‘Operation Ivy League’ Shuts Down Columbia Fraternities
A massive undercover drug bust on Columbia University’s uptown Manhattan campus – dubbed “Operation Ivy League” by police investigators – shut down three fraternities last week, including a chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, the national Jewish fraternity.
Investigators claim the bulk of drug traffic occurred in bedrooms and common areas of the three frat houses. Police arrested five undergraduates accused of peddling nearly $11,000 in cocaine, LSD, ecstasy and other drugs to undercover cops since July. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the accused included some of this Ivy League school’s elite students: a cancer researcher, a member of the fencing team, a Gates Millennium scholar and a high school salutatorian.
One 20-year-old AEPi frat member, Harrison David, accused of selling cocaine, lamented his father hung up after he called from the Manhattan Detention Center. Already refusing to pay $41,000 in annual tuition, David’s father wouldn’t drop $75,000 in bail money, the New York Daily News reported.
Kevin Shollenberger, Columbia’s dean of student affairs, laid down interim suspensions for the fraternities, meaning recruitment, initiation and social events must stop. AEPi’s national chapter has been notified.
The 97-year-old fraternity has yet to release a statement.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
