NPHC/NPC/IFC/NIC/MCGC and Greek Week
 

Hello!
So, a few quick questions..

1. Regardless of your council and organization:
Is Greek Week mandatory at your school? For example, if your chapter chooses not to participate, are there penalties?

2. If you are in NPHC, are you required to participate in your university's Greek Week?

3. If you go to a PWI, do you have different Greek Life Advisors for the councils or it's just one person over ALL Greek Life? It just seems like there is a lack of understanding between our Greek Life Coordinator and the NPHC at my school.

Thank you all!!!

Really yall? 30+ views and no one has anything to say about Greek Week?

LOL. I had typed a post but decided not to post. In the 1990s, my chapter hated Greek Week. We considered it an NPC-IFC-centered waste of our time.**

They tried to require our participation but we fought that tooth and nail. We agreed to participate in later years but it still was a hassle because we are an intentionally small chapter. Although we were friends with some NPC and IFC members, Greek Week wasn't fun. We would much rather hang out with other GLOs without a formal Greek Week.

They unfortunately had the same Greek Life advisor for all of the GLOs. We didn't pay that advisor any mind and only cared what the Delta chapter advisor, et al. dictated.

**This was also connected to the notion that NPC and IFC are "real" sororities and fraternities whereas the rest of the GLOs were for "those people." That is correlated with race and ethnicity which is why it grates my nerves when national bodies like NPC present themselves as representing "all sororities" and "the sororities."

/there ya have it

1) I work with a professional fraternity at a public college. Actual Greek Week, I don't know if they do. But they do require a lot of things for our org that I do not think is an efficient use of our org's time, such as mandating participation on a professional council. (I just think professional orgs operate in their own realms and don't need to interact with other professional orgs in order to be a success.)

2) n/a

3) At this school, there is one Greek Life Advisor for all Greek Life. The person sometimes has graduate assistants, but there are none currently.

Send me a PM if you have further questions as I can't guarantee further public comments about this topic will be diplomatic on my part lol

1. Regardless of your council and organization:
Is Greek Week mandatory at your school? For example, if your chapter chooses not to participate, are there penalties?

No, if a group didn't want to, we'd have no problem. Our associate NPC member just started participating recently, and we welcomed them in easily.

2. If you are in NPHC, are you required to participate in your university's Greek Week?

Our NPHC and MCGC organizations aren't required to join in; they used to be involved but have since discontinued.

3. If you go to a PWI, do you have different Greek Life Advisors for the councils or it's just one person over ALL Greek Life? It just seems like there is a lack of understanding between our Greek Life Coordinator and the NPHC at my school.

Our school has NPC-IFC under the Fraternity and Sorority Life Office, while the NPHC and MCGC groups fall under our Multi-Cultural Student Services Office, so we have separate advising for each set of councils.

1. Regardless of your council and organization:
Is Greek Week mandatory at your school? For example, if your chapter chooses not to participate, are there penalties?

I don't think Greek Week is mandatory-to the best of my knowledge not all of the IFC and NPHC chapters participate, and non-social groups don't participate at all.

2. If you are in NPHC, are you required to participate in your university's Greek Week?

Again, I am fairly sure but not completely sure that they aren't.

3. If you go to a PWI, do you have different Greek Life Advisors for the councils or it's just one person over ALL Greek Life? It just seems like there is a lack of understanding between our Greek Life Coordinator and the NPHC at my school.

We have a Director of Greek Life, an Associate Director of Greek Life and then several Graduate Assistants who act as advisors to chapters in all three councils (Clemson doesn't have any chartered multicultural groups). Our Associate Director is an AKA and one of our grad students is a DST so I'd like to think that we have decent communication between the NPHC and overall department, but I'm not totally sure.

1. Regardless of your council and organization:
Is Greek Week mandatory at your school? For example, if your chapter chooses not to participate, are there penalties?

When I was in school, it wasn't required. However, we had to submit annual "performance reviews" to the Greek Life office and there were points given for participating in GW. If you participated in other events throughout the year (both school and non-school related) it could potentially offset the points lost from not participating in GW.

2. If you are in NPHC, are you required to participate in your university's Greek Week?

My org is not NPHC, but no groups were required.

3. If you go to a PWI, do you have different Greek Life Advisors for the councils or it's just one person over ALL Greek Life? It just seems like there is a lack of understanding between our Greek Life Coordinator and the NPHC at my school.

There were multiple advisors (throughout the years, I've seen one for each council [4], one for PWGLOs and one for "cultural" GLOs, one for fraternities and one for sororities -- not sure what they're doing now, but all of the advisors reported to the Student Activities director).

1. Regardless of your council and organization:
Is Greek Week mandatory at your school? For example, if your chapter chooses not to participate, are there penalties?

I think so! but I only think so because each one had to pay a fee.

2. If you are in NPHC, are you required to participate in your university's Greek Week?

Okay so technically you are supposed to, but that doesn't mean people like listen to that. At my school you have at least one NPHC and one MCGC fraternity or sorority paired up with you. Our NPHC frat participated with us to the best of their ability ( i think they had other events planned around the week too) and the same with a majority of the other NPHC sororities and fraternities.


3. If you go to a PWI, do you have different Greek Life Advisors for the councils or it's just one person over ALL Greek Life?
Nope. Our greek life advisor oversees them all. But I know he is a IPT so he deff understands the culture of the NPHC and whatnot.

I wish more schools would try this model.

I'm curious is the resources are comparable. At my alma mater, Greek Life had a MUCH larger budget than the MC office did.

The FSL office has a slightly bigger budget currently, in part due to previous allocations and due to the addition of more chapters in the IFC-NPC area recently. I know the university tries very very hard to make sure campus resource allocations are equal and suited to what each group needs. We've had a big uproar here regarding diversity issues on campus, so I imagine the MCSS budget will be seeing a rise come fall in order to tackle these issues and provide more resources/programming. We have a very welcoming atmosphere here, and money works much the same--there's plenty around so if the MCSS Office wanted more I can't imagine them having problems getting it.

And at many schools, Greek Life/Student Activities has a larger influence/impact on campus life than Multi/cultural offices.

It is an interesting model. At face value (what k_s has presented) the model seems super segregated but I could see how that is beneficial for NPHC/MCG. I think it implies that the university acknowledges that the councils and organizations operate very differently and need their own space to do their thing, but it also implies that the university is not going to create any common ground for all orgs to share.

Can I just be super honest and slightly shady?

Why should the orgs share common ground? Even aside from recruitment practices, it's apples and oranges, from systems of advising to theories of lifetime commitment. And social justice.

Well that's my neutral/unbiased answer. To be really real... you're right. Apples and oranges still means we're all fruit. Maybe we're apples and tomatoes. Both fruits except we're fruits that everyone treats like vegetables?

Now this is stuck in my head:
You're A Vegetable, You're A Vegetable
Still They Hate You, You're A Vegetable
You're Just A Buffet, You're A Vegetable
They Eat Off Of You, You're A Vegetable

I've said this in other threads. There is no reason to act like the different councils have anything in common other than Greek letters. At a national level, there are some common interests, such as allowing single gender organizations, housing and insurance policies, etc., on which the groups might want to work together (for example, the bill to allow donations to Greek housing to be treated like donations to a university for tax purposes), but as far as programming? Nope.