I went through similar hazing when I pledged way back in the day. It wasn't insane, but it wasn't wildly enjoyable either.

Like you, I'm not convinced hazing is a bad idea when done correctly. I've been through a lot of military training as well, a lot of things there were less constructive and more humiliating than anything I did as a pledge. But, the methods that work for training are equally effective regardless if you're talking about teaching a pet, pledges, or Army privates. Constructive, controlled, and well thought out application of physical and mental stress is (as far as I'm concerned) the quickest way to achieve training goals.

That said, it's illegal and has consequences. I look at it a lot like pot. I really don't think pot is really any worse than alcohol & I wouldn't much care either way if it were legal, but it isn't, and because it isn't I would go to war with my brothers to keep it out of my fraternity house, because the consequences of getting caught are too serious.

We got busted for hazing when I was an active & one of my best friends and I were the ones that re-wrote the pledge program from scratch.

Our basic premise was to make pledgeship just as hard if not harder, but with methods other than physical hazing. We scheduled their entire day from morning till night. If they weren't in class they were busy.

We still had house hours to clean, but it was just cleaning & actives helped rather than screw with them. They had an increased number of study hours. We stuck with a set schedule of hours in the evening, plus they had to sign into the library for an additional 6hrs a week during the days. We added an hr/wk bible study focused on the principles of our org so they would better understand ritual at the end of the process.

We added a program we called active practice. That was we took an active officer position & assigned it to each week. They would do a project for that position that week. A pledge was selected at the beginning to be in charge of each project so they could coordinate with the officer and work with the pledge class to plan what they were going to do. So, they had like a philanthropy wk where they planned a full up chapter philanthropy project from scratch just the way the chapter philanthropy chair would do it and with him as an advisor. They also did fundraiser, social, chaplain (brotherhood retreat that turned out to be their big brother wknd)... I don't know, 8wks worth of stuff with a new position/project each week. As long as you can keep the pledge class in control of the project rather the active officer treating it like he's got slave labor for a week, then it's very effective. We felt like it taught strong leadership and trained them to do many positions in the chapter that they might be able to hold in the next year or so. Anyway, if they weren't otherwise occupied during the day, they were supposed to be working on those projects.

They had a DD rotation pretty much every night. Pledge trainer made sure folks with tests the next day were off. They had an absolute curfew every night & if they broke it we at least scared them by bringing them to a vote at chapter or something like that. And pledgeship was absolutely dry all the time - cause they were on-call DDs the whole time. There were a couple exceptions to that. Their bid acceptance party, big brother, and the social they planned. Otherwise, no exceptions & actives took that seriously cause that's your brother's DD you're talking about.

That's most of what I can remember off hand. Point being, pledgeship was more time consuming and arguably harder than before, but was now legal and more productive. We went from busted for hazing and fighting for our charter one semester to getting national and campus awards for that program the next year.

It's going to be hard. You have to get buy in from your chapter, and a lot of them aren't going to want to do it. You need continuing education directed at moral leadership and self-discipline. You need strong chapter leaders, and send emerging mid-level leaders to something like leadershape so they can take the reins next.

If you don't already have a strong involved alumni advisory board, get with your nationals and get one going. I don't know how your national org does their chapter advisor/alumni board/or whatever, but I really like what we do. We have a board of folks with focused positions. So, you have one advisor focused on risk mgmt and judicial for instance. All he does is ensure a training level and oversee operation of the chapter officers doing those functions. So, rather than one chapter advisor trying to oversee everything, you have specialized focused experienced help for key operational areas. You don't want those guys micromanaging, but you do want them deeply set in key areas of the chapter.

You have some hard work ahead of you, but you will find it very rewarding to look back and know you were a big part of changing the chapter for the better in this way. Good luck!

Oh, I forgot to say... you need to look at all your traditions. Some of those likely involve hazing. For us that was big bother. So, we created a local big brother ceremony to replace that event. Nationals was never too happy with the addition of a local "ritual" but it was better than a rally & trading swats by a bonfire in the middle of no where. They're still doing that same ceremony. It's a little cheesy, but kind of cool.

You don't by any means have to create ceremonies or anything like that, but you do need to figure out key traditional events that involve hazing and create a substitute that's equally transformative & cool in the eyes of actives. Don't be scared to start new traditions. A year or two later they're engrained & just as loved as what you were doing before.

First of all, congrats on the awards / turnaround.
Second, maybe just a minor question, or maybe you can't answer because of ritual issues: was it hard to do a "bible study" focused on your org's principles without hitting the slippery slope of actual religious beliefs / theology, etc?

I'm an ATO, so Alpha and Omega with a cross in the middle. We aren't exclusively a Christian org, but we are based on Christian principles. We were started after the civil war to bring mankind together on the basis of commonly held judeo-christian principles, and cause everyone to believe in those things so we can unite them. So, not really a problem.

That said, we tapped Campus Crusade to run it. I know some campuses have Greek InterVarsity which might be better if it's there. You could probably use a business ethics professor if you needed to. Whatever works. I thought it was good to bring someone in from outside that had some expertise and maybe a different view about the subject areas than we as undergrads did. Opportunity to sharpen and refocus.

Anyway we have some principles stated in our ritual & 3 public principles focused on pledges. We just changed the ritual principles to synonyms, added the pledge principles, and kicked in a couple complementary words. Then told the Campus Crusade guy to do moral development sessions based on one of those words for each session. He did the non-denominational won't offend anyone version. He did make bible refs, but also talked about how something was viewed in Judaism, Islam, etc. It was a bit of a communications barrier to get across to this guys what we wanted, but once it was going it worked well.

