Sigma Alpha Epsilon Announces Historic Change for membership experience

[snowflakemom]

Originally Posted by SAEalumnus

I don't necessarily disagree. However, this would be like the president writing his own laws without regard for Congress. The checks and balances are there for a reason.

I can absolutely see why members would be upset with the way it was done.

[SAEalumnus]

Originally Posted by snowflakemom

I can absolutely see why members would be upset with the way it was done.

Exactly. Beyond that, the new program is still under development, but was rushed into implementation for what can only have been the convenience of the timing to our national founder's day. Such a radical departure from the usual order of business will have unavoidable hiccups as we work out how to deal with it. Nevertheless, we were all given 48 hours' notice of its implementation, followed by 48 hours to comply. Noncompliance means getting your chapter shut down. Nobody likes an ultimatum.

My hope is that the Supreme Council and Fraternity Service Center reconsider the mandatory nature of this until it can be more thoroughly reviewed and actually discussed by the membership. It could be piloted on a voluntary basis to prove the concept and refine it where appropriate before full-scale implementation. There were so many ways in which this could have been better handled. As it is, I've already heard talk of the entire Supreme Council getting voted out of office at the next Convention over this.

[naraht]

Originally Posted by SAEalumnus

The five-member Supreme Council acting on its own does not have the authority to do this. They are attempting to invent this authority by pulling the word "represent" out of context and ignoring the multiple sections of the Fraternity Laws that clearly but inconveniently establish otherwise.

I fully agree here. Yes, there are reasons to allow a National Board to make certain actions between conventions. However, if a National Board can do this, what CAN'T they do.

I fully expect the Supreme Council to be voted out at the next opportunity.

[badgeguy]

In reading this thread, does this new policy state that after each bid is given out, the chapter will have 48 hrs to initiate the new member?

A question I have is was this something done to try and appease the university boards of trustees and insurance companies?

Years ago this was brought up in many fraternities, back in the 1990s many schools were trying to abolish pledging as they feared the pledge process was the sole root of hazing....

It didn't work then as they had planned.

The thing about making anyone the chapter likes, and "automatic" brother so to speak is that eventually there will be those that find ways around this....

Fraternities are akin to FreeMasonry in that now it seems that they will just follow how that organization works. You get a committee to check your background, then you go through the three steps to becoming a "brother". Although there is no "pledge process" within masonry, many lodges take the three months to go through each "phase" of membership if you will....(I too am a mason, so I'm trying to put this in laymens terms for those not familiar with how it works).

If this sort of thing happens you will see more groups adopt processes similar to other orgs who dropped "pledging" for a more elaborate ritualized society. New members may be called whatever the college or university wants to call them other than "pledge" but many will not likely be privy to "ALL" the secrets of the society until after a period of time passes or other "levels" of membership occur.

From an historical standpoint the logic of it makes sense in that in the beginnings of most orgs, they would just find people on campus that the chapter liked or members trying to establish a new chapter liked and then just initiate them as soon as possible to have them start to build great chapters, some failed, and many successed, and some switched affiliations.....but that was back in the days when you'd be talking about only a couple of people to deal with within chapters, now some chapters have hundreds of members and dozens of potential new members. To me it seems like rushing in 100 new guys (or gals if this ever happens to a sorority) will break up many chapters and cause too many divides within the brotherhoods....there won't be any time to get to know how the new members will fit in...they are forced to being "fit in" under this plan.

In the end, I guess there are interesting points on both sides of this issue....it'll be interesting to watch what happens.

BG

[WhiteRose1912]

If you're interested in seeing what collegians think about this, there's a discussion about it over on Reddit. It's going about as well as you'd think.

[Sen's Revenge]

I am all for massive, sweeping, transformative changes in theory. They excite me to no end. I immediately envisioned myself as a chapter president confronted with making this work, like Olivia Pope.

And it SHOULD work.... chapters SHOULD be picking dudes they KNOW they really want and making them their brothers. IF SAE allows for a much longer rush period and doesn't penalize chapters for becoming drastically smaller over the next five years, SAE could truly become known as an elite, exclusive, selective fraternity nationally. This is not a terrible branding decision, all things considered.

But here's the problem: Rarely, if ever, does a fraternity's culture supersede the campus culture. What is the usefulness of this sort of image if you are on a campus where "exclusive" isn't as valued as "big" or "gregarious" or whatever it is that works on a specific campus.

In NPHC world, where all of the organizations have abolished pledging since 1990, and some before that, we have certainly entered into a dark ages we are only just now emerging from. Of course the kid sought underground pledging experiences which turned them from children into men and women. That's what people under 25 do, make dumb decisions.

