What Pisses Me Off About Fraternity & Sorority

Yesterday I sat in a 1:1 meeting with my supervisor and she asked me a few simple questions:

1. Are you willing, able, and motivated to continue to move the agenda forward in Sorority & Fraternity Life at the University of Tennessee?
2. What is your attitude in how it relates to you and your work?
3. How does your role contribute to the successes of the Office of Sorority & Fraternity Life and the Division of Student Life?

To be completely honest, I struggled in being able to have a positive answer to those questions.  Because sometimes I honestly wonder if we make any kind of impact.  I wonder if the time that we spend implementing leadership theories into retreats, composing assessment for diversity programming, coordinating educational workshops and programs, having 1:1 conversations with students actually means anything to them.  During our conversation I had to mentally force myself to think about the positives and look at how I'm contributing to the success of our students.

Then I read Jess's blog A Message for Fraternity/Sorority Professionals Before #AFAAM and it came at the perfect time.  Thank goodness, I'm not the only one that feels this way.  Thank goodness I'm not the only one that's pissed off.  Thank goodness that there are other people that are concerned about our future.

What pisses me off is that I don't think our students fully grasp the power that they have within their organizations and themselves.  What pisses me off is that we spend most of our time and money on selling an ideal image during recruitment that doesn't get lived up to during the rest of the year.  What pisses me off is that entire chapters will show up to a Wednesday night date party, yet it's pulling teeth to get 5 to show up for a community service event.  I'm pissed off that my women glorify blacking out from alcohol and seem to think it's a right of passage when they turn 21.  I'm so upset that we have to beg members to take leadership positions in our chapters.  I hate that my members can talk all about the gossip they hear from all the other chapters on campus, yet they can't walk into their formal chapter meeting and recite their ritual.  I hate that we have to threaten fines and standards meetings just to get people to show up for chapter events and that things that we should just do out of the goodness of our hearts, like donating to food drives, have to provide point incentives. I hate that the only way we can get members to participate in anything is to turn it into a competition.  I despise that I have to listen to people complain that our community has the negative stereotypes because all the media does is focus on the bad, yet every other week when our office asks each chapter for their positive news to be able to promote it, we hear nothing.  I'm sickened that our members know about hazing and other things that go on and stand beside and allow it to happen.  I loathe the fact that we have alumni that encourage poor behavior and use their lawyering skills to get their chapters out of trouble instead of holding them accountable for their actions. 

Why do these things piss me off?  Because we're better than that.  We took oaths promising to be better than that.  We were founded to empower, lift up, and make men and women better people.  To provide members with guiding principles and values that contribute to our campuses, local community, and society as a whole.  That 150, 100, 25 years ago, our founders created something so that they had a platform to be able to fight and advocate for what they believed in, and we've turned it into a social drinking club.

After being able to read Jess's blog and reflect, instead of feeling bad that I was frustrated, now I think it's a good thing.  I think I'm supposed to feel this way.  I'm supposed to be pissed off.  If I wasn't pissed off, I wouldn't push my students for change.  Is it fun to feel pissed off?  No, not really, but that feeling when combined with just a few energized student leaders leads the way to feeling passionate and motivated.  Gathering together other pissed off sorority & fraternity professionals can lead to collective action where we force the tough conversations to be had.  We've created this reality for ourselves.  It didn't just happen by accident.  So what are we going to do to change it?  We all have the responsibility to do it.  We can sit here and blame university administration, governing councils, or legislation, but in reality, it's our individual members that have the power.  

I don't have a lot of push or pull when it comes to changing the big picture of the fraternity and sorority world, but there are things that I can do here at the University of Tennessee.  And I'm accepting that responsibility with gusto.  I hope my students read this.  I hope they see that I'm pissed off and why.  And I hope that it pisses them off too.  Pisses them off to the point where they stop sitting back and just letting things happen as they always have.

So what are you gonna do?  Are you going to get pissed off?