“WAS it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour? Hell no!”, thundered John "Bluto" Blutarsky in the 1978 film "Animal House", one of the highest-grossing comedies of all time. Bluto (played by the now immortal John Belushi) was rallying the beleaguered brothers of Delta Tau Chi, victims of the censorious Dean Vernon Wormer and his campaign to obliterate the fraternity of debauched misfits. Jump forward to 2014 and Dean Wormer has real-life company. A glut of new reports about excessive underage drinking, sexual assaults and otherwise dangerous behaviour in college fraternities has put university administrators on the defensive. Across the country, and particularly at elite institutions in the north-east, many are starting to crack down on these all-male and historically quite-white societies. Amherst College in Massachusetts, which had already formally banned Greek groups three decades ago, announced in May it would suspend or expel any student joining an underground group deemed “fraternity-like [or] sorority-like”. JP Morgan Chase stopped managing an investment account of the charitable foundation run by Sigma Alpha Epsilon, or SAE (the groups are known by the Greek letters of their names). Lloyd’s of London threatened to cancel SAE’s insurance plan thanks to the threat of injuries and deaths, Bloomberg News revealed in March. All this comes as the White House presses universities to better police campus sexual assault, intensifying the scrutiny on these clubs. The possibility of legal action looms constantly over fraternity houses, which are effectively communal drinking societies for aspiring professionals.

Undergraduates often compete to join the individual campus chapters of national fraternities, lured by the networking prospects, the camaraderie, the chance to live in a run-down home with their soon-to-be closest friends and the booze. Prospective members undergo up to a year of “pledging” (often inebriation-heavy hazing rituals) before becoming “fraternity men”, with all the social benefits that entails. Pledging mostly happens behind closed doors, but reports of egregious physical hazing occasionally become public: a University of Tennessee fraternity was suspended in late May after pouring hot sauce on its recruits’ genitals. In December a first-year student at New York’s Baruch College died of brain injuries after being pummelled.

In 2011, months after a student died in a hazing incident, Cornell University’s president David Skorton penned a New York Times essay explaining his decision to forbid fraternity pledging altogether. This was one day after Princeton University banned its own fraternities from recruiting first-year students. Hazing is illegal in 44 states, and Bloomberg reports over 60 fraternity-related deaths since 2005. A recent Bloomberg series, paired with an Atlantic magazine cover story, has provided anti-Greek campaigners with a wealth of statistical ammunition.

But the groups have some fearsome weapons of their own. Alongside numerous business executives, 39 senators and 101 House members are fraternity or sorority alumni, boasts the website of the North-American Interfraternity Conference trade group, which represents 74 national fraternities. It is a bipartisan and powerful bunch. The Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee, FratPAC, aggressively fights legislation that threatens to harm the clubs, such as anti-hazing measures. Over 300,000 undergraduate men nationwide are fraternity members today.

Defenders of fraternities have claimed their share of scalps. The president of Trinity College in Connecticut will retire earlier than planned in June after tangling with graduates who threatened to withhold donations when he mandated the groups coeducate. At larger southern schools, where the culture of fraternities is especially strong, colleges are less likely to fight. Many universities are quietly eager to let students live in their own group houses, off the schools’ books. While small, elite north-eastern colleges such as Amherst and Williams College have done away with fraternities, this has not been so easy elsewhere. At Dartmouth College—the inspiration for "Animal House"—repeated faculty-driven efforts at reform have been repelled.

Scuffles between university administrators and fraternities are hardly new. But for name-brand schools such as Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University, where Greek organisations have run into legal or reputational trouble in recent years, the stakes are higher. No sweeping legislation condemning fraternity life is expected—the groups have too many high-profile supporters for that. But decades after Bluto's call to arms, it may be that Dean Wormer gets the last laugh.