A gay college student's claim that a fraternity rejected his application or "pledge" because of his sexual preferences has stirred controversy at the University of Texas in Austin. Alarmed over allegations of anti-gay bias, university administrators have ordered their political police -- the Campus Climate Response Team -- to investigate.

The uproar at the state's flagship university underscores how much college fraternities -- whether composed of obnoxious WASPY elites or loveable misfits -- have changed since 1978's uproarious movie "Animal House.”

Diwu Zhou, a senior in civil engineering who is openly gay, has been eagerly telling media outlets how he was supposedly denied membership by Lambda Phi Epsilon because of his sexual orientation.

Interestingly, Lambda Phi Epsilon is composed overwhelmingly of Asian-Americans. They have banded together because of common interests and backgrounds -- yet woe to any of them if they dare to reject a pledge because they would prefer not to share their living arrangements with somebody with a different sexual orientation. Or put another way, how dare they exercise a variation of our freedom of association -- and that is the freedom not to associate when rejecting a fraternity pledge they deemed unsuitable.

Some students claiming to belong to Lambda Phi Epsilon have spoken up, saying that Zhou's “personality” -- not his sexual orientation -- is why he was rejected. Some have even said the fraternity has in fact had gay members in past years.

Zhou, meanwhile, has eagerly related his story to sympathetic media outlets, claiming that during pledge week a fraternity member had asked him if he was offended by a specific anti-gay slur. "They use discrimination with the word 'brotherhood' and that really disgusts me," Zhou said. He also claimed that an unidentified fraternity member subsequently told him that his sexual orientation is what derailed his application.

His allegations remain unproven. Meanwhile, the national board of Lambda Phi Epsilon has temporarily suspended the fraternity's Austin chapter while it looks into Zhou’s claims.

One upon a time, fraternities and sororities were composed of like-minded individuals with shared interests and personalities and backgrounds. And, yes, those fraternity brothers and sorority sisters tended to share similar ethnic and racial characteristics (though this certainly wasn't always the case). Nobody saw this as potentially criminal activity at the time; but this was long before the ideology of politically correctness and diversity took root on America's campuses. I never pledged to a fraternity, incidentally -- a process that can take weeks to more than a year as everybody gets to know one another. But if I had pledged, I was well aware that I could have been rejected for the most trivial of reasons (in my mind).

That's life. Interestingly, the freedom to associate or not associate is a constitutionally implied right -- and in recent years it has been unashamedly granted to black fraternities, Hispanic fraternities, and Asian fraternities. Everybody except white males and, as this case would suggest, heterosexual males.

What next? Will a heterosexual male claim "gender discrimination" at the University of Texas because he was denied admission to a sorority? Where does the craziness end?

For readers too young to remember, here is a scene worth savoring from "Animal House" – long before the existence of the "Campus Climate Response Team."