It Is Time to End Pledging

“Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” – Lord Acton

In 1971, a psychologist at Stanford named Phil Zimbardo received a grant from the Department of Defense to conduct a study on the impact of incarceration on prisoners. Instead of studying actual inmates at a real prison, Zimbardo had a different idea – to create his own simulated prison. Over the summer, he transformed the basement of the psychology building at Stanford into a prison, complete with bars, cells, and a mess hall. He recruited 16 students to participate in the study. Applicants had to undergo a rigorous psychological evaluation. Once the students were selected, eight were randomly assigned to be the prisoners, the other eight randomly assigned to be the guards.

The guards were only given two rules: keep the prisoners imprisoned at all times, and do not physically abuse the prisoners. Otherwise, the guards were left to run the prison as they saw fit.

The rest of the story is now a part of psychological folklore. The study, which was supposed to last for five weeks, was abruptly cancelled on the fourth day because the behavior of the guards became so abusive that two of the prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns. Their abuse of the prisoners, in a matter of days, became increasingly severe; sleep deprivation, lineups, food deprivation, and a variety of other dehumanizing activities quickly manifested themselves as the norm in Zimbardo’s imaginary prison.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, as it is now known, illustrated in a powerful and real way a dark reality of human nature – that power corrupts. As Zimbardo himself noted, “absolute power in a novel setting will lead even good, decent people to engage in inhumane, abusive behavior.”

Absolute power. In a novel setting. Sound familiar?

Hazing is a societal problem that is much, much bigger than fraternities and sororities. In the 2007 National Study of Student Hazing, over half of students involved in clubs and organizations on college campuses reported experiencing hazing in high school. Just last week, it was reported that Colgate University had suspended the men’s rowing team because of alcohol related hazing. Evolutionary Psychologist Alco Cimino has suggested that hazing is an evolutionary adaptation – literally part of our nature – by which we prevent new group members from exploiting the benefits of the group without contributing to its success. Hazing is not just a fraternity problem. It is a societal problem. It is in our DNA.

But why is hazing so much more severe in college fraternities than in any other group? Why does fraternity hazing so frequently result in injury or death? When I speak with students about hazing, I point out the fact that 44 fraternity/sorority members died between the last two non-Greek hazing deaths (Ken Christiansen in 2001, and Robert Champion in 2011). And dozens more have died since. Why are fraternities (and to a lesser extent, sororities) killing their members with such frightening regularity? What about the college fraternity experience makes it uniquely prone to dangerous, deadly hazing?

Absolute power. In a novel setting.

On a sports team, in a band, in the military, and in literally every other group we commonly associate with hazing, the power of hazers is mitigated by a responsible adult who is ultimately in control of the group. If I am a freshman on the college baseball team, I may go along with some low-level hazing just to be a good sport, but I am not likely to subject myself to anything that I perceive to be particularly dangerous or degrading because, at the end of the day, the person hazing me has very little real power over me. The coach of my team ultimately decides who plays, and if I’m better than the guy hazing me, I’ll play over him regardless of whether or not I subject myself to his abuse.

The fraternity pledging process, on the other hand, gives the hazer absolute power over the person he is hazing. If I am a freshman fraternity member, I am led to believe that if I do not willingly subject myself to the whims of my abuser, that he has the power to remove me from the pledging process and prevent my initiation. There are no adults in the mix – advisors have no real authority in the chapter, particularly in decisions about membership (who gets a bid, who gets initiated). The power differential between hazer and victim is more pronounced in the college fraternity than in any other group on or off the college campus. When we add into this mix the social status that many fraternities enjoy, dangerous levels of alcohol consumption, lower levels of moral development, heightened hypermasculinity, and the belief of many undergraduates that their fraternities are inherently social in nature, we have a recipe for disaster.

Researcher Aldo Cimino has argued that hazing is an evolutionary response to the need for groups to prevent free-riders – those who would exploit the benefits of the group without contributing to the group’s success. He has also demonstrated that the groups with the most perceived benefits are those most prone to dangerous hazing. It is in our nature to haze, and fraternities with their social clout on campus provide an environment ripe for dangerous, deadly hazing. 

Knowing that we are programmed to haze, and knowing that severe hazing is more common in groups providing the most benefits to their members, and knowing everything we know about the cognitive and moral development of adolescent males, we still permit membership structures that give 19 and 20-year-old men absolute power over the lives of their 18-year-old new members.

This is the definition of insanity.

We cannot have membership structures that give absolute power to 19-year-old fraternity members and not expect them to abuse that power. We can no longer have a serious conversation about hazing prevention without first addressing the power differential inherent in the fraternity pledging process. It is time to end the outdated, antiquated process of pledging.

