of course they do. But they do what they like… as, I imagine, most college students do who can afford to do so.

And the idea that American graduate students live under these un-grown-up regulations is preposterous (“even graduate students,” as TM writes). That kind of statement sounds like flip, ungrounded cultural generalization. The only universities I know that even approximate what you describe are religious universities. Graduate students generally do not live on campus, and as this may surprise a few folks here–they have functional, adult lives, do adult things, labor, pay bills, fret about their professional futures, their work relations, struggle to balance work-life issues, struggle to find extra funding to support their kids when applicable, and all the fun “grown-up” activities our continental counterparts are apparently so good at doing habitually. And, conversely, color me skeptical that European college students are so “grown up” by contrast.

It sounds a lot like cultural condescension masquerading as hand-wavy sociological analysis.

US college studies [sic?] are far more regulated than their continental European equivalent (both academically and in general)

Can you actually give some specific examples of this? Because I am also a little bit puzzled by this. I mean, I don’t doubt that there’s somewhat more hand-holding in US colleges and universities than in Europe (tho it varies a lot on the type of institution—a private liberal arts college is going to be quite different in this regard than a large state school, e.g.), but I suspect that it’s really easy to exaggerate the differences here.

On other thing: typically, how old are the students entering university in Europe? Of course, I expect there to be national differences, but from my limited experience in Germany, I have a sense they tend to be a couple of years older, say 20-ish vs. 18-ish. I may be wrong about this, but if not, that makes a big difference because at that age, two years is significant (especially if, e.g., one’s spent a year or so out of school post high school).

I did my PhD in Belgium, which has a similar system as the original post notes. My understanding is that, here, universities did not just stumble into this system but that it was pressure from PhD-grant recipients and their union reps that made it possible. So I share G@42’s and Merian@43’s surprise that a left-wing blog is seriously considering making life more difficult for people who already hold precarious jobs, in order to supposedly benefit the organization that employs them and its “customers”. But that’s too often true in academia, which, puzzlingly enough, has both the highest concentration of leftists and one of the most exploitative, winner-takes-all labor structures.

It’s funny how unions are fighting to prevent fixed-term employment from becoming the norm, and we’re here arguing that, really, we need less protections for workers and less stability, because OUR industry has special needs. But why stop there? Is it not the same reasoning that has led to a massive shift away from tenure and toward non-permanent contracts in the civil service? Is it not the same reasoning that leads private companies to argue for employer-friendly labor market reforms?

js. 51. First your question about age: German Gymnasium used to go up to grade 13 so you are correct, students entering University would be slightly older than in the US. In addition there used to be compulsory service for males, now abolished. Now most states have abolished grade 13 (to become more competitive blah blah) although some are regretting that decision.

The level of reglementation at US colleges is is really enormous for somebody used to the German system and this applies to many aspects of student life. It is however understandable that if you are used to the US system, you may not notice it as much in your daily life. A huge difference is that German students do not live on campus and even if they live in a student Wohnheim, its administration would be separate from University. There is no campus police, no “dean of students”, J-Board and so on. The University admin doesn’t reach into students’ lives as it does here; again, this may be a question of perspective – it may not seem intrusive if you are used to it.

The way of studying is very different. There is usually no attendance control, no formal signing up or dropping of classes, no “homework”, very few limits on what classes can or must be taken. University is much less structured. On the flip side, there is much less support, less access to instructors, tutors and so on. In my time, basically the Uni didn’t care. Whether I passed the exam was nobody’s problem but mine. US College resembles much more German upper level Gymnasium (Kollegstufe) than University. The Kollegstufe also shares the goal of a diverse, well-rounded education whereas University is specialized. These impressions are dated however – with the introduction of the bachelor, things have changed quite a bit.

