[EE-BO]

Thanks for posting the article exlurker.

I think there are two excellent Risk Management points that arise from the content of the article you have linked,

1. Stories about the "old days".

As an alum I have heard some really interesting stories about the "old days" of my chapter- and I am even in a couple of them. The stories have been embellished, as any good story is, but when it comes to stories there is a very real danger that pledges will take what they hear to be fact and do something foolish in the hopes of "measuring up".

This is a perfect example of that since the article indicates that the pledges did this because they heard someone else did it before- and thought it would be funny to do it again.

But leaving aside whether it was an appropriate activity, note that the pledges took a LOT of pictures. If this really did happen in the past and noone got caught, does anything think the group that did it before stood around for a very long time and took a ton of photos? Or would they have done it a couple of times and taken off?

The lesson is not to have pledges do things like this very quickly and then leave, but the actual story of the incident is a perspective on just how freshman don't think about what they are doing the first time they escape the confines of home. How smart was it to hang around and do this over and over and over again?

2. Carefully planning pledge activities BEFORE the semester starts.

Whether you find this incident funny or not (I must confess it is kinda funny), does anyone here think that a pledge educator or officer of a fraternity would ever be intelligent to let this take place in a public place?

A good pledge program is hard and a hell of a good time in ways that non-Greeks won't understand.

But a good pledge program is also planned out in advance with very clear guidelines about what can and cannot happen overall- and specifically what can and cannot happen in the public eye.

A pretty good rule of thumb (and something we always abided by when I was an active) is that no brother- not even the pledge educator- is left alone with the pledge class as a group to give them orders. And especially not when people have been drinking (though it is not clear that was the case here- I am just pointing it out.)

Having that second guy around when things are going on is very important. It is one more step towards making sure that these kinds of things don't happen. While the concept itself is fairly harmless, this is a PR nightmare waiting to happen because of where it was taking place.


On a final note- I think UGA stuck with the right charge. Now that the facts are presented, hazing and racism do not seem to apply at all. I wonder if some who rushed to judgment- including someone claiming to speak for a Chi Phi brother- will be willing to rethink their positions or at least explain why their positions are still justifiable (to each his own- but at least state your case.)

That said, I find it amazing that colleges still think forced "re-education" programs (diversity training etc.) do any good at all. If anything, it just alienates people even more after the public trashing they get in the media for what was a dumb kid mistake that happened to push certain buttons but was otherwise no different from any other dumb kid mistake.