Will ending pledging get rid of hazing? Of course not. Newly initiated members will still be subjected to those members who feel newcomers must earn their membership. But by eliminating the power differential inherent in the pledging process, we empower the new members to stick up for themselves and walk away from activities they feel are dangerous. We lessen their tolerance of severe forms of hazing, thereby reducing its likelihood of occurring. Fraternities engage in abusive hazing because they can – because they know their pledges wills subject themselves to it. Once they realize they cannot – that newly initiated members will not subject themselves to abuse in the name of “earning” something they have already earned, the culture will begin to change.

Then, and only then, can we begin a meaningful conversation about helping chapters develop meaningful rites of passage for their new members – activities that build solidarity and create a sense of accomplishment in ways that do not involve abusive or dangerous behavior. But as long as this period of trial membership remains, conversations about replacing hazing with other activities are an exercise in futility. As long as we give 19-year-old men absolute power over the lives of 18-year-old men, we will continue to see them abuse that power in dangerous and deadly ways.

As fraternal organizations may be slow to adopt new membership structures, campuses are uniquely positioned to serve as a catalyst for this change. Through sanctioning for lower-level hazing cases, campuses conduct offices can require disciplined organizations to immediately initiate all future new members. Campuses can adopt blanket policies requiring that student organizations eliminate pledging and all other forms of “trial membership.” As long as any such requirements are either the result of a campus disciplinary proceeding or are universally applied to all student groups (and not just fraternities), campuses would be wholly within their rights to begin promulgating such requirements.

It is time to start this conversation now, because there is a dirty secret that no one has had the courage to utter, but that I will state here for the record. What happened to Timothy Piazza at Penn State, or to Max Gruver at LSU, could happen tomorrow in 75 percent of fraternity houses in America. Alcohol-related hazing is frighteningly common. These deaths were not isolated incidents. They are the inevitable result of a system in which we mix an alcohol-fueled party culture, low moral development, hypermasculinity, tradition, and the forces of evolution with a heaping scoop of absolute power. It is a recipe for disaster, and it is well past time that we fixed it.

Ending pledging will not fix the problem of hazing, but failing to end pledging will prevent us from ever truly fixing it. 

The Drunk Sex Problem, Revisited

Take a look at the photo above, and imagine the following scenario:

Each of these young women, depicted here pre-gaming before their date party (photo courtesy of TSM), go out tonight and have similar experiences. They consume alcohol to the point of incapacitation, and each go home with their respective dates and engage in sexual intercourse. Each of them wakes up the following morning with only a vague recollection of what happened the night before.

Woman A laughs about what happened. She had a blast the night before, remembers being really into her date and wanted to have sex with him. The fact that she was too drunk to remember what happened doesn’t bother her. She knew they guy, was comfortable with him, and wanted to sleep with him. In her mind, it was a great ending to a great night.

Woman B wakes up confused, and attempts to replay what happened but can’t seem to remember details. She liked her date and was into him, but hadn’t really planned on having sex with him. She isn’t necessarily bothered by the fact that they had sex, but feels really bad that she was too drunk to remember it. She tells herself that she needs to be more careful and probably watch her alcohol consumption in the future to make sure she doesn’t put herself in this situation again.

Woman C wakes up, horrified. She has no recollection of what happened and is scared. She didn’t really know her date very well – it was a guy she’d met at a party the week before. She had no intention of having sex with him. Upon getting dressed, she immediately goes to the hospital, tells the nurses that she thinks she may have been raped the night before and asks for a rape kit examination.

Three women with three identical experiences, each of them defining what happened to them in a completely different way.

My question for you is this:

Which one of them is correct?

Alcohol and Minimization

Two years ago, I wrote an article entitled “The Drunk Sex Problem” for AFA’s Perspectives magazine. In that article, I pointed to the fact that in the study from which the “one in five” statistic comes, only a third of the women who reported incapacitated sexual activity defined those experiences as sexual assault. I went on in that article to critique some of the popular prevention messaging related to alcohol and consent.

Unfortunately, we continue to see confusing messages around this topic. At a national prevention conference last year, a keynote speaker praised campus prevention campaigns using messages such as “Drunk sex is rape” and “a person under the influence of alcohol cannot consent to sexual activity.” The problem with these statements is two-fold. First, the legal standard, as well as the standard articulated in guidance related to Title IX, is “Incapacitated,” which is a higher threshold than just “drunk.” These messages are often inconsistent with law and university policy. Secondly, if we use prevention messages such as “drunk sex is rape” and “someone under the influence of alcohol cannot consent to sexual activity” then we are, in essence, calling a vast majority of college students rapists and/or rape victims. We are also telling two of the three women depicted in the scenario above that they are incorrectly interpreting their own experiences. We are telling them that they are wrong.

All of this is a big problem.

