You completely missed the point. It's not about drinking, it's about being too clueless to know you shouldn't shout it from the rooftops. And it most emphatically is NOT just "one person at one chapter."

You are very fortunate.

No, I said that because that is what I tried.


I agree. But, I've also run into the attitude of 'I'm 18 now, you (older adult) can't tell me what to do!!!!!'



I never had to deal with drinking. The chapter just wanted to do silly stuff that they though would be good sisterhood bonding activities, but I had to tell them that the activity was now considered hazing. They wanted to try to do it anyway.

I figured she'd understand as she's in law enforcement, and hell, can it be considered to be lawyertalk if Jeff Bridges' character in True Grit waxed eloquently on the law using those terms?

True. Trouble is, that our national offices are trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Create a safe place for illegal drinking? Then when something goes on [and it will] complicity of the HQ is easily proved, even though common sense would seem to dictate that for the members, this would be the ideal approach.

Pretend it never happens and close chapters when they are dumb enough to get caught? Then when something goes wrong [and it will], at least you have plausible deniability. This is obviously the worst approach if the safety of collegians is paramount, but it's the approach most organizations take.

The sending of the email was one person from one chapter. That was, in this case, the shouting from the rooftops. I maintain that someone, 10, 20, 30 or more years ago, probably got in trouble for something similar, it just wasn't an email.

The drinking and drugging and whatever, as I said, is not new and is not somehow more blatant than 10, 20, or 30 years ago. People have had fake IDs, underage parties and such since the dawn of minimum age laws, and I doubt that they were ALL more subtle.

Point is, in 1981, someone got a group in trouble for underage drinking at a party because they were stupid enough to talk/brag about it in public. 'Kids these days' aren't worse, they just have different ways to get caught being stupid.

You're right.

I think the point being made was that "kids in those days" did not have social web sites like t-witter, face-book and the such to broadcast everything they did.

"Kids these days" have that option. Unfortunately the "kids these days" choose to use that option when they really should not, for most reasons.

Yeah, yeah it is.

can't do it, even if it would make sense logically it's illegal and can't last. Until the law changes there's no choice for our offices at all.
I don't really think that it's necessarily true that creating a safe space for illegal drinking is some how actually safer. I think people believe that it is, but I don't think statistics back that up, not when it's still illegal.
Considering our orgs all seem to do alcohol abuse education in some way shape or form (maybe not all, but many) they're doing more than just looking the other way.

My question is, how did it get out?

That's not altogether true. Although, as an aside, I will say that I'm certainly advocating a position which is different from how I act when dealing with my own chapter (I follow the rules). While active support is probably out of the question, feigned punishment, meaningless suspensions and not shuttering chapters when individuals have lapses in good sense are probably on the table.

Examining a few premises with regard to drinking, would you agree that:

1) Less education is better than more education?

2) Fewer policies looking after the safety of members are better than more policies looking after the safety of members?

3) Drinking at the chapter facility is better than drinking elsewhere and having to obtain transportation home while one's judgment is impaired?

We can talk about those statistics (are you referring to that early-2000s Harvard study?) as it fails to discuss some of its basic assumptions, has some rather flawed premises, and that its conclusions tend to be somewhat viewed in a vacuum, and are not generally reliable if we're wanting to glean anything useful.

I agree that most of our organizations require undergrads (and begrudging advisors in many cases) to view the Alcohol 101 flash presentation, and that's better than nothing, but if we're doing that, are we not on some level admitting that we know that everyone is engaging in this activity?

I do agree that the big issue here with AGD was that the email admitted to many members having fake IDs, which in most places is a felony. That officer's behavior could have resulted in the chapter's officers, advisors, etc., being named as defendants in a conspiracy to commit a felony case. I don't really fault AGD's offices for taking the action they did. Under the circumstances, it was probably appropriate, so I hope no one views my words here as being critical of AGD's activities, because if it was my chapter, I'd probably be supportive of the same sort of action being taken.

I don't agree. (Except I never said that drinking etc was new) Unless you were around in that time period, you really can't assert that THE SAME AMOUNT OF people acted the same way. They did not.

