NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — National leaders of a fraternity accused of directing Yale University pledges to chant obscenities against women as they marched through campus have scheduled a meeting with the Ivy League school’s chapter. Delta Kappa Epsilon International Fraternity says its director will visit New Haven this weekend to discuss the incident, which it condemned as “deeply offensive.” It also ordered the Yale chapter to stop pledge activities. Some students and the Yale Women’s Center board complained after pledges were videotaped last week, chanting about necrophilia and a specific sexual act. Michael Jones, a Yale senior who also is a New Haven alderman, said the DKE fraternity has apologized. Local DKE leaders referred calls to national headquarters. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NEW YORK — Universities are buying up chunks of land at bargain prices, sometimes without a clear idea how they’ll be used. Some are taking advantage of good sales during a sluggish economy, while others, like Columbia University , are continuing a practice they’ve done for decades, buying even if the price isn’t discounted. The University of Dayton last year acquired the 115-acre world headquarters of technology company NCR Corp for the fire sale price of $18 million after buying 50 acres from the company for three times the per-acre price in 2005. And the University of Delaware last year bought a 272-acre former Chrysler auto plant for $24 million. The schools are banking on future growth to make their purchases good investments. In the interim, many are leasing the properties they’re not using until they need them. It’s good that colleges are looking years or even decades ahead, but investing in real estate can be risky, academic research analyst Jane Wellman said. “People who just lost their shirts in the last real estate crash know the risk of real estate as an investment portfolio,” Wellman said. Colleges “are banking that now is the low point in real estate, and it may not be.” For years, Columbia bought land wherever it could, amassing more than 17 acres on Manhattan’s Upper West Side between 2002 and 2009. Construction has begun on a multibillion-dollar expansion that would build new housing, laboratories, open space and tree-lined sidewalks. University President Lee Bollinger said it won’t be finished for at least 30 years. And while some of the space has been dedicated to specific departments, Bollinger said he’s intentionally not deciding how the rest of the buildings will be used. Dan Fasulo, a managing director for real estate research firm Real Capital Analytics, says many colleges are jumping at new opportunities to buy land cheaply since the economic slump. Some schools say the economic downturn drove prices so low that it was cheaper to buy land with existing buildings now than it would be to construct new ones later. University of Dayton President Daniel Curran thought he got “the deal of a lifetime” five years ago, when the Ohio university bought 50 acres from NCR Corp. for $25 million. Then he got a better offer: the company’s expansive world headquarters property — complete with a moat and a mini golf course — for $18 million. The former Chrysler Group LLC plant the University of Delaware bought won’t be completely built out for 50 years, said Executive Vice President Scott Douglass. Since nearly a quarter of it has no specific plans, it may be used for scientific testing, Douglass said. At Columbia, where tuition and living expenses are soaring in New York , junior Jose Robledo said although he’d like his university to put more money toward financial aid, it’s more important for it to expand and try to improve — even if he’s not around to see it. Fasulo offered colleges some words of caution, though, saying land investment in a rural area is riskier than near a place like Columbia, in one of America’s most desirable real estate markets. “From a market perspective, there would be a lot less risk worrying about surplus property in a place like Manhattan than if you were out in the woods somewhere,” he said. “Let’s say enrollment falls in half, you can sell it off as a condominium.” And Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, a nonprofit studying college costs, noted that even when a building isn’t being used for academics, a university still has to pay to maintain it. “You’re going to have to keep raising money and getting more money every year just to keep the hamster running in the cage,” she said. “They’re perpetuating a very expensive cost structure, and I don’t think every school can maintain that.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

