No, we weren't shown it but I made the leap when I heard Keith's complaint.

Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to the dorm/house names

It's always Benes Hall. That's where everything happens, since that's where Parker, Piz, Wallace, Mercer, and Moe all live.

Regarding the 10 dollar cup: Oh. Oh oh. I'm gonna have to correct more than one or two fallacies in my understanding of what frats and sororities are and how they relate to the college.

What do you mean?

I thought they had only the loosest affiliation with the college and really only functioned as a weirdly evolved form of off-campus student accomodation.

I don't know why I thought that's what they were. Though considering my knowledge of the system has been gleaned from Road Trip and Andrea Zuckerman's conflicted feeling about sororities maybe I do.

Well, they're not established by the colleges. Like many other student groups with official on-campus presence, they're separate organizations that get permission to establish a chapter on-campus. So they're loosely affiliated in that sense. They're not part of the college's offerings. College students, instead, join them, and perpetuate their presence on campus. That makes more sense in my head.

This wiki article looks fairly informative: [link]

Right. They have national headquarters. However, on some campuses the Greek houses are owned by the university while on others they are separate from university housing.

On the campus where I went as an undergrad, the fraternity and sorority houses were off-campus, though just barely -- they were on the street that was one of the borders of campus, the same street that the Jewish Student Center and Catholic Student Center were on. The fraternities lived in their houses, but the sororities weren't allowed to -- they had parties and meetings and stuff there, but the girls lived either in dorms or in nearby apartments. (The usual explanation for this was that the city of New Orleans classified any house where more than ten unrelated women lived as an illegal brothel, but the campus newspaper investigated that once and found out it wasn't true -- the "no living in sorority houses" was just a university regulation.)

Each fraternity and sorority had to have a charter from the university. During the time that I was there, two fraternities got their recognition revoked because of parties that got too wild. (One of them landed about a dozen freshman girls in the ER from roofies.) The guys had to vacate the houses and find somewhere else to live -- the houses just sat there empty for a few years. I'm not sure what all the legal stuff going into that was.

At the university where I'm in grad school now, some of the fraternities and sororities are in houses that they own, but more are moving into into university-owned buildings -- the university is requiring it, I think, so that they can have more control. The university built a bunch of row houses that now house about six fraternities and sororities.

At my undergrad school, the university definitely had some influence over what the frats did. There was one, KA, which is the Southern fraternity (honorary president is Jefferson Davis), that held a ball every year where they symbolically secede from the campus, and all the guys dress up in Confederate uniforms and their girlfriends in Scarlett O'Hara dresses. A lot of students protested this, and the university and the frat reached a deal that the frat could continue to have the ball as long as no one in a Confederate uniform set foot on campus. (They violated this. All the time. But officially, that was the agreement.)

Hey, I think that U of I had a chapter of that frat too -- they would send a guy in Confederate uniform on horseback to deliver the invitations. Nuts.

Yeah, in order to stay on campus the Fraternities and Sororities have to obey rules set up by the university.

It differs at some schools-- at mine, everyone lived on-campus and there was no fraternity housing; there were no sororities; some fraternities were co-ed drinking groups; and none had a national charter. (All the national charters were revoked in the early nineties.)