Sorority DEF in the NPHC had a three-day intake process. On one hand, the organization became very successful over the past 20 years in creating a culture that frowned upon the "making" of sisters and embraced the "selection" of sisters. But at what cost? Even though women are still pledging, it's now been 20 years of being called skaters, paper, weekend warriors, etc. And they don't even have a three-day process anymore, but after 20 years, the damage to the undergrad experience has been done.

Anyway, I feel like I am rambling... but my overall point is that unless SAE is prepared to not even compete for the same candidates as their peers, they are in for a lot of problems they hadn't even considered. Hazing persists in NPHC organizations and abolishing pledging hasn't saved lives.

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by sugar and spice

I think it's a brilliant idea in theory. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out in reality.

I'm not sure it's that brilliant. Personally, if it were my group doing this, I'd rather see a rehaul of how pledging is done first. I've said before that I think that pledging (called by whatever name), at least for males, plays into some important rite-of-passage archetypes—not so much in terms of weeding out, but rather in terms of being fully accepted. NB: By pledging, I do not mean hazing.

Originally Posted by Katmandu

Lambda Chi Alpha does not have pledging.

Yes, it does. It just calls it associate membership. Not having pledging means going straight from bid to full initiation. Lambda Chi goes from bid to an associate member period and then to initiation.

SAEalumnus, thanks for all of the background info. I can see why SAEs may be up in arms about this if there are questions as to the Council's authority. I hate to say it, but I think an attempted change like this is doomed if there isn't broad buy-in from collegiate members, and that's not likely to happen without extensive discussion and feedback that includes everyone.

[33girl]

Re Masons, yes, it would be marvelous if college fraternities could choose their members like that. The difference is that the window of time is a lot shorter. The Masons also don't have to worry about filling a million dollar house.

[DeltaBetaBaby]

Originally Posted by MysticCat

I'm not sure it's that brilliant. Personally, if it were my group doing this, I'd rather see a rehaul of how pledging is done first. I've said before that I think that pledging (called by whatever name), at least for males, plays into some important rite-of-passage archetypes—not so much in terms of weeding out, but rather in terms of being fully accepted. NB: By pledging, I do not mean hazing.

I guess this is why I am so cynical about it. The national council has told chapters they must implement this or lose their charter. Okay, but they've been telling chapters that they have to stop hazing or lose their charter for years, and hazing is still happening (and I personally have no idea how widespread it is, but obviously the council thinks it is enough of a problem to implement this change).

On an unrelated note, I go by their HQ a lot. Maybe I should look and see if people there look especially stressed out today.

[sugar and spice]

I'm sure it's taboo to say this on GC, but the problem is that NIC fraternities are largely wedded to this idea that the collegiate chapters are capable of self-government despite the fact that this has been proven untrue for the majority of them. SAE says it outright in their statement: "We acknowledge that many groups maintain a positive experience for their new members and that the experience may be beneficial to the development of members on some campuses. Unfortunately, the instances of programs that do not follow suit outweigh the ones that do." SAE's own documentation shows that they've disciplined more than 100 of their 250 chapters since 2007--and that doesn't include the ones who are doing things but haven't gotten caught, or--like with the Salisbury hazing case--ones where the university found the chapter guilty of hazing but SAE failed to act.

So fraternities' international offices create policies that are supposed to dictate how chapters should be run, and they hand down punishments when chapters are caught violating those policies, but they apparently fail to intervene effectively in that middle period where they could address hazing or alcohol problems before they've grown out of control, because the chapter is supposed to be in charge of governing itself. This is not a sustainable position, given rising insurance and settlement costs, and I think SAE's leaders realize it, even if their members don't. They already have the highest fraternity insurance costs per member in the country, and if they lead fraternities in deaths, they likely also lead them in pocket-emptying lawsuit settlements, too, so those costs are only going to grow. This is a good first step to reduce them, but unless they're going to back up the changes with changes in how things are enforced--field staff taking a more active role to root out hazing, a return of house parents, more direct involvement with campus Greek life staff, more of a willingness to close chapters with recurring problems (no matter how prestigious of a campus they're on), etc--then nothing will change. More direct HQ intervention is not going to be a popular change, so I can understand why so many fraternities are so hesitant to do it, but the bottom line is that it's going to be a necessary one at some point in the fairly near future in order to keep organizations alive.

[DeltaBetaBaby]

Well said, S&S.

