I haven’t posted anything to this blog in a long time. Most of my writing time these days is devoted to reports for clients, although I was able to carve out some time recently to publish our Dyad Strategies Whitepaper (which you need to read here, if you haven’t already, because it provides valuable context for this post) as well as a companion commentary piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (which you also need to read and can be found here). We also launched the Dyad Podcast in the last year, and most of my creative energies have been applied there. So, the blog has just sat and gathered virtual dust for a while.
If you read the piece I published in the Chronicle, you will see that I lay out three things that we need to be thinking about as we approach the
return to “normal” in the Fall. To summarize, we have to rethink our approach to recruitment
and incentivize our chapters to go out and find more maybe and never joiners,
we need to be prepared to provide some intensive alcohol dependency
interventions, and we need to get serious about addressing the power
differential inherent in a two-tiered active/pledge membership structure.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to drop a few blog posts
as an addendum to the Chronicle article. There are a lot of other things we
can/should be doing to prepare for the post-COVID environment, and I can be a
bit more candid on my blog that I might be in a Chronicle piece.
This week, I want to talk about systems of accountability.
We’ve been preaching accountability for years, but during that time we have not
done much to update or improve our systems of accountability to meet the unique
needs of a new generation of students. In my last blog post (written over two
years ago) I highlight some of the research emerging around post-millennial
students and their developmental inability to engage in meaningful
confrontation. Traditional systems of accountability (which rely heavily on
dated notions of self-governance) just aren’t working like they used to. As a
result, more bad members are able to stay around chapters and inflict more damage
than ever before. We have to make it easier for chapters to get rid of their
bad apples.
When I speak to fraternity members about hazing, one of the
things I always do is ask them to close their eyes and picture the faces of the
guys in their chapter who are the most likely to cross the line with a new
member and do something that might actually hurt someone. Interestingly, no one
ever has any difficulty with this task. Our chapter leaders know who their bad
apples are, but in most organizations, they feel completely powerless to do
anything about them.
Here is the the reality – in most groups, it takes a two-thirds
vote of the entire chapter to expel a member. Even before the post-millennial
generation and their inability to navigate healthy confrontation showed up on
campus, a 2/3 vote by a chapter to expel someone was a tall order, but at this
point it’s nearly impossible to expel someone short of them actually doing something truly awful. Because they are not gluttons for punishment, most chapter presidents are
not willing to jump through the hoops necessary to even try to expel someone if they know the
process is bound for failure. Why expend the emotional energy and political
capital to expel someone when the process is destined to fail and half of the
chapter is going to hate you when the process is over? Most chapter leaders
feel completely powerless to do anything to rein in the behavior of their worst
members. The result is that these bad apples are allowed to sit around and
contaminate the other apples around them until they finally do something bad enough
to get them expelled. But at that point, it is generally too late, because the
thing that would finally get them expelled ends up with someone getting hurt
and the chapter being closed.
I think Phi Delta Theta has a really good model for how we
can make getting rid of bad members easier for chapters. In their process, all a
chapter president has to do is ask their regional director (a high-level volunteer
position) to remove a member. No trial by chapter. No 2/3 majority. The regional
director simply talks to a few people, and if he decides the expulsion is
warranted, he signs off on it. Of course, there is an appeal process to ensure
that the ease of this process is not abused by a chapter president out seeking
retribution on his enemies, which is all you really need in terms of a safety
net.
Until we acknowledge that what might have worked 25 years
ago in terms of self-governance isn’t going to work today, our chapters are going
to struggle to effectively deal with their bad apples. We are living in a
period in which those rogue members have felt increasingly empowered to take
matters into their own hands, behind closed doors, in private residences away
from campus (as appears to be the case in the deaths of both Adam Oakes and
Stone Foltz). If we want to avoid further disaster in our fraternity chapters
this Fall, we have to take proactive steps now to make the process of expelling
problem members easier.
