Alpha Chapter Woes

[EE-BO]

PM about to be sent.

For the public record though, I do not have any special insights and conclusions on this. I am a great believer that a chapter's active members, alumni and GF liasons are the ones to handle chapter matters.

I do not want to embed myself in this, just as I would not want other chapters embedding themselves in the doings of my chapter. I just wanted to put my comments out there in the hopes that the people who started this blog might change their minds.

While it is true that many would not have been aware of this situation, from the inside there is not a lot of information out there either- nor have I pressed for it- for the reasons I state above. So, the blog does not really do anything to provide info to those who are entitled to it (Alpha actives and alumni) in reaching a determination.

As an advisor, I try to encourage my chapter to approach their fraternity experience like a business. In many ways, being in a fraternity prepares you for professional interactions.

In this particular case, the primary driver of the blog seems to be a desire to get more information about the reasons for the member review. Agreeing with its findings or not is surely a matter of contention too, but what I have read indicates the most urgent desire is to get more info from GF.

And, looking at it from a real life perspective, the presence of the blog is only going to make it less likely that will happen. How the member review went down is something I know nothing about, nor it is my business- but I think it is safe to say that if those asking for the information are showing a willingness to broadcast chapter matters on the internet, then GF has no incentive to try and have a discussion with those individuals because they have no way of knowing if those individuals will make additional discussions public if they do not like what they hear.

I do not ever try to butt in on other chapters- I really don't. But then again, I have never seen anything like this blog before in response to a chapter's internal matters.

And I am just not sure it could do any good at all. If anything, it creates more harm.

As an active member I often had an inherent mistrust of GF and Housing Corps and all that- but with age and experience I know that these entities do care. And a chapter with a strong caring alumni base will have the best ally possible in dealing with internal strife.

Alpha chapter has such an alumni base- full of men who care deeply about the chapter and have devoted their time to other chapters around the country, including mine.

So while there may be particular aspects of this one process that need to be discussed for the better of future management, I cannot imagine how this blog is going to help in any way.

Right now it can still be possibly excused to some extent as frustrated young men who need someone to work with them on understanding what happened- or accepting it.

But if the disclosure gets much more detailed or starts naming names, then it will go beyond that and I do not think these young men will find a sympathetic ear because at that point it will look like something quite different, and it would then validate the presumption that these men were in the wrong all along.

JMHO.

[furmanbeta]

While I can understand where you guys have been coming from, I think that there is something that should further be understood and looked at here. I definitely concur in the opinion that I do not want other chapters butting into my home chapter's business, nor do I necessarily feel the need to get involved in theirs. However, looking at things from a business perspective, each chapter is not its own business, each chapter is a member of the larger corporation. As such, members of the corporation should have the right to gain at least some knowledge into the inner workings.

Basically any time that you take a look at the GF website, you'll see that there are chapters reporting on various successes that they have had. But isn't it strange that there is virtually never a failure posted? Is it because every chapter is functioning so well that there are no massive failures worth reporting? Of course not, this is merely selective reporting of the news to create a particular image. There is barely a mention of when a chapter is closed, much less severely reprimanded. The entire process needs to become somewhat more transparent.

That having been said, I am no great fan of the AO staff in large part. While I am sure that the hearts and minds of these men are in the right place, they are working on a seriously misguided sense of action. It is not the job of the General Fraternity to step in constantly. We're closing chapters as quickly as we're opening them, that suggests to me that there is a problem. Now comes the question of what the problem actually is. The first possibility is that there are far too many irresponsible individuals, who are not living up to the Code, and basically disgraces to the name of the fraternity. The second possibility is that those individuals who sit on their high hill in Oxford have little understanding of what it takes to be successful on the undergraduate level, have forgotten what life was like when they themselves were undergrads, and are high and mighty enough to believe in their own superiority. As for me, I think it's the latter.

Here's one final thing to consider, and I can't believe it hasn't been brought up yet. Alpha won some awards at Convention last year, with the most important being the Knox and Sisson Awards. These are the absolute highest honors that a chapter can receive throughout the course of a year. They are the supposed mark of chapter excellence. Are we to believe that in a period of about 6 months (4-5 of which were actual academic months) that this chapter has devolved to a point where the entirety of the membership needs to be reviewed? Something is rotten in Oxford.