University Of Wisconsin Suspends SAE

[Kevin]

1987? 1992? Really? No active member in college today (maybe someone with the nickname "Blue" excepted) was alive at the time, so just.. no..

I think if you look at college fraternal groups such as SAE, you're going to find a number of regrettable incidents in their past, present and future. Our members are, have and will be responsible for racial incidents, hazing incidents, sexual abuse incidents and no matter what policies universities adopt or what our national offices do or how much we alumni want to inject ourselves into these students' daily lives, the fact will not change that our active membership consists of men, mostly 18-22 years old, many from backgrounds of privilege, who make bad decisions. What distinguishes each of our groups is not that those things happen, but rather how our organizations strive to prevent those things from occurring and what we do in response when proactive measures fail (and they will).

I don't want to be too critical of SAE's general staff at this stage in the game. They recently went through a very messy separation with their former executive director in which he very publicly resigned his membership. If they are not a mess internally right now, I would be very surprised.

I also hesitate to comment as to whether this is an SAE problem or just a problem most fraternities probably have, which is only made more public today because of social media and the lesser tendency on the part of administrators to turn a blind eye towards this sort of thing.