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Old 08-20-2003, 08:35 PM
decadence decadence is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 1,474
Making effort to search for posts from others asking for help and replying to them.

Enlightenment, I certainly see what you are asking. GLOs have a position to be incubators of leadership with their opportunities offered - officer positions etc. True, most regular collegiate clubs and societies offer some similar positions (usually less committees due to lesser organisational complexity) but perhaps without the leadership training schemes that would be offered by a GLO.

Schools themselves may be thought of as cradles of leadership. Unfortunately the structured academic curriculum often has little opportunity to teach such skills and still less opportunity to allow students to practice such skills. GLOs with managing committees, organising projects etc offer such options.

The question whether there is burden of responsibility to seek out campus leadership positions on those in GLOs... I would tend to think a fraternity man (or woman obviously) should not be expected to fill a campus leadership position more than an unaffiliated man. This comes down to the question of whether leadership skills are intuitive things one is born with (which they aren't) or things which may be developed (which they are). Since I posit they are things developed, it does not follow a fraternity man would be a better leader than the next candidate "just" because he is in a fraternity. To be a better candidate he would have to have a) had leadership training via the chapter e.g like the DTD fraternity offers its brothers and b) had a chance to put those into practice via an officer position. Not all fraternities have formal leadership training in place as part of programming so there cannot be a hard and fast expectation Greeks would make better leaders. Or indeed should be looked upon as leaders - unless they have requisite skills to be as such. One owes it to oneself to seek personal development, however, so if there are opportunities withn the chapter then those should be sought and certainly later it WOULD be proper to share that expertise with the university as a whole to benefit the whole student community.

In conclusion, I'm not sure if my thoughts were in any way illuminating for you but I hope it may help.

- Richard.
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