US College resembles a (mostly benevolent) patriarch – it houses, feeds, educates the student, gives them rules, disciplines them or shows leniency – some colleges are quite flexible with alcohol rules for example (which obviously they don’t have in Europe) but I also know of a student who was busted for mushrooms (imagine that!) and basically the next day the University kicked him out. He wasn’t even on campus and it had nothing to do with the Uni but they can do that – it’s solely up to the admin – and forget about “presumption of innocence”.

js @51 – basically I’d agree with what TM writes, though the degree of independence expected of German students they describe has decreased significantly, mostly as a result of a switch to the BA/MA system.
But to give you some specific examples:
PSU, for example has this to say about off-campus offenses by students:

There are many circumstances where the off-campus behavior of students affects a Substantial University Interest and warrants disciplinary action. … Student conduct committed off the campus which affects a Substantial University Interest is conduct which:
– Constitutes a violation of local, state or federal law, including repeat violations of any local, state or federal law committed in the municipality where the University is located;

So, e.g. getting drunk on the street in College Park is something that the university can punish its students for. German universities did use to do that (and in a much more drastic fashion–there are beautiful student prison you should go visit in places like Tuebingen, Freiburg, or Heidelberg), but it’s unthinkable today. If the police breaks up an off-campus party and arrests 25 people, in the US there would be no end to the letters from the rector, Dean of Students, etc. in the US. In Germany, the university would ignore it.
Related to the on-campus, university housing that TM rightly mentions (which also includes Greek life, heavily regulated by universities) is also the common requirement for students to live in said campus housing, at least during the first year of their studies. Again–absolutely unthinkable in Germany.

(FWIW, I agree with G @49 that this does not apply in any way to graduate students. While a graduate student in the US, I did field work in Germany and hung out with the graduate students at my host institution and there really wasn’t much of a difference at that level).

@TM, 50: That’s really clarifying, thanks. I’m aware there are differences (as you mention, meal plans, on-campus housing is a good example, although as some folks mentioned, even these things vary wildly from university to university). My guess is that the rule of thumb is: the wealthier the school, the more regimented it is.

For those who ask: I can’t find statistics off the bat about funded humanities PhDs. But this Atlantic article at least includes many submitted statements which lend credence to the claim that it’s well known that “Most Ph.D. programs in the humanities don’t cost the student a dime” (as one contributor put it).

As far as I know, that’s just common knowledge here in the U.S. At the risk of sounding outrageously elitist, the only “notable” schools, off the top of my head, which do *not* automatically fund their PhD students are The New School and CUNY Graduate Center–although I’ve heard the latter has been working to change that in the last 2-3 years. The New School is a peculiar exception: it mostly caters to internationals with funding from elsewhere. I have no idea what their domestic graduate students are thinking–my understanding (open to being corrected) is that they compete, year by year, for funding.

So I’d be curious what degree programs folks are going to that are not fully funded offers. At every program I applied to, the policy was that the school *only* offered fully funded acceptances. It wasn’t even an option to do otherwise. Sure, I have the privilege of being at a pretty good program, but I cast my net pretty wide when I was applying.

Just to get back to topic: the major problem is course not starry-eyed humanities and social science PhDs who are running away from the “real world” by paying for our PhDs. It’s that among American graduate students at private universities, we work a gazillion hours a week with no employment benefits or protections, subject to the arbitrary authority of an employer because of the whole regressive “graduate students aren’t employees” thing. Again, seconding Damien@53’s bafflement with the OP.

Just to clarify my @58: I do think that there’s some amount of infantilization that goes on in US colleges, and I find it deplorable. Sternly worded letters from the dean of students are a perfect example of this sort of dumb shit. I just think it’s easy to (a) overstate the case, and (b) fail to notice the diversity of institutional structures within the US higher education system. At @58, I am pushing back against what I perceive as a bit of both (a) and (b) in the thread.

Point taken about Wohnheime. I didn’t know that — or if I did, I had long forgotten. And about governance structures too; but again, Germany has works council representatives that sit on corporate boards. The US has… Chattanooga. Which fits with what you’re saying, I think.

Fraternities and sororities are weird beasts tho. I may be wrong about this, but the extent to which universities encourage them vs. just tolerate them (or even kick them out in some famous cases) can vary a lot, I think. They also have an organizational structure that’s independent any given university, so regulating their—i.e. the association’s activities on campus seems entirely fair to me. (But again, as I mentioned, I’m not quite neutral when it comes to them.)