Confessions of an Ivy League Fratboy Revisited

On January 25th, 2012, Andrew Lohse ’12 released a scathing expose of Dartmouth Fraternity culture in The Dartmouth, beginning a media circus around Lohse that would gain him a Rolling Stone profile piece and a book deal on his undergraduate shenanigans while also becoming a public case study on how not to be a “True Gentlemen.” 10 years later, his name is still met with immediate mockery and ridicule on campus. Associated with self-destruction spirals of cocaine affinity and public betrayal of a loyal and intimate brotherhood, Lohse’s story and his legacy is much more a farce than the tragedy he so desperately wishes it be.

Dartmouth’s Greek life has changed a great deal since Lohse’s day at the College, and while the exact effect his actions had on those changes is debatable, the saga of Lohse marks an important starting line for the transformation of Greek Life. Also published in this physical issue is a “Timeline of Scandal” by Editor Emeritus Jack Mourouzis, which chronicles the 4 years after Lohse’s original expose, and I highly recommend reading it before this piece.

Originally leaked on Dartlog and then published later in The Dartmouth, Lohse’s first public rallying cry “Telling the Truth,” perhaps shockingly, is well-written and does level solid-sounding accusations against the College. Missing the self-vanity and awful writing conventions of his later book, this piece by Lohse can hold its own. The first sentence grabs the reader, deals a real blow to the College, and lays the groundwork for what he seeks to expose in his piece: “We attend a strange school where a systemic culture of abuse exists under a college president who has the power and experience to change what can only be described as a public health crisis of the utmost importance: the endemic culture of physical and psychological abuse that occupies the heart of Dartmouth’s Greek community.” Leveling accusation after accusation, Lohse is persuasive and articulate, revealing what he alleges as happening during his pledge term and as the systematic cover-up Dartmouth admin pursued. Yes, his final sentence is melodramatic (“It is a small college, but there are those of us who feel the need to tell the truth about it.”) and reveals a propensity for self-aggrandizing that would destroy his later book, but his original piece is not completely without merit, demonstrating an articulate and defined argument that led to him finding favor with national audiences.

Perhaps at odds with the current view on campus, Lohse’s original piece did have supporters on campus. Originally covering Lohse’s story, the Review published a piece with the title of “Lohse ’12 Uncovers Evils of Fraternity Hazing Practices and the Kim Administration’s Apathy.” As the title may suggest, the contents of the article follow this lead, siding with Lohse against the Kim administration: “The saddest part, though, is that the Kim administration was already aware of the scope of these hazing practices performed by Dartmouth men. The president’s office has known for a whole year. What is he actually doing to address this serious issue?” While Lohse’s allegations certainly got attention and sympathy, the mood on campus toward him did not stay positive for long. Two months later in late March of 2012, the College dropped the investigation into SAE members due to them providing “physical evidence that proved specific claims by Lohse false.” Ironically, the same day that The Dartmouth broke the story of the College dropped the charges, Rolling Stone published the infamous profile piece on Lohse: “Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses.”  With these two developments in the story, the campus began to ridicule and mock Lohse, no longer seeing him as a good-willed whistleblower, but a shrewd opportunist only seeking desperate career revival after flaming out of the College.  

Reversing on our earlier positive coverage of Lohse, the Review published a quite condemning piece titled: “Has Lohse Accomplished What He Set Out to Do?” The tone of this article is harsh and captures the mood surrounding him on campus:

“People from the outside world are horrified at what they must think is an accurate portrayal of the College on the Hill. People on campus are furious. There’s even a ‘Remorseful Douchebag’ meme as seen on the left of this post, courtesy of Bored@Baker … For what it’s worth, Andrew B. Lohse ’12 is a pariah on campus, and I would lay even money on him never returning. His name is mud.”

(The aforementioned meme contains a picture of Lohse standing in front of SAE with the top text saying “Burns all his bridges” and the bottom “Whines about being ostracized.”)

As always The Dartmouth took a more refrained approach, publishing an editorial “Pollard: Muckraking for a Buck.” Though not as harsh, the article still criticizes the Rolling Stone piece and Lohse’s antics:

“But I strongly disagree with Rolling Stone’s decision to take Andrew Loshe’s story and turn it into a symbol and vanguard for Dartmouth’s culture and Dartmouth’s soul… The article demonizes many aspects of Dartmouth culture that actually make the College a phenomenal, unique place to spend four years.”

“Similarly, the article uses a narrow, biased and skewed lens to examine the Dartmouth Greek system…The only good that will come out of the muckraking spotlight created by the hubbub over these allegations is perhaps increased conversation and action on the part of the Dartmouth administration.”

