“Why Don’t Colleges Get Rid of Their Bad Fraternities? A Yearlong Investigation of Greek Houses Reveals Their Endemic, Lurid, and Sometimes Tragic Problems—And a Sophisticated System for Shifting the Blame”, Caitlin Flanagan2014-03-01 (law)⁠:

[History and investigation of legal records/settlements involving US college fraternities. The author finds that fraternities are involved in a remarkable number of serious, often fatal, injuries in part because of deliberate decisions to preserve traditions such as bunk beds for drunken partiers deliberately placed next to permanently wide-open windows on the 2^nd or 3^rd story of frat buildings.

Fraternities are able to survive because of their long history, including highly valuable real estate next to universities acquired in their earliest days (many frats being older than many American universities), and because of carefully-tailored insurance and regulations which enable them to push legal liability onto the students or members for the slightest infraction, such as bringing an additional bottle of beer, and thus responsibility for anything that might happen (like falling out of an open window); frat members are debriefed by the frat’s lawyers immediately after incidents with an eye to finding one who can be blamed, before the frat members can realize that the lawyers are not there to help them.

While the frat members in question may have no assets to be sued over, their (frequently middle or upper-class) parents do, and may lose their houses in the subsequent lawsuits.]