Phi Kappa Psi at U of Virginia Voluntarily Suspends Activities

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by 1964Alum

While the FIPG certainly asserts constructive policies to address alcohol abuse within fraternity chapters, I think those very critical of the entire Greek system have personally seen that the fraternities are not walking the walk. CYA activities are not going to fool anyone.

Expecting college kids not to drink, period, is an unreasonable expectation. NPC groups have avoided a lot of liability by allowing fraternities to assume a lot of it. Things like dry housing also come with a lot of unintended consequences. Alcohol.edu is actually a pretty good program and ensures that members at least have access to information before making poor life choices. Are 18/19 year olds going to still make poor life choices? Of course.

HOW, specifically, are individual chapters going to enforce these policies? HOW are the fraternities going to proactively protect these young women? HOW are fraternity brothers going to demonstrate that they take these policies seriously backed up with action, not words? HOW are they demonstrating that they value women?

In 99% of our chapters, there is absolutely nothing wrong. We are talking about a small minority of problem chapters.. and as we saw with schools like UVA, both Pike and Sigma Nu were proactive. Before anything serious happened, those chapters (Pike's Alpha chapter and Sigma Nu's Beta chapter) were shut down. Some national groups probably do a better job of taking the initiative and some groups are a little hamstrung by their own legislative processes seeing as this was an issue which was suddenly huge on the radar, many of us can't react in a huge way until our major legislative assemblies take place.

Until the behavior of fraternity brothers consistently changes, there will be no change in the public perception.

That's a little offensive. This issue, kind of like school shootings, kind of like terrorist attacks, etc., while real and while needing to be addressed is not nearly so pervasive as your above sentence would suggest. Fraternity chapters are not consistently places where women can expect to be raped. The problem is real, but let's not blow it out of proportion.