View Single Post
  #7  
Old 02-01-2006, 09:17 PM
Firehouse Firehouse is offline
GreekChat Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 780
Don't sell your souls.
Public universities have every right to reward organizations which dance to whatever tune the administration plays. They do NOT have the right to punish Greek organizations or any other student organization for failing to meet artificial and arbitrary "expectations". Civil rights law is very clear in that student organizations cannot be "de-recognized" for simply not fitting the template that some administrator dreams up.

Our university gives all chapters the opportunity to apply for recognition in a wide range of programming areas. The school even awards a "Fraternity of the Year" to someone in each greek council. However...the administrators who dream up the criteria are almost all women, and as a result the criteria for "Fraternity of the Year" is all about diversity and health issues and community service, etc. There are no points for sports, for rush, for any competitive, manly activity. I don't question their motives - they're nice people - but the effect is that they're trying to mold fraternities into what women think fraternities ought to be.

I don't care. But, I would be very disturbed if there was an effort to punish fraternities for not being like sororities. Administrationrs who deal with Greeks often tend to be bullies. maybe they're just tired of dealing with undergraduates. In any case, they have abslutely no rights whatsoever to impose, say, community servitude on student organizations. I'm not a Lambda Chi but one of their attorneys said it very well: "There are fraternities who don't want to do community service, who don't want to make their GPA the central focus of their lives. As long as they don't break the law they have the right to be lazy. Leave them alone."

THIS IS IMPORTANT: Once you agree to submit yourself to this sort of bullying, this sort of manipulation, you have lost the right to determine what standards they impose on you. Did the school tell you that you have to require each member of your chapter to do ten hours of community service? Next year, maybe they'll decide it needs to be 50. Do you have to have a chapter GPA of 2.8 to have a pary or get a pledge class or play intramurals? Why not a 3.0 or a 3.5? It's their decision now.
If you say, "well those are good things"...OK, then you focus your chapter on those achievements and win all the university recognition you can. But leave us alone if we don't want to. It's not your fraternity chapter; it's ours.
They HAVE NO ENFORCABLE RIGHT to threaten you with loss of recognition. Fraternity alumni on my campus stopped a version of this "Delaware Plan" dead in its tracks simply by visiting with the university Vice President and politely pointing out that these amounted to civil rights violations, and that they would be challenged as such if imposed.
Reply With Quote