One of the assessment instruments we have developed at Dyad Strategies (manuscript under review) examines the various ways that members of a sorority might respond when a chapter member discloses that she has been sexually assaulted. There are four general responses that sorority members may have in this situation. First, they could support the survivor and do everything we would hope that they would do in order to support their sister. On the other hand, they may blame her for what happened, asking her things like “why did you go home with him if you didn’t want to have sex” or “why did you have so much to drink.” Thirdly, they may minimize her experience, trying to deescalate her interpretation of what happened by asking her questions like “are you sure you’re not just regretting what happened” or making statements like “I’m not sure that’s rape – it was really just a drunk hookup.” Lastly, a sorority may place social pressure on a member to NOT report what happened for fear of the sorority becoming a social pariah on campus (i.e. if the alleged party is a member of a popular campus fraternity).

We have studied each of these responses to sexual assault in connection to a variety of the constructs we study, including sisterhood and various measures of chapter social culture. Of all the relationships we have observed (and will soon be publishing), one stands out above all others – the strong relationship between alcohol use and the minimization mindset. Of the four mindsets, alcohol use has the strongest relationship with minimization among sorority women, and in a regression model, alcohol use is the single greatest predictor of a minimization mindset. The more frequently a sorority member reports binge drinking, the more likely she is to minimize the experiences of her peers when it comes to potential sexual assaults. She is increasingly likely to be the one asking “are you sure you’re not just regretting what happened” or “are you sure that wasn’t just a drunk hookup.”

After we analyzed the data and uncovered the strong relationship between alcohol use and the minimization mindset, I spent several hours over a period of weeks trying to make sense of the relationship between the two. And then one day it dawned on me – binge drinking predicts minimization because frequent binge drinkers and their close friends are themselves more likely to have had incapacitated sexual experiences that they did NOT define as sexual assault. In other words, they are Woman A in the scenario depicted above. They, and their close friends, are increasingly likely, based on their alcohol use, to have had incapacitated sexual experiences. And, if they did not identify those experiences as sexual assaults, then they are likely to use their own lens for defining potential sexual assault when discussing similar experiences with their peers. If what happened to them was just a fun, drunk hookup, then how can it be a sexual assault when someone else has a similar experience?

Message Matters

If, like me, you believe that the three women depicted in the scenario at the beginning of this article are ALL correct – that each person is free to define their experiences in their own way – and if, like me, you care about preventing sexual assault, then we need to revisit the problems associated with the “drunk sex is rape” prevention messages.

The fact of the matter is that reducing this complex issue down to simple slogans like "drunk sex is rape" or "a drunk person cannot consent to sex" is not helpful, and it may even be counterproductive. We’ve tried to create a dumbed-down, black and white, dualistic message for our students, but the reality is that sexual assault is not a black and white, easy, simple issue. There is a great deal of relativism involved – different people respond to similar scenarios in drastically different ways. Our prevention messaging needs to reflect both the complexity of the issue as well as the lived experience of the students we are trying to educate.

The goal of prevention programming should be to have students walk away from a program saying “I should be much more careful about my sexual choices when alcohol is involved.” We should also seek to create dissonance in some people about their past sexual behavior, causing them to consider that, perhaps, some of their previous sexual experiences COULD have been considered sexual assaults. Male students who frequently mix sex and alcohol should walk away from a prevention program saying to themselves “I’m very fortunate that I have not been accused of sexual assault – I really need to be more careful.” If the goal of prevention programming is to change student thinking in a way that might change their behavior at some point in the future, then having students critically reflect on their past sexual experiences is an important and effective step.

Calling the vast majority of our students rapists and/or rape victims, I would argue, is not an effective strategy for achieving the desired changes in thought and behavior. As my friend Aaron Boe frequently points out, being reckless with messaging can have serious unintended consequences for those you’re trying to help. The implication of “drunk sex is rape” is that if students have had sex while intoxicated then they should see themselves as having experienced sexual assault, either as a victim or a perpetrator. If they don’t reject the message outright as absurd (adults have responsible, healthy sexual experiences involving alcohol all the time) then a person may take on an emotional burden that was not there before by contemplating an entirely different kind of label for their experience. Or, a person's friends may start insisting that their drunken hook up should be considered “sexual assault,” resulting in emotional pain and potential pressuring of one kind or another about what to do next (as appeared to be the case in the now famous incident at Occidental College). 

