Wesleyan frat sues for discrimination after being forced to accept women

Members of Wesleyan's Delta Kappa Epsilon chapter are suing the school for discrimination after being forced to accept women in order to remain on campus.

In September, the frat said it "strongly disagreed" with Wesleyan's decision to force residential frats to go coed.

The lawsuit comes after the frat was told by the school that its members couldn't live at their frat house for the 2015-2016 academic year, according to a press release from Delta Kappa Epsilon's Wesleyan chapter.

"Discrimination is abhorrent in whatever form it may exist," Scott Karsten, spokesperson for the DKE alumni organization, said in a statement.

Both alumni and undergraduate members are involved with the lawsuit, which accuses the university of "discrimination, misrepresentation, and deceptive practices" surrounding the co-education decision earlier this academic year, according to the DKE press release.

The frat points out that Wesleyan has a number of other housing options that let students live together based on "shared hobbies, experiences, cultural interests and identities." The lawsuit cites several examples of undergraduate Program Houses that Wesleyan sponsors on campus, including the Light House, for Christian students, and the Women of Color House.

Wesleyan's refusal "to permit male fraternity brothers to reside in single-sex housing" is contradictory to their "willingness to allow many other diverse groups to reside by choice with members of the same sex, ethnicity, national origin, religion, culture, sexual orientation, sexual identification and the like," the fraternity's press release stated.

We have reached out to Wesleyan University for comment on the lawsuit and will update with any statement we receieve. The DKE lawsuit was first reported by The Wesleyan Argus, the university's student newspaper.