[Kevin]

This whole thing makes me glad that major changes like this in Sigma Nu have to be approved by the collegians. It would be a pretty tough sale. And if I think of just how many actually awful people our pledging program (no hazing) has kept us from sharing our secrets with, I could never support this sort of thing.

And if to comply, SAE chapters simply wait a semester to hand out a bid and initiate, what was the point of that? How many of your pledge class members are going to be picked off by other NIC groups through COB who don't have this restriction?

To each their own though. Maybe this works for y'all, but what I'm guessing is the makeup of your executive board is going to change dramatically soon and these rules are going to be rescinded before Fall recruitment.

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by sugar and spice

I'm sure it's taboo to say this on GC, but the problem is that NIC fraternities are largely wedded to this idea that the collegiate chapters are capable of self-government despite the fact that this has been proven untrue for the majority of them.

You make lots of good points overall, but I question this one. Has it actually been "proven" that "the majority" of chapters are incapable of "self-government" (which is a much bigger thing than just preventing hazing)? If it has, what's the proof? It's not the statistic you cited:

SAE's own documentation shows that they've disciplined more than 100 of their 250 chapters since 2007--and that doesn't include the ones who are doing things but haven't gotten caught, or--like with the Salisbury hazing case--ones where the university found the chapter guilty of hazing but SAE failed to act.

That's just one fraternity, and it's not a majority of chapters of that one fraternity, unless you can include 26 otherwise unidentified chapters (well, 25 not counting the Salisbury case) that are hazing but haven't gotten caught. Proof means actual data, not anecdotes, showing that more than half of chapters of NIC fraternities are incapable of governing themselves.

I'm not denying there's a major problem. There certainly is. I just question what seems to me like an over-generalization.

[BlueOwl]

Really interested to see how this all shakes out! I have a son who is currently an active member in a college chapter of SAE and let me tell you they are NOT HAPPY! They feel like they are just giving the membership away, without having to first prove your loyalty and worth to the Brothers. While I do not support hazing activities that are overtly humiliating or potential harmful to life and limb, I DO support a comprehensive new member period that includes learning all those tedious details about the fraternity! I don't think its awful to have new members do some chores around the fraternity house, I do not think its a travesty when a initiated (usually older) member calls a new member at 2:00 am and tells him to go buy him a Slurpee and bring it to him in the fraternity house. I do believe that some of these activities do serve to bond the group together and frankly to weed out the ones who maybe don't really want the membership that badly! I know many of you think Im nuts and that I am pro hazing. Well, to a degree I suppose that I am. But both my husband and my son look back at their personal experiences with so much respect...and some laughs. By the way....my best friend's son is a Lambda Chi at a private california school. Yes, they most certainly DO have a new member period and they most certainly DO haze.

[SOM]

As I posted a day or two ago I can understand and support my Brothers postings here. My feelings are that once this is full implemented, it will work to help us (SAE and all GLO's) improve and strenghen. However, as my Brother pointed out, the set-up and start-up of this program is a bit of a shock. I would have to wonder how busy the office and phone lines are this weekend with calls and meeting.

Something that I find interesting in a few posting is sort of a cavalier approach to hazing/RM issues. One look at the RM section should be enough. Or one can do a search with terms "hazing" "law suits" "injuries" "deaths" "Sigma Alpha Epsilon" (or any other GLO). Sadly not at all to difficult to find news stories about SAE. We have a large target on us right now as we have the highest death toll of any Greek living group. And laws suits resulting from them. A letter from our National was posted, a year or so back, in the RM section-worth a review. And it is not only SAE-all GOP's, as seen within the RM section, have problem chapters. And yes, Chapters can get closed, a few Brother/Sisters may get some fines and/or minor jail time but it is the National that gets hit with the law suits. Even thought they have policies in place, education in place to prevent, or at least reduce the issue. I have seen here and in other posting all to many comments from people who claim to be active students that state that their Chapter gives the finger to their National all the time and get away with it. Until something bad happens and then they find out that they are on their own. And that they just put a hurt on the entire Greek family on their campus.

Now I have a good feeling that I may be one of the oldest people lurking on this board. And yes, by today's definitions, I was hazed. However we were never, ever put into any kind of situation that may have put us anywhere near the the area of physical harm. Most of it was mental and even that was countered by positive education and support right afterwards. As for getting a 3 AM call for a soda-that is BS. That is not building a Brotherhood-that is bullying. We had to carry a pen, a lighter, and some small change. Maybe a whole dollars worth. And wear our Pledge pin. Did we, as Pledges, do some house work-Yes. Party clean up and dinner set-up. And Active Brothers did come around and help out after a bit. That is team building.