When I first decided to enroll
at U of I, I had no idea if I wanted to rush or not. I ended up joining one,
which I will not name, however, it is one of the most prominent fraternities on
campus. During my time before my initiation, my pledge class and I faced many
challenges that brought us together and turned us into men. From daily
cleanings to standing in front of a room of men yelling at you to going to 3
am's and having to face the challenges of reciting literature of the fraternity/reciting
"quotas" of active brothers in the chapter house, I transformed from
a boy to a man. My pledge class became a united group of real brothers who have
a strong connection that nobody can understand unless they have experienced it
themselves. We had an initiation week that lasted all week, I will not go into
details about what occurred, however, it was the most challenging week of my
life. I wanted to give up, I cried, I went through hell, but I never gave up. I
knew if I dropped out I would disappoint my best friends who I pledged with and
I knew I was becoming part of something bigger than myself. The day I initiated
was one of the happiest days of my life. I experienced my brothers cry, I
cried. It was a beautiful moment.
Two years later, nationals have
banned our pledgeship and discontinued our initiation week. Nationals believes
by instantly initiating will make us better as a chapter and closer as a
cohesive unit. They believe our pledgeship is unnecessary and has no purpose.
We as a chapter have a huge problem with this change. In our opinion, we
believe you need to earn your place in our fraternity. We all have done it and
we all are better for it. It is not hazing, it is constructive activities that
transform the immature boys we were in high school to young adults that have
priorities, goals, and ambition to be successful in life. We understand
hardship, we know that hard work is necessary for success and by depriving us
of the most beautiful moments of our lives is wrong. These are the transaction
costs in ridding of our pledgeship, we are depriving future pledges the chance
to become men and experience what hard work actually is. Another transaction
cost associated with the new system is that the relationships we build are so
strong because of what we went through together. We all share something so
special to us and we believe it is actually detrimental to the fraternity's
long term future because alumni will not donate back to the house. We have had
discussions with guys from 2005, 2009, 2011, 2013, and current chapter members
and they all are in agreement that they will not give back to the house and
will not continue relationships with the active chapter house. Donations from
alumni are huge and a large part of our financial aid for social events and
philanthropies, without it we could collapse entirely as a chapter.
I believe the transaction costs
associated with doing away with our pledgeship is not worth the risk of
allowing the house to potentially crumble and no longer be an active chapter.
We all love our fraternity, but we adore our chapter. I am proud to call myself
part of this chapter more than I am proud to be part of our fraternity. I would
hate to see one of the greatest chapters in the nation discontinue because we
decided to take away the backbone of of our house, pledgeship.
The passion in which you wrote is evident. I will not try to match that in my response, but I will try to get you to see the picture in a different way than you depicted it.
ReplyDeleteFirst, have you and your fellow fraternity mates read this piece from several years ago called The Dark Power of Fraternities? I read it around the time it came out, as I was a subscriber to The Atlantic then. I don't recall all of it, but some of the issue is about liability insurance. The National, I believe, provides insurance for the individual chapters. The National, in turn, purchases coverage from some insurance company. Given the spate of incidents that motivated this story, the insurance companies were doing some or all of the following - raising their premiums rather dramatically, refusing to pay on a policy if there were some initiation practice in place that seemed to increase risk of a bad outcome, insist on some adult (closer to my age than to yours) supervision in place to keep things from getting out of hand. In short, the Nationals are doing what you don't want them to do, because the insurance companies think fraternities are uninsurable otherwise.
If that is the approximately correct, and I'm saying this from memory rather than rereading that piece, then you should ask whether you can have the fraternity the way you want it, but with no insurance coverage. I doubt that can work.
Now let me turn to some of the other things you said. I appreciate that the 'hell week' you described created an intense environment that served as a bond among those who participated in it. And forming such bonds is a good thing. So that much of what you said I will agree with.
But you also repeatedly used the expression - 'turned us into men' without ever saying what that really means. You also seemed to imply that there was no other possible mechanism for you to mature in this way. For your information, I did not belong to a fraternity in college. Do you think I never matured as a consequence? This would seem to be an implication of what you wrote. If you actually didn't mean that, you need to reconcile something that might be difficult for you to do - admit there are other paths toward maturation but still express some preference for the path you were on.
There is also the issue of whether you are mature as measured by other adults (like me) rather than by your peers and whether you can see yourself through the eyes of others, not just me but consider people who work in the Dean of Students office. How would they think about what you said?
Finally, let me ask this question in a different way, which is to consider other branches of the fraternity at different campuses. Are they all in revolt with the National organization? Or have some of them come to terms with the current realities? How similar is your fraternity to the analogous ones at Wisconsin or Ohio State (assuming there are chapters on these other campuses)?
I hope you can try to address these points in a level way. That is the way in which I've tried to offer them up.
Sorry for the delayed response, I did not mean that if you are not part of a fraternity you will never mature into men. I meant that if you are put through the type of pledgeship I was put through, you can become a man because of this. Of course, there are other ways of becoming a man. I just believe this was the best course action for myself in becoming the man I want to be.
DeleteEvery fraternity is pretty much the same across the big universities. I know of many chapters that do the exact same things as us, if not worse. All members that have been exposed to pledgeship of this sort, agree with my viewpoints. I have talked to multiple members from various chapters.