That is true most of the time. However, my daughter is a Freshman at a college in Florida and I attended parents weekend a few weeks ago. As you can imagine, the fraternity parties at the fraternity houses were relatively regulated and had a bunch of rules. Then my daughter took me to a fraternity party at a satellite house (i.e. not formally a fraternity house but rented by fraternity brothers) that everyone knew was affiliated with a certain fraternity and was manned by pledges of the fraternity. The fraternity apparently has these parties at this house all of the time and the brothers of the fraternity rent the house year after year. Although the fraternity had a beautiful house on campus, their big, blow out parties are held at the satellite house. The party was similar to the fraternity parties when I was at PSU back in the day with a lot of kegs and nobody getting carded at the door other than to see if you were on a list. I would be thoroughly surprised if the alcohol was purchased anybody other than the fraternity.
Being much older and more conservative than I once was, I looked around that party and saw nothing but a liability waiting to happen. As an example, there were 15 wasted students dancing on a table that looked like the legs were going to give at any time. Although the house was large, the house looked like it should be condemned.
I can tell you for sure that if and when somebody gets seriously injured at a party at this house, the lawyers are going after the fraternity. Further, despite the fact that the students are doing their own lawyering and trying to find loopholes in the fraternity rules to allow for such parties, to the extent that the Florida school is liable for fraternity sanctioned events, the Florida school is going to have a really hard time saying this was not a fraternity event. This type of liability is not something that can be ignored by Universities anymore. It is the unfortunate reality that exists today.
To the extent that someone will say the situation I described is much different than the current PSU situation, I challenge that person to write a rule that will ensure the University has properly addressed these satellite party situations that shields the University from liability for not having proper oversight over fraternities.