Our students and alumni learn to cover their tracks and call it leadership by watching us – the leaders of the fraternity/sorority world. They see how we act and act in the same way and we lecture them for it.
Broad, unrefined prohibition is an unworkable answer considered respectable only among those who fetishize authority and power – people who have no place in leading a values-driven fraternity experience.
Dog and Pony Show Laws like Pennsylvania’s, which merely bundle already illegal things together with a different context and title, will do nothing to stop deaths due to hazing. They may actually make it worse.
The issue is not that fraternity members wish to be regressive heathens who kill their own members. The issue is that some students are held to different standards than others, that many are aware of it, that they are pushing against those policies, and that we are responding by disparaging people as if they were simply regressive heathens determined to kill their own members.
The scariest element of dangerous hazing activities is that many accelerate from innocuous to dangerous over a period of a few years.
Here are some thoughts for chapter officers, chapter advisers, and general members to nudge their chapters away from dangerous hazing trends.
This might be a great post for those who are advising for the first time, who want to switch up their practices, or for chapter officers. The challenge of positional leadership is that it inevitably creates a divide between you … Continued
I was at The Ohio State University working to re-establish a chapter of my fraternity in the spring of 2012. It was an interesting recruitment campaign as it was one of the rare instances where our entire team of five worked together to set up one chapter.
In our 2nd or 3rd week of the campaign, Woody Woodcock from Phired Up visited to offer coaching support to our team. Our recruiters were trained in part by Woody and his colleagues, and we had built a fraternal bond with one another over the course of our fall term – Phired Up staff would visit twice during each of our expansion campaigns.
Woody noticed some disorganization and distractions among the members of our team, so one evening he asked us to meet in one of our temporary apartments. We entered into a dark room, the only light coming from candles set on a table in the shape of our letters. The six of us stood around the table while Woody spoke. Some of what he said was written on a piece of paper, some of it may have been improvised, but the purpose of it was to reconnect us to why we were setting up a new chapter and the bond we all shared as fraternity men.