Of course there were people occasionally who were dumbasses and got busted because they were blabby. The dumbassery just wasn't occurring as often because the majority of people were aware that they had to keep certain things under the radar.

If fraternities and sororities wanted to put the cap on this behavior, they'd lobby for the states to drop the drinking ages below 21 if they saw fit, and quit worrying about their images.

Yes, people 10, 20 and 30 years ago could also be stupid. The big difference is that there was nothing permanent back then. No email, no internet, no twitter, no text. There was also not the level of news/entertainment reporting that there is now. If someone blabbed, it only was heard by those in earshot. If it was repeated, then it became an unproveable rumor. These types of things just didn't travel far. And they certainly weren't important enough to make the 6pm news or the front page of the local paper... which is all the news that we had.

So, the lack of common sense could be the same, but the situation today is completely different. Put something stupid "out there" now not only could the whole world potentially see it, there would be no way to retract it/hide it/deny it. Yes, people got in trouble back then, but the ramifications of their actions weren't near as severe.

This question in particular struck a chord with me.

The issue at hand is that several people don't understand the consequences of written records, and considering how email, twitter, and FB messages work on a technological level, it'd be crazy to assume that any of it was actually private.

Even for private messages sent online, you should imagine that they are mailed without any envelope with all the parts printed on the same side of the same sheet of paper, and that it is physically impossible to deliver unless each person handling it reads the entire message and photocopies it each time they handle it. Not to mention, some of the handlers are handlers because they can make money by selling information contained in those messages (this applies, in particular, for Facebook and Gmail).

As for Yahoo! Groups: last I recall, the default settings make the group easily viewable to the public. I haven't checked, but chances are, someone can probably go online and dig up that incriminating message mentioned in the OP right now.

When people wonder why I'm such a tech advocate in some areas but an ultra-Luddite in others, this is why.

I haven't seen True Grit yet, but thanks to Legally Blonde, I know what the two terms mean :)

For the record, I'd pick the dangerous one...because I'm not afraid of a challenge!

Wow! Tons of interesting discussion here. Basically, I'm with 33girl: it's not that we were angels back in the day, but we were a lot more circumspect about it. I'd like to think I wasn't all that wild as an undergrad, but I was scared spitless of our standards process--that put the fear of God into me.

Kevin, I'm thinking malum prohibitum.

This discussion is an interesting dip into current mores, that's for sure. Thanks for all the different points of view.

Feigned punishment never results in respect for the rules. I think that's a bad idea.



No, No, No (and that's a very non-neutral premise the way you worded it, I'm disappointed in you.)

I haven't seen anything that suggests that, for example, teens who have parents who let them have alcohol at home (as a party, not as a glass of wine with dinner) are better about handling their alcohol either. I think we trick ourselves into thinking that.

IYeah, it's a systemic issue, one that's outside of our orgs control. If our organizations want to lobby to change the legal drinking ages, I'm all for it. Our organizations should NOT condone - tacitly or explicitly - illegal activity.
I agree, that's a whole other issue.
No, I don't have to have lived then because that's just anecdotal evidence. If there's statistical evidence out there I'm glad to examine it, but I don't know that it exists.

Instead, I'm making what I feel to be logical assumption that someone, somewhere on a yearly basis, throughout the history of organizations has done something stupid and made it public. Just like someone, somewhere every year has an MLK party with fried chicken and watermelon and 'thinks' that it's cool. Stupid college students do that sort of thing. One hopes they grow out of it, but this is not something new.

I disagree, I think we just find out what happens at XYZ, Alpha Beta chapter because of the internet. I believe that XYZ Alpha Beta chapter would have gotten in trouble every year, but Joe Schmoe cross the country wouldn't have heard about it.

I agree.
I do agree with this. I was disagreeing with the idea that kids these days were just scandalous in ways never considered before. I think they don't realize the ramifications of putting things online, but I think they've always been just as stupid (and smart) as ever.

I went to school where the bar age was 19. I know of nobody dying of alcohol poisoning in a bar. I know of several people who died of alcohol poisoning in fraternity houses.

(I know, anecdotes are not data, but I'd argue that a "safe place to drink" did exist, though it was illegal for 19 and 20 year olds to drink there)