Hello again all -
I am writing in response to the post by AKOmicron, where she touches on the press release and what was said in it. I would just like to reflect on the portrayal of the university versus the greeks (this feels like an essay).
First off, I'm not sure if I spoke about the " While the board’s action was taken at its meeting late on Friday, the announcement was delayed until today to permit Gerald Brody, vice president of Student Affairs, to notify presidents of fraternities and sororities of the board’s decision. “We wanted to extend that courtesy to our students,” said President Edmondson. " part of the press release, I know it's a technicality, but the Press Release was sent out before the e-mail to the entire AU Campus. And I don't mean by a few minutes or so. GLO presidents were notified, and I speak for my house, around 12:00 noon that day. The Press Release was released at 2:00 PM, and the mass e-mail was sent to AU students at 4:30 PM.
Secondly, I'm not sure how many Trustees actually sit on the board of Trustees, but there are 45 people listed on the website. The address for this is:
http://www.alfred.edu/faculty/html/b...f_trustees.cfm
Thirdly, to my knowledge, the Task Force met with 6 Greek Students. I do not feel that 6 Greek Students are a fair representation of the entire Greek System, ESPECIALLY since some of those 6 students were members of the same GLO.
Fourth, " At Alfred University, the Task Force found membership has declined from 45 percent of the student body 40 years ago to 10 percent today. Among entering freshmen last year, only 4 percent expressed an interest in joining a fraternity or sorority, raising questions of their long-term viability, a concern heightened by the fact that fewer than half the members currently live in the chapter houses. " For a school that has 2,500 students, 10% is a decent sized amount of students. For those who might have a little bit of trouble with math (No offense intended towards anyone) that is 250 students. Yes, there was a much higher percentage back 40 years ago. BUT, also, at the same time, there were a LOT fewer organizations at AU. Today there is over 100 organizations on campus, catering to every interest you could possibly imagine. About the part about entering freshman, I don't know how many of you knew that you would be interested in going greek when you were an entering freshman. As for me however, I was a straightedge, deadset, ANTI-GREEK person when I first set foot on this campus. I can guarentee that I too checked the "NO" box on that little questionnaire that went around with my housing packet. As for the "fact that fewer than half the members currently live in the chapter houses" part.....Well, where do I begin? I'll start with DZ, since there seem to be a lot of DZ posts on this thread. As I understand it, the reason that the DZ sisters here have not gotten an official DZ house is that if they did, they would need to have a Housemother and curfews. The housemother part, I have been told in the past, is not possible at the moment, because of the cost to hire someone to live in the house full time. Also, They would not be able to build a house off-campus in a location easily accessible (less than 2 miles) to campus, for two reasons. 1.) The Village of Alfred (town that the school is in) has passed laws quite a while ago that prevent the building or NEW occupation of buildings to be used for Fraternal organizations. GLO's that already have houses are "Grandfathered" in, like DeltAlum posted. Also, there are no houses for sale that could be bought in the area. 2.) Alfred University (back when GLO's were recognized by the university) had a policy stating that any GLO that was created or that was to move into a new house, must, in order to retain recognition from the university, move ON campus into a house that was already existing or that was built for them on a street called Greek Row. This was a provision created because AU thought it had a chance to become Ivy League, and as I have heard, one of the requirements was that greeks were on campus. I am not sure of the validity of that, but either way, they above is a policy maintained by the university.
Fifth, "Additionally, “Greek membership does not reflect the changing campus population in terms of women, minorities or international students, all of which have an important future at Alfred University,” Bernstein said. " If any of you have seen Wednesday's NY Times, the version that had the article AND the picture, I would like to point out that the picture shows 5 members of my Fraternity. Out of the 18 current actives, and I can explain why that number is low in another post, 1 is African American, 1 is Haitian. Just graduated recently in the past 5 years, there have been, I'd say, between 5 and 10 Spanish/Puerto Rican/German exchange students/Arabic. Compared with a total of graduated students in the past 5 years of around 35-40, I think that between 17% and 25% of our population in the past 5 years is not too bad. I can not speak for the rest of the system, but I know that most of the other houses, if not all, had at least one or two "ethnically diverse" people in them. As for the fact that that the number of sorority members hasn't gone up, for the past school year, there was an interest group set up for a new sorority, which would continue through next smester and possibly be a colony next year. I foget the name of the National that was sponsoring them, but I do know that it had gotten off the ground, and there was a decent amount of interest shown in it.