From just these two articles, it is clear that Lohse quickly used up the goodwill that he might have once had from his original piece, and this campus dismissal and mockery of him is what continues on as his legacy at the College.

The hubbub around Lohse split with the publishing of the Rolling Stone article. Those on campus who felt that the magazine (which now has a sustained record of misreporting college stories) improperly categorized that all Dartmouth students live a life of drug-fueled debauchery and degeneracy were firmly squared against a national audience who felt that young people were essentially torturing one another to prove that they belonged in elite company. While the article does have its pitfalls, unlike the longer expose by Lohse, it is at least compelling and readable. The best and brightest young men in the country committing sadistic acts to one another for social gain is a gripping story after all, and building on the prestige of the College, the story undoubtedly has a wide and national appeal. Being nearly nine thousand words, it is certainly not a light read, but for any of you who find yourself with an extra thirty minutes or so, I highly recommend it. Although it does come down too light on Lohse and does paint the College in a less than favorable light, the article is an enjoyable read, and probably gives the best account yet of Lohse and his shenanigans on campus.

The Rolling Stone article is also where Lohse’s book is first mentioned, infamously stating how Lohse is “writing a memoir: a ‘generational tale’ that he hopes will be part Bright Lights, Big City, part The Sun Also Rises and part This Side of Paradise, and describes as ‘a one-way ticket to the secret violence at the heart of the baptismal rites of the new elite.’ At which point he stops himself. ‘I bet that sounds incredibly douchey and brash and stupid.’” This acknowledgment to his book was, and is still, widely mocked, letting Lohse’s air of arrogance slip through the cracks, a feature that makes the book he did eventually write (Confessions of an Ivy League Fratboy) almost unreadable. This quote is indicative of Lohse’s false self-awareness, where he feigns that if he acknowledges his pretentious writing aspirations, he is therefore somehow justified in these delusions. But no, he is not Hemingway nor Fitzgerald, he is simply an SAE, and a failed one at that too.

Of all the peculiarities in Lohse’s saga, his connection to the Review is one that is of special interest for the sake of this article (You are reading this in the Review after all). In his freshmen fall, Lohse did write for the Review, and then he subsequently left and went to write for one of our apparent rivals of the time, The Dartmouth Free Press. (It is amazing how there is a constant rotating door of anti-Review publications on this campus that all go belly up after a few years.) In the Rolling Stone article and his own book, this switch is painted as Lohse seeing the light and abandoning silly conservative ideas for the more proper liberal ones. He remarks how in high school he once “cut school to go to a John McCain rally” but is fundamentally liberal by the time of his media campaign. Perhaps he just did not have the fortitude to be a “campus conservative” and succumbed to the mob of campus liberalism like so many great men before him. While there are other theories as to why he left the Review, we at the Review are just thankful he did leave. There have certainly been poorer writers than him in our history, but none of them got book deals to demonstrate that fault to the world.

In his book, he recounts how when he was rushing SAE, one Reviewer in the house (ahh the old SAE Review connection) sought to prevent his bid, stating “He’ll sell the house out just like he sold the Review!” Obviously, SAE did not heed this precocious warning, as they did take him and he did sell them out later. Let this be a warning to all fraternities: you might think it is bad to bid a Reviewer, but it is always worse to bid a former Reviewer.

Of all the institutions from the old College on the hill that Lohse exposes, perhaps his most successful expose is on the Dartmouth English Department. He constantly reminds the reader how he was a prospective English major who was “not like the other guys,” and that while other students were prepping for corporate recruiting, he would be reading Romantic poetry or Buddhist Sutras. But either he failed to utilize the few things he gleaned from the English department in his few terms here, or the department has had a turn for the worse since Professor Hart’s day. Here is a collection of a few of the most memorable quotes from his book:

On admissions: “I applied early and was deferred, which basically means rejected and told to go f*ck yourself in admissions purgatory for a few months while some secret committee makes up its mind about you. The Dartmouth acceptance I’d craved my whole life from idolizing my grandfather was almost given a partial-birth abortion, a scenario I found highly dissatisfying as I was, at that point, a Republican.”

On homecoming: “Our initiation into the cult of Dartmouth College began the way it does for every class: we had to run around the homecoming bonfire …. This was after being paraded around time, past police barricades… marched up South Main Street like prisoners of war … After some speeches, the president and high priests and pharisees of the college looked down from a platform erected in front of Dartmouth Hall to watch. We were told to run. We did.”

Referring to throwing a chair in the vicinity of an SnS officer: “I have these, uh, fits of existential rebellion. Whatever.”

