Something I saw in the bathroom this weekend inspired me to write about the recent frat house controversy

This is a post about Pi Kappa Alpha, Psi Upsilon, and AEPi losing their brownstones. But first let me tell you about some vomit.

When I woke up Friday morning and walked into a floor bathroom, the unwelcome smell of bile and the unhappy sight of someone's disgorged dinner, wrapped like a scarf around the base of one toilet, greeted me at the door. It was disgusting, and so I left. It's not my job to clean up that sort of thing. (This is going somewhere, I promise! Click through to find out what happens to the vomit!)

It's now Sunday, and the vomit is still there. Some helpful person opened a window to air the place out, but no one's gotten down on his knees to scrub the floor. And why should anyone? It's much, much easier to ignore the mess—to rush into the bathroom, tolerate the smell for a few minutes, and escape—than to deal with it. It's this sort of collective action problem that lays shared spaces to waste so quickly and so often. In a communal context, it's very easy for something that should be everyone's problem to become no one's problem in particular.

I don't know what life was like in Pi Kappa Alpha, Psi Upsilon, and AEPi in the weeks before the drug bust. It's still unclear to me how much the members of each fraternity knew about the drug dealing that was going on. It seems likely to me that at least some people knew. And I wouldn't be surprised if they failed to speak up not because they condoned what their brothers were doing or because they wanted to protect them, but because they had no real incentive to turn a fraternity-wide issue into a personal crusade.

You can ascribe a moral valence to that reticence if you'd like. You can say that those who knew about the drugs and failed to speak up deserved to be evicted from the brownstones. You can say whole fraternities got their just deserts. Or you can decry the University's decision to punish "guilty" brothers and "innocent" brothers alike.

But without more information about how many fraternity brothers knew exactly what was going on, debates over questions of individual culpability or the fairness of guilt by association are not likely to be satisfactorily resolved. Instead, the more fruitful course is to work to understand and correct the structure of incentives in which the members of these fraternities operated. Clearly, the right incentives weren't there.

It was in the University's interest to signal to fraternities still in their brownstones that drug dealers shouldn't be treated like vomit on a bathroom floor—to signal that they really are, in a serious way, a problem that no one in a frat house can afford to ignore.

It may not have been fair, but that's just what Columbia did. And although the decision to evict three fraternities from their brownstones certainly won't stop drugs from being sold and consumed by Columbia students, I suspect it really will convince fraternity brothers to attend more dutifully to the bad behavior of their fellow members. That's a good thing.

Thomas Rhiel is a Spectrum opinion blogger. Spec's former managing editor, he's currently looking for a job.