Sixth, "The Task Force also learned that students in Greek houses tend to drink more and more often than their peers at Alfred University " I don't know where they tried to come up with this, but this past semester, there was an absolute minimum of social events hosted by greek houses. During this semester, the amount of alcohol related write-ups in on-campus dormitories was higher than it had been in the recent past. This fact, while I do not have the numbers here, has been determined by the office of Residence Life. The write ups, in general, were for students drinking in their dorm rooms or for being drunk in their dormitories. Do note, however, that the majority of these write ups occured on nights where there were NO greek hosted events held that night.
Seventh, "There are also growing numbers of violations of University policy. This spring, six of the 12 Greek organizations (eight fraternities and four sororities) were under sanction for violations. " While, unfortunately, this is true, the university does not tell the public that there was BASICALLY a witchhunt going on, where students that did go to a greek house and drink and came back intoxicated but were not causing any types of noise violations were told to tell the RA/RD where they were drinking or they would be written up. This happened more than once, not only on nights when a Greek Hosted event took place, BUT even on nights when one hadn't taken place. Very Salem Witchhunt style.
Eighth, "It also hired additional staff to work with the Greek organizations " The only staff I know of is the Assistant Dean of Students, Daryl Conte, whose position was extended in 1992 while there was an Interim Assistant Dean as I understand, to include Greek Organizations specifically.
Ninth, " “The University has repeatedly encouraged fraternities and sororities to set higher academic standards for themselves and to police their own behavior, but overall, they still do not meet our expectations.” " As for this, I would like to say that while the average GPA of Greeks is lower than the schools average, it has been increasing throughtout the past few years. Also, the rate at which matriculation is reached for Greeks is much faster than that of non-greeks. Also, The past two years there have been TREMENDOUS strides towards creating a well run, unified, and PRODUCTIVE Inter-Greek Council (IGC). During this past semester, guidelines for internal Judiciary action for infractions that were not deemed serious were created, and implemented into the IGC constitution, which was fully revised as well. Previous to IGC, there were seperate Greek Councils, Inter-Fraternity Council (IFC), and Panhellenic Council. These two organizations were combined, creating IGC, and since then, the Greek System has been becoming more unified, and actually working together in order to "police their own behavior". It is not like we completely ignored them and conitinued on our way, we were trying to change things.
Tenth, "Furthermore, the task force noted, the University has offered financial assistance to the Greek houses, including establishing a revolving loan fund to help them with repairs to their houses. " It was reported in a Newspaper in a statement by a university administrator, I can't remember who, that the university has spent around $100,000 over the past few years. Where has this money gone? I can speak for my house when I say that we have not seen any of that money, in the form of a loan or otherwise. As for the Revolving Loan Fund, I speak for myself, and I have been here for 4 years now, that this is the FIRST time I ever heard of a Revolving Loan Fund to help with repairs. Was this $100,000 spent on salaries?
While this was not in the Press Release, there has been mention of houses being in rough condition, I can't remember the exact wording, in different news articles. I would like to point out the fact that while the Task Force was meeting, they made appointments to visit some of the Greek houses. Unfortunately, the trustees could not make it to the appointments that they had made, and ALL of the appointments were cancelled. Back in February, Dean Brody, who is mentioned in some articles and in some other posts by AU students, took a quick tour of ZBT Fraternity. Let me note that while ZBT is not a model of the perfect Fraternity house, there are NO structural problems, and NO code violations. Let me also note that every year, the Village of Alfred requires us to have a house inspection, by the Village Code Officer. This Code Officer checks Fire and Safety Systems, Structural issues, and Sanitary issues. If a house does not pass the code inspection, the house is condemned until it is brought up to code. This past year, not one house was condemned. The Code Officer is not employed by the school, he is employed directly by Village, so there is no bias involved.
Ok, I believe I have said everything that I wanted to say for now, so I will wrap this up. Thank you to all of you patient and interested enough to read this entire post.
Joseph A. DeLuca III
Kappa Psi Upsilon
'1190'