These are a few of the many strange (and hilarious) quotes from his book. I excluded his many vivid descriptions of vomit, but for those who are interested, there are numerous of those included in his book. In all, his writing is just bad. There is no other way to put it. He uses over-the-top metaphors in unneeded situations. He is melodramatic, depicting every event as if his life is an epic. He has an annoying tendency to insert filler words into his writing, with “like”s and “uh”s scattered in as if his writing copied the talking habits of a 13-year-old girl. Beyond just simple syntax and word choices, he also struggles to effectively tell his story. Honestly, as the Rolling Stone article proved, there is a compelling story to be told here, but Lohse is woefully unequipped to tell this story effectively. The other students around him all mold into passing names, never developing into distinct characters, and there is no development within himself either. From the beginning, he is dispassionate and corroded by the nihilistic tendencies that he says he wishes to criticize and fight against at Dartmouth. He denies his own agency, never taking any real responsibility for his failures, such as the cocaine and chair-throwing incidents, or even for the hazing abuses he claims he perpetrated. In denying this, he tries to portray himself as a helpless victim caught in a cycle of abuse, but his story is much more self-aggrandizing and self-profiting than he wishes to admit.

As an aside, when Lohse’s book was first published in 2014, the late Joseph Rago, one of the Review’s great alumni, reviewed it in The Wall Street Journal. Displaying his classic wit, Rago condemns Lohse, “Trigger warning: These may be the worst, and least trustworthy, confessions in the 16 centuries since St. Augustine’s,” and concludes his piece with “The worst hazing rite I can imagine is spending time inside the mind of Mr. Lohse.” It is a great piece, and I highly recommend it.

While Lohse’s charging of hazing never directly amounted to anything, Greek life has undoubtedly changed in the 10 years since. Due to President Hanlon’s Moving Dartmouth Forward campaign, Greek Houses have had to reel back and reform many of their previous antics. The Hard Alcohol Ban and the creation of Housing Communities were products of an explicitly anti-Greek College administration. The derecognition of AD and SAE  heightened this conflict, and while no other houses were formally derecognized, many houses did face lengthy suspensions and probations at the end of the last decade. (My house, Tri-Kap, included amongst those.) Now, due to the controversy surrounding the College’s COVID policies and Hanlon’s impending retirement, the confrontation between Greek life and the administration is at a dull simmer, with each faction mostly leaving one another alone. Fittingly, it was ten years to the day of Lohse’s original column’s publication that Hanlon announced his intention to retire after the 2022-2023 school year. January 25th, 2012 to January 25th, 2022 was a Dartmouth era of sorts, bookend on both ends with notable events. New college administrations always make their boldest decisions at the beginning, so time will only tell what lies ahead with the new administration. But for now, we are living in the College created by the last decade and the Hanlon presidency.

Beyond just exposing Greek life, Lohse did leave behind a small corpus of D editorials that you can still access and read on their website. The years on them show, as he ridicules the likes of Herman Cain’s presidential campaign and comments on the Joe Paterno scandal, but also a clear message emerges from them. Lohse hates corporate recruiting and its surrounding culture. In one piece in particular (“Lohse: A Corporate Stranglehold”), Lohse alleges that a student told him a firm paid her $100 to tell them why she did not participate in sophomore Summer recruiting, a claim for which the D had to issue a correction, with the firm denying such accusations. Lohse comes down harshly on his classmates’ corporate-driven priorities:

“There are a few paradoxes about Dartmouth culture that I have always found deeply troubling, chief among them the cognitive dissonance between the brilliance of my peers and their complete lack of intellectual curiosity…. They seem aware that doing so will not help them land a prestigious 16-hour-a-day job at some faceless hedge fund, where they’ll learn about manipulating capital instead of imagining a freer and more just world.”

Lohse is not wrong in criticizing the presence of an anti-intellectual and corporate focus that has grabbed the undergrads of Dartmouth; however, while Lohse likes to feign self-awareness in his writing, he is woefully unaware of this irony. The very thing he claims to vehemently hate, trading intellectual interests and human relationships for career advancements, is what he came to embody in the minds of most students.

Only after his College career was completely disgraced, after he had used up every ounce of forgiveness the College had to offer for his stupidity and recklessness, only then did he sell out his own house, his own brotherhood, his own community, a community that tried to protect him even after everything. He betrayed everyone who had given him so much so that he could launch some last-ditch attempt at an activist career and his cherished book deal. In all, Lohse’s great legacy at the College is being the ultimate snake and sell-out. While he is the one obsessed with revelations on the abusive and tyrannical system at the College, the ultimate revelation from all the exposes and profiles and the eventual book is that Andrew Lohse is the worst of those sell-outs whom he claims to so ardently hate. Thankfully though, Lohse, just as in his College career, was a failure in his writing career as well.

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