OXFORD, Ohio (AP) — Sorority spring formals call up visions of young women in colorful dresses dancing the night away — not vomiting on tables, urinating in sinks or having sex in closets. The drunken shenanigans of three sororities at Miami University in southwest Ohio sound like something out of Animal House and were especially startling for a school that frequently makes the top 50 in a U.S News & World Report academic ranking but never makes lists of big-time party schools. CAMPUS DRINKING: College’s problem or society’s? FRESHMEN: Study booze more than books The school suspended two of the sororities and put the third on probation. A task force is reviewing discipline and education policies on student behavior and alcohol, and the campus group governing sororities says it will begin teaching new members to speak out when they witness bad behavior. There is little evidence excessive alcohol consumption is any worse at Miami than other colleges, but students are worried the antics will damage the school’s reputation. “It’s embarrassing,” said Christina Zielke, 21, a senior from Cleveland, who doesn’t belong to a sorority. “This kind of thing gives a bad name not just to the Greek system but to the university and students like me who aren’t in the system.” Students also are worried the debauchery could even devalue a Miami diploma, said Heath Ingram, student government president. “They’re angry about the actions of a few damaging Miami’s reputation and the effect that might have on getting into the best graduate programs and job opportunities,” he said. The three sororities’ spring formals took place over the span of about a month. On March 26, Alpha Xi Delta sisters and their dates vomited, dropped drinks on the dance floor and tried to steal booze at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, center officials reported. One male even tried to urinate on the center’s Slave Pen, a slave-holding pen reclaimed from a Kentucky farm, the officials said. Two weeks later at the Pi Beta Phi formal, staff at Lake Lyndsay Lodge in nearby Hamilton found a couple having sex in a closet and two girls “repeatedly trying to urinate into the sinks on the bathroom counter,” the lodge said in a complaint letter to the school. It complained of students vomiting, flipping over an appetizer table and of being so drunk they couldn’t walk. On April 23, about 30 students on the way home from a Zeta Tau Alpha formal trashed a bus and harassed and shouted obscenities at the driver, who tossed them off, the transportation company said. The company had to send another bus. Miami suspended Alpha Xi Delta and Pi Beta Phi and put Zeta Tau Alpha on probation. Zeta Tau Alpha’s Miami chapter president, Meghan Hughes, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that “while a small percentage of our members behaved inappropriately, we all take responsibility.” Other members or officers of the local chapters did not respond to requests for comment. National leaders of the sororities supported the school’s discipline and put their chapters on probation, though some noted that members told them some of the claims were exaggerated. About one-third of Miami’s 16,000 students belong to one of its more than 50 Greek groups. Larissa Spreng, president of the Miami Panhellenic Association governing campus sororities, said students in fraternities and sororities are disappointed in behavior she says doesn’t represent the Greek community. She called it “an atypical Miami semester.” The association requires new members to take a program on managing alcohol and other risks. Next year, for the first time, it will focus on the need for bystanders to speak out when witnessing bad behavior, Spreng said. A new task force of Greek and non-Greek students, staff and student-group advisers is meeting this summer to review and recommend changes in discipline and education policies on student behavior and alcohol, said student affairs Vice President Barbara Jones. The school already requires freshmen to complete an online alcohol-education program. Miami, which has had to discipline other Greek groups over alcohol, last year invited a national Greek coalition to assess its Greek organizations and programs. The school is implementing the group’s recommendations to improve Greek values, including more alumni and faculty involvement. Some educators and researchers suggest binge drinking among college students has increased over the past decade — and that women are catching up to men in terms of the percentage who binge — but statistics from major national studies indicate very little change. Schools are seeing increases in both the number and severity of alcohol-related incidents, not just among sororities and fraternities, said W. Scott Lewis, president of the Association for Student Conduct Administration. The disparity between stable drinking trends and reports of worse behavior may be that “we really don’t have good measures of behavior associated with drinking and parties,” said Robert Saltz, senior scientist at the Prevention Research Center in Berkeley, Calif. The two- and one-year suspensions for Alpha Xi Delta and Pi Beta Phi mean they lose their campus dorm suites and can’t recruit members or participate as a group in campus activities. Zeta Tau Alpha can’t hold social events with alcohol the first year of its two-year probation. Jenny Hoy, the mother of a Chi Omega sorority member at Miami, thought the discipline was fair. “As a parent, I’m concerned about what is basically roguish behavior, but I don’t believe it will permanently damage the school’s image,” said Hoy, 46, of Reno A member of another Miami sorority doesn’t approve of the conduct but doesn’t think all members misbehaved. “I don’t think it’s fair that people who were innocent are being punished, too,” said Kappa Kappa Gamma member Rachael Fraleigh, 19, of Chicago. Lake Lyndsay Lodge manager Lyndsay Rapier-Phipps, a Miami graduate, acknowledged that about a quarter of the students were the worst troublemakers at Pi Beta Phi’s formal. But she said others “just stood around watching and laughing.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.