Decker Paulmeier grew up working nights and weekends in his family’s barbecue restaurant in South Carolina. He took his first double shift when he was eight years old, and eventually hustled his way up from bussing tables to mixing drinks behind the bar.
Like a lot of people who went to Bluffton High School, the medium-sized public school in his South Carolina Lowcountry town, Paulmeier was a working-class kid and the grandchild of immigrants (his mother’s parents immigrated to America from the Philippines).
He considered himself a slacker in middle school, but he wanted to go to college. He thought about going to a place like Georgia Tech, where he could study something cool like aerospace engineering and still have time to play club lacrosse and join a fraternity.
But after a family visit to San Francisco brought him to Stanford’s expansive campus as a high school sophomore, Paulmeier said he was hooked. He shaped his next two years around getting into the elite college—taking every AP class available to him and pursuing leadership opportunities wherever he could, whether it was as captain of the lacrosse team or as president of the National Honor Society.
“If I didn’t get into Stanford, I probably wasn’t going to go to college,” he told me.
He ended up getting into the school, which rejects 96 percent of its applicants.
At first, Paulmeier loved Stanford. He built strong friendships, pursued a philosophy major, and worked on an independent research project for the college’s Ethics in Society Honors Program on how to “close the inequity gap in the college admissions system,” he said.
After a gap year during the Covid lockdowns, he returned for his junior year in the fall of 2021 hoping to salvage a sense of community and camaraderie after a long period of social isolation. And what better way, he thought, than to host a party at his fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where he was now president.
Paulmeier, now 23, planned the bash at Kappa Sigma for April 15, 2022. But first he had to get approval.
For the past several years, Stanford has required students to adhere to a Student Party Policy, which includes a highly detailed “Harm Reduction Plan” mandating multiple sober monitors and designated alcohol service areas, and prohibiting the serving of any hard liquor.
Party hosts must also provide “EANABs,” or Equally Attractive Non-Alcoholic Beverages, to “contribute to an inclusive and inviting experience” for all partygoers. Hosts are also required to take an online “Party Planning Course” before submitting their applications.
Paulmeier met all the requirements, and the party was approved. He said student IDs were checked at the door, nobody had to be transported to the hospital for drinking too much, and the music ended by midnight.
“If anything, it was one of the more stable, risk-managed events,” he told me.
He never thought of it much afterward. Then, on April 28, 2022—the Thursday before midterms week—Paulmeier woke up to a frantic string of texts from his fraternity’s vice president and an email from the university’s Office of Community Standards, also known as OCS.
He let out a sigh, typed in the required passcode to view the message, and saw the words at the top: PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
“Christ,” he remembers thinking to himself, “this is bad.”
The message went on to state that OCS was investigating Kappa Sigma for three “concerns.” First, an allegation of hazing after a fraternity member suffered a panic attack. Second, a claim that students under 21 were served alcohol at Kappa Sigma’s April 15 party. Third, an incident on April 24 in which a Kappa Sigma member consumed too much alcohol and had to go to the hospital. In the meantime, OCS said it was placing Kappa Sigma on probation, meaning they could not host or be involved in any parties on or off campus.
“Failure to adhere to the interim Probation with Restrictions will result in additional sanctions and will delay the completion of this process,” the letter, signed by OCS Associate Dean Tiffany Gabrielson, read.
Within the hour, a dozen other Greek organizations’ presidents were texting Paulmeier, saying they, too, had been placed on probation, according to Paulmeier and one other source.
“This just nuked social life on campus for the rest of the quarter,” Paulmeier told me.
Paulmeier knew OCS had a reputation for being harsh—punitive, even.
The campus had been devastated by the suicide, on February 28, 2022, of his friend Katie Meyer. Meyer was a 22-year-old senior, captain of the Stanford women’s soccer team, and a star campus athlete. On the night of her death, she received an email, also drafted by Tiffany Gabrielson, that informed her she was being charged with a conduct violation alleging she had deliberately spilled coffee on a Stanford football player. This letter was open on her computer when she killed herself in her dorm room.
According to a wrongful death suit filed against the university by Meyer’s parents, the five-page, single-spaced letter attached to the email contained “threatening language regarding sanctions and potential ‘removal from the university.’ ”
Paulmeier is normally calm and deliberate in the way he speaks, often trying to show empathy to the university when telling his story, even after months of dealing with bureaucratic red tape. But when the conversation turned to Meyer, Paulmeier’s “deep-seated anger” toward the college bubbled over.
“The fact that just such a fucking flippant email. . . ” Paulmeier said, trying to calm his rage over the letter he claims caused his friend’s death.
“Yeah, it’s one email,” he said again. “But what does one email from Stanford mean if you’re a Stanford student? One email could mean the end of any kind of life that you had spent every fucking day for years working towards.”
Paulmeier said emails about his own investigation appeared in his inbox for the next seven months—first from OCS, and then lawyers from an outside law firm hired by the university to conduct the investigation into Stanford’s fraternities.
The OCS letter from Gabrielson was stern: “Finally, I want to remind you of the policy of Fraternal Organizations Housed on Campus. . . which provides for a review of fraternity and sorority housing eligibility when a Group is found responsible for ‘one major’ or ‘three minor violations’ of university policy within an academic year. Each of these concerns could be considered either a minor or major violation under that process.”