We ended up recruiting a couple guys out of campus crusade that each later served as chaplain for the chapter - which is mostly about continuing moral leadership education for actives in our org. We also started doing habitat projects, which was run by campus crusade guys on our campus, so working side by side with those guys. Lot of cultural barrier, but good stuff to do.

Bible study, and anything specific we did, may not be the perfect answers for another org or campus. It's what worked for us. I'm mainly saying it can be done & done well while still being hard and maybe even making your chapter/members better in the process. You just have to be creative and put in some hard work.

Thanks for the info, and best wishes for the future, too.

haha you caught me mid-edit. No worries. Hope our experience can help someone else along the way. If not, well, it worked for us at the time & I'm proud of that accomplishment.

dnall, it seems to me that ATO has held on to this particular aspect of its heritage/history more than most if not almost all other GLOs with a similar background, at least of the NIC/IFC variety. By that, I mean that while many groups acknowledge that they are founded on and espouse Judeo-Christian values, ATO seems to take it further with more stress on its spiritual dimensions. (I know there was discussion here at one point about ATO publishing a devotional book and having a prayer "room" on its national website -- don't know if either of these are still around.)

Do you think that this religious dimension has, in fact, remained more a part of ATO's national identity than is the case in other GLOs? And if you do, can you say why? (Understood if you can't.) I just find it very interesting and informative.

I really like this:

"...ATO, so Alpha and Omega with a cross in the middle."

Yeah we have all that & a little more.

We used to have a spiritual consultant that toured around. He wasn't there for the dog & pony show. He wasn't supposed to report bad stuff unless it happened in front of him. He was there to see what was really going on in your chapter and help you get back to the fundamentals. He did a session with movie clips to reinforce the ritual/creed & used that as a basis to get the chaplain running continuing education for actives. That was badass, but it got discontinued due to cost.

We still do a spiritual leadership retreat hiking through the Rockies for a week. Never been, but hear it's real cool.

But anyway, to your question... I can give you a really simple answer you won't understand, or I can take a minute to explain it in more detail so you get it.

I would say XYZ can be based on whatever judeo-christian values, fine. But why does it exist?

If that answer is a social club, mutually supporting each other, standing up for the rights of people like us (ie make my own life better), &/or self-improvement then I don't understand why they still exist.

I can see the short term by the founders. I can see a chapter operating as a social club. I can see some alumni caring about their past experience and the friends they had it with. I cannot see a national org & involved alumni without purpose. All that would leave behind is taking money off chapters to pay the staff and spray around a few scholarships. That would be tragic.

ATO chapters exist ONLY to recruit men of quality and train them to accomplish our mission as alumni. They do a lot of other stuff like any fraternity, but that's just bonus. If only the bonus existed, we'd dissolve the org.

The simple answer is that is who ATO is. That's our lives & we've sworn our soul before God to execute it forever and be judged by him on our performance of this calling.

Without the mission, it's just some dumb letters on the front of a house full of drunk assholes trying hook up & pissing off the neighbors. That's not a fraternity and cannot be allowed to exist, at least not with my letters on it.

I mean I can talk to you a lot about the mission and purpose. I can explain the principles just using synonyms for the actual words. I can tell you the 50 something bible versus in our ritual. I can tell you almost everything about my fraternity with the exception of the actual secret stuff. We're not supposed to hide that stuff. We're supposed to be finding rushees that believe & buy into that concept, and we're supposed to be spreading that message to the world, so not at all secret. The handshake and password and stuff are the only real secrets.

I couldn't comment on other orgs. I've seen some where I don't see the purpose and I have an very hard time understanding them. But I've also seen others where I can very clearly understand they have very important mission & members are deeply committed to it.

All I can say is I hope all orgs have a purpose and commitment on par with my org. If they don't I feel sorry for them and it effects my respect for their org. If they've lost their way, I think it's vitally important the reexamine who they are and get back to those roots. If they never had a serious purpose, which I hope has never in history been the case, then I would hope they'd either remake their org or dissolve cause that's a waste of space making us all look bad.

Anyway, I'm sure that's long. Clearly passionate about my org, and always difficult to explain your passions to get across your feelings and why you have them (maybe girls are better at this? ;) ). But, I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.

The juxtaposition of these two statements made me laugh. Sorry.

I do understand what you're saying and I appreciate your taking the the time to answer. It does help me understand better (and confirm) what I thought I was observing. And what you said about the mission of the org, as well as what you said about getting back to roots, resonates with me and my own experience very much.

I know that this was something of a highjack of the thread (though one I found informative), so back to our regularly scheduled thread. Perhaps what the OP can take from this (if he's still reading) is that part of a successful strategy is likely to involve delving into what the fraternity experience really means for his fraternity.

I don't think you can say that overall, as there are many religious or ethnic groups out there who part of their purpose, if not their primary purpose, for being founded was that they were denied membership in other groups. You can't really blame them for "losing their purpose" when society has moved forward and (hopefully/theoretically) made their purpose moot.

It's a completely normal fraternity with ragin parties, serious risk mgmt concerns, etc. It's not church deacons. We're all comfortable with the juxtaposition of the two by now.

I would say their founding was short sighted. They have lost their purpose & therefore should dissolve or remake themselves with a new change the world purpose. Otherwise it's sitting in a car that's out of gas blasting the radio and pressing on the pedals thinking you're getting to your destination. I'd rather see them out of the way so those members will go to orgs that do actively have a serious change the world mission to accomplish.

:eek:

Can we unban Rudey for a day or two?

dnall, why are you such a jackass?

Oh, I know. It was just humerous.

So only "serious change the world" missions are valid or worthwhile missions? Anything else is short-sighted? My org certainly has what I would call a "serious change the world" mission, but I can't imagine ever suggesting that other orgs with different kinds of missions (like, say, change/grow the person) aren't equally worthwhile or valuable.