First, let me say that I am not emotionally in favor of dry housing.
Having said it, now I must once again point out the following:
*Over 95% of all fraternity insurance claims are alcohol related. This includes injuries, property damage and even deaths.
*Because of the above, there is an ever increasing number of fraternities who cannot get insurance from anywhere. That number is growing and will continue to grow.
*A number of those fraternities have banded together to fund a kind of self insurance pool.
*The amount of money in that pool is nowhere close to what a major insurance company has.
*A very few (possibly as little as two or three) really major claims against this consortium could bankrupt the fund and may well bankrupt all of it's participants.
At that point, the debate will end, because those fraternities will cease to exist.
In the final analysis, all of the arguments about third parties, driving to bars, legal drinking age and all the others will be moot.
We will have killed the organizations that we all love.
A fraternity chapter at Ohio University just closed because of a $2 million award paid by it's national to the parents of a member (at another school) who died in an alcohol related case. That national had to raise it's insusrance bill to over $300 per man. The chapter simply couldn't afford to stay open.
What you are potentially arguing here is not the future of dry or wet housing, but the future of the entire fraternity system.
The real tragedy is that the problem has gotten to this point. Moderation in alcohol consumption is the key. Unfortunately, our track record is terrible.
And Greeks continue to die.
And so, if moderation is not achieved (and I see nothing to indicate that it will be), dry housing is inevitable.
Those are plain, unemotional, dollars and cents facts.
I don't like it, but unless you all are willing to put your house in order, that's what I see in the future.
Fraternally,
DeltAlum
|