She didn’t state outright that the fraternity would be kicked off campus, but Paulmeier felt it was implied.
The lawyers from Stanford’s outside firm were friendlier, Paulmeier said, thanking him for his cooperation. But regardless, he woke up every morning and checked his inbox with “worry and dread.”
“Every time I would get those letters, I couldn’t help but think of her,” he said of Katie.
As his own investigation continued through the summer of 2022 and into the start of his senior year, Paulmeier said he worked five to ten hours a week trying to piece together the fraternity’s defense, and met personally with Stanford’s lawyers at least four times to be interviewed about the case. He decided not to hire an outside lawyer for his defense because he said he was confident the allegations were nothing more than misunderstandings. But as the investigation dragged on, he said he found himself navigating legal landmines and wondering whether he should have asked for help.
“I’m sitting in two-hour-long interviews on Zoom with lawyers who are trying to verbally and rhetorically trap people,” he said. “I had young kids that were 18, 19 years old who are international asking me, ‘Hey, can I talk to this attorney and tell them I drank a beer, or am I going to get my visa revoked?’ ”
Eventually, Paulmeier passed his presidency on to another fraternity member. In December, OCS officials emailed the fraternity saying they were found at fault for serving alcohol to at least one person under the age of 21 and for hosting a party in violation of university policy. The fraternity accepted responsibility and agreed to participate in what’s called a “Resolution Through Agreement,” or an RTA.
But the real punishment, Paulmeier says, aren’t the mandatory trainings or the months-long probation.
Dealing for months with lawyers and campus investigators drove Paulmeier, typically enthusiastic and motivated, into what he calls an “exhausted, burnt-out depression.” He told me he had gone through “a state of mental and physical exhaustion and collapse.”
Paulmeier was doing graduate-level coursework before the investigation. But by the end of spring 2022, he ended up with three incomplete classes. Normally a student who earned mostly As and Bs, he said he started his senior year in the fall by failing a class for the first time in his life.
His grades dropped so precipitously he was placed on academic probation and was in danger of failing out. Worst of all, one of his academic advisors wrote him a sympathetic letter urging him “in the strongest terms” to withdraw his honors thesis, which explored how elite colleges can reform their admissions processes to attract more students like him.
And all along he felt a nagging sense of guilt. He worried that complaining would make him appear ungrateful for the chance to attend a school like Stanford—an opportunity his family had sacrificed so much for him to achieve.
After being notified of Kappa Sigma’s charges in December, Paulmeier typed out an email to Gabrielson and other OCS staff: “I did everything I could to prove to this institution I was good enough to be here. But now I walk around this place and can’t help feeling physically defeated and discarded.”
“This investigation has disillusioned me from loving this place I used to think of as my home,” he wrote. “I hope that my statements in this letter aren’t perceived as character attacks on any individual. The overall effect of this investigation on my health wasn’t from one person, or even several, but a system.”
The system of punishment at Stanford is more than a decade old. Class of 1977 alum Bob Ottilie first became aware of it in the spring of 2011, when he got a panicked phone call from a Stanford student at his old fraternity, Sigma Chi.
The student told him that, in the middle of a human biology exam, the class coordinator had pulled him aside and accused him and two others of cheating.
The class coordinator’s allegation, based not on her own observation but that of an anonymous student, was the only evidence against them, Ottilie said. But all three students were charged by OCS with cheating under the university’s honor code.
The students knew Ottilie ran his own law practice and reached out for his counsel. Ottilie agreed to take the students’ case pro bono and worked with two other alumni lawyers on their defense—recreating seating charts and finding over a dozen witnesses who were willing to testify to their innocence.
Ottilie said he turned up at multiple hearings for the students only to be told by university officials he was not allowed to speak on their behalf, but could advise them from behind the scenes.
After five months of a judicial process that Ottilie describes as “biased against the students,” all three of his clients were acquitted of the charges. But the experience exposed a deep flaw in the university’s treatment of its student body, Ottilie told me.
“In the process of working with those students, we discovered that Stanford. . . was denying them of their procedural due process rights at literally every step of the process,” he said.
One year later, in 2012, Ottilie and two other alumni lawyers formed a group focused on Stanford’s disciplinary proceedings called the Student Justice Project, and set up a website for the organization, saying it was “born out of. . . the failure of University officials and Trustees to protect our students.” They published a detailed report of the cheating case on the site, and listed multiple allegations of mistreatment, including ignoring prejudicial information, giving students false or misleading information regarding their rights, and excluding evidence in favor of the students.
Ottilie shared the 60-page document with The Stanford Daily, and personally emailed administrators, from Stanford’s then-Dean of Student Life Chris Griffith all the way up to then-President John Hennessy. In the report, he argued that Stanford had violated the terms of its own judicial charter throughout the investigation.
At the time, Chris Griffith told The Stanford Daily that she had received “really good feedback from the students who’ve come through our process.”
Griffith also noted that some of Ottilie’s suggestions in his report—such as the need for more formal standards on evidence that can be admitted during a case—were already being considered by an inte
