Andrew Lohse is annoyed that his brand-new Bass Weejun penny loafers might not fit. This dilemma, he jokes, is his biggest concern of the day—along with picking up clothes from the dry cleaner.

So one might be forgiven for thinking that Lohse, a 24-year-old former Dartmouth College student whose exploits as a fraternity member brought him national notoriety and a Rolling Stone feature in 2012, is still a bro at heart.

But Lohse, on the phone from Brattleboro, Vermont, is discussing his new book, Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy, and he sounds decidedly not like a bro. In fact, if this conversation took place at a frat house, there’s almost no doubt Lohse would be relentlessly mocked.

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Lohse is a frat boy turned feminist, though he shies away from being defined by any particular political movement. He is sensitive when talking about Greek life and the problem of campus sexual assault.

“If being a feminist means speaking up about these issues and equality,” he says, “then you could call me that.”

He explains why he eventually couldn’t defend belonging to a frat, which he calls “an emotional, psychological pyramid scheme.” He cites theorists Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, who famously wrote about how institutions wield power against the powerless.

Since publishing a tell-all column two years ago in The Dartmouth about the vagaries of pledging to the school’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter, Lohse has emerged as an unconventional conscience of frat culture. He has called for an end to dehumanizing hazing rituals (think omelets made of vomit and kiddie pools filled with human waste) and rampant substance abuse of the kind he once engaged in as a student. There’s value in the bond of brotherhood, he says, but it can also become destructive when forged in a fog of alcohol poisoning and humiliation.

“What do you think is going to happen when you have 70 19- and 20-year-old boys in a giant mansion and they have all this money and they’re allowed to operate totally in secret?” Lohse says, describing his experience at Dartmouth. “I don’t think that they’re going to be debating Socrates, and I don’t think they’re going to become really thoughtful, romantic, respectful young men. That’s just not how it works.”

Lohse is no prince in his book, either. He abuses alcohol and cocaine. He becomes belligerent and entitled when caught, often disobeying female university employees charged to protect his safety and health. Two long-term girlfriends come and go, admittedly to Lohse's regret, though hookups are fine distractions. And yet, he increasingly senses something rotten at the core of frat culture.

“There’s always the tension in the mind of any well-meaning young guy who joins a frat,” Lohse says. “Most of these people are really intelligent, hard-working, well-meaning people, but in the context of that culture, things become baser.”

One of these things is misogyny. In a recent issue of Cosmopolitan, Lohse wrote about how some of this brethren practiced a unique kind of loathing when it came to women —“from bros calling girls sluts and slampieces, to their tireless efforts to get girls drunk and hook up with them, only to speak degradingly of them later.”

Lohse makes a fascinating connection between hazing, consent and sexual assault. “Most of our hazing events took place when we'd been ordered to drink such extreme amounts of alcohol that we couldn't have possibly consented to them,” he wrote in Cosmopolitan. “But we were indoctrinated that this type of exploitation was totally normal. This brainwashing was subconsciously projected onto any non-brothers, i.e., women, who entered the space, and I think it rewired some guys.”

Lohse with a friend at Dartmouth in 2010. Image: Courtesy Andrew Lohse

With that insight, it’s disturbing to learn in the book that as a pledge, Lohse claims to have filled out an entrance exam that posed the following scenario, asking potential brothers how they would respond: “One of your pledge brothers admits to you that he slipped [date rape drug] Rohypnol [sic] into a young lady’s alcoholic beverage. He proceeds to engage in sexual intercourse with said lady.”

Even now Lohse doesn’t know why that question appeared on the exam. “I would think at the time that was a litmus test about moral character, and not a litmus test about being some hard guy frat bro,” Lohse says, noting that no one ever asked about it again. Nor did he hear brothers talking openly about rape or obtaining date rape drugs. “That would have never happened.”

Still, by the time he took his concerns about hazing to the school’s administration, Lohse knew of several female friends who said they had been raped. That was before Dartmouth became one of dozens of schools being investigated by the Department of Education for possibly violating federal laws regarding sexual assault and harassment complaints.

His peers, though, seemed to know that Dartmouth could be a “male dominated” environment. Brothers joked about sending their future sons off to the Ivy League school, but would never permit their daughters to attend — an apparently popular sentiment across campus.

The school’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter could not be reached for comment.

In a statement shared by Dartmouth with Mashable, the school said it strictly prohibits hazing and has expanded efforts to create a "safer social environment" in recent years:

Dartmouth provides many opportunities and strong support for learning and personal growth in and out of the classroom. It is regrettable when a student, like Mr. Lohse, makes poor choices and fails to take advantage of the experience and resources we provide.

Some critics have called Lohse self-serving. Though he’d previously spoken to administrators privately, his whistle-blowing column only appeared after a drunken run-in with campus security led to his permanent departure from Dartmouth. Others think Lohse is embellishing, and perhaps even lying, about the hazing and excessive drinking. A recent Dartmouth graduate and former frat brother called Lohse’s story “far fetched” in a Wall Street Journal review of the book.

Lohse knows he is a solitary high-profile dissenter amidst countless glowing testimonials for Greek life, and that sometimes surprises him.

“There are [so many] frat boys and alums in the world and you think there would be more,” he says. “I don’t understand that. But I also think that speaks to the power of the experience over people’s sense of their identity.”

These days, Lohse is focused on finding different ways to socialize young men—and ridding the Greek system of gender segregation might be a good start. That division, he says, can create a predatory attitude about women. Whatever the changes, he says, they must fundamentally alter the character of frat life: “I don’t think there’s a way to have the system as it is without it becoming warped.”