Quote:
Originally posted by Rudey
We don't want to do a common rush. That is just a way to push restrictions on us that we do not want. We do however want to promote Greek life and increase the greek population.
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Even without common rush, pooling money in an IFC-like environment can allow you to do bigger, better pre-rush events, and those are what really gets the word out.
This year, for instance, we put a couple grand into doing a big Greek BBQ - every chapter set up a booth, we cooked burgers and dogs, the girls sang and the guys played touch football. Fliers went up all over campus, with the BBQ info as well as rush schedules for each house. It went over very well, but probably wouldn't have happened without the IFC.
As far as other benefits, some right off the top of my head:
-Self-policing: if the school is comfortable with the IFC, you stand a good chance of gaining a (limited) ability to police yourselves. For instance: a chapter gets in some trouble, IFC sanctions (rush? social? fines?) could be levied rather than the school taking action.
-School relations: Putting a unified face on greek life, as well as putting good guys in positions to have interaction with school officials, can make the school feel better about the greek system, and create positive relationships between school officials and fraternity life.
-Inter-chapter relations: meeting guys from other houses, and working with them regularly, definitely helps with relations between different chapters. For instance, two LXAs on IFC have done great jobs this semester, and end up being really cool guys, and so we have a couple events in the works that Kappa Sigma and LXA are co-sponsering.
There can definitely be advantages to the IFC; just like anything else, however, if it's run poorly it is worthless. Also, if you have large disparities between chapter sizes then it can feel like the larger chapters are simply buying t-shirts for the smaller ones, as we pay a set amount per head in the chapter, and thus pay more than twice the amount of the smallest chapters. Overall though, when well-run, the IFC has created a lot of oppotunities for our greek system.