Having students be more thoughtful about drunk sex is an important goal. Telling students that “drunk sex is rape” is an incredibly ineffective strategy for achieving that goal, because instead of having students reflect on their own experiences, it puts students on the defensive, causing them to tune out our messages and serving to confuse rather than to clarify, wasting their time and ours. Having students understand that their drunken sexual experiences could potentially be sexual assault is an erstwhile goal, but telling them that drunk sex is ALWAYS rape is a poor strategy for achieving that outcome, because that statement ignores the complexity of the issue and is so inconsistent with their own experiences (remember, 2/3 of women who have an incapacitated sexual experience do NOT identify it as sexual assault). In my original "Drunk Sex" article, I cited Brett Sokolow's insightful whitepaper on incapacitation and the need for clarity related to conversations about alcohol and consent. That whitepaper was written in 2005! Twelve years later, and we are still struggling with this issue. We need to evolve quickly and become more sophisticated in our prevention messaging in order to connect with students in a way that will change their thinking and, subsequently, their behaviors.

Strategies for Educating Men

I was discussing these issues at a recent conference presentation, and was talking about the need for a more nuanced approach to our education regarding alcohol, capacity and consent, urging participants to help students understand where the line between “drunk sex” and “incapacitation” is drawn. One of the participants came up to me after the session, and while very complimentary of the session, asked me a question that was very consistent with my own experience.

“I understand that we need to help men understand where the line between drunk sex and rape is drawn, but how do we do that without the conversation turning into a Q&A about ‘how far can I push the envelope without getting in trouble’?” In other words, how do we keep our prevention programs with men from turning into a “how to not get accused of rape” session.

On this question, I will shine a light on some of the work that my friend and colleague Aaron Boe at Prevention Culture is doing. His work in this area has greatly influenced my own, and I think his approach to sexual assault prevention with fraternity and sorority members is the most enlightened, well-researched approach that I have personally seen.

As Aaron and I have discussed on many occasions, when we are educating men (whether in a group or a 1-on-1 conversation), the sequence of topics in a prevention conversation is very important. Conversations on capacity are more relevant after men understand the critical concept of, as Aaron puts it, “It doesn’t take what people might imagine to be ‘violence’ for a person to be violated and experience serious emotional harm.” When you start with simplified messaging like “drunk sex is rape” or over-simplified slogans on consent, there is an implicit threat involved—you are naturally implying threats of very serious punishment. Why wouldn’t a young man hearing this message be concerned and defensive? And when you make a misstep and say something unrealistic or untrue (because adults impaired by alcohol have mutual, ethical, and even healthy physical intimacy all the time) you are just daring them to discredit you and dismiss your message. Too often, people skip the part that matters, which is the harm that can be caused. Virtually all non-sociopathic people care about not causing serious harm to another person, and not having any guest or person around them experience serious harm. Most men, however immature they might be, at least care about not causing serious emotional harm to another. And we need people to care and be engaged (rather than defensive or dismissive) to have meaningful discussions about sexual assault.

I would suggest based on my own observations and my conversations with Aaron that the sequence of topics should be in the following order:

1. Help men understand the realities of trauma – Aaron has a really neat way of getting this point across. He puts pictures of two men on the screen – one a haggard, unshaven, scary-looking guy who you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley at night, and the other of a bright-eyed, handsome, baby-faced college man. He will ask students to identify the convicted rapist. This is a trick question, because both men in the photographs are convicted rapists. Aaron will then make the point that most men understand how someone being sexually assaulted by the first guy might be traumatic, but don’t really understand how being assaulted by the second guy might be traumatic. He’ll then ask the men to identify the reasons that being assaulted by the young, baby-faced guy may actually be MORE traumatic than being assaulted by the unshaven, scary guy. The men will immediately be able to identify the issues (perhaps it was someone she trusted, maybe it is someone she has to see on campus every day, etc.). By helping men understand how being assaulted by a peer (i.e. someone just like them) could be a traumatic experience, Aaron is able to help them understand the realities of trauma in a way that really causes them to reflect on their own choices. For the non-sociopaths in the room, the natural response to this realization is “I wouldn’t want to traumatize or hurt someone. Maybe I need to be more careful.”

2. Help men understand THEIR responsibility in preventing sexual assault – Most college men operate in a sexual world with the following rule – “I’ll keep going until my partner makes me stop.” After we have helped students understand the reality of trauma, then we can help them buy into reframing the conversation about responsibility. If they are not sexual predators or sociopaths, then most men are going to say “If I don’t want to traumatize someone, then it is MY responsibility to make sure that I’m only doing something that my partner wants me doing.” Again, the sequence of lessons here is important. Talking about this responsibility shift BEFORE we help men understand the realities of trauma would not work. But when men understand the potential trauma that they could cause, then helping them take responsibility for NOT causing trauma is much easier.

3. Help men understand capacity and consent – Once men understand the reality of trauma AND their responsibility in ensuring that they don’t traumatize someone, we are now ready to have the conversation about capacity and consent. When we wait to have the conversation about capacity and consent until the end, we are able to keep the conversation from turning into “how do I avoid getting accused of rape” and instead make it about “How can I make sure I respect my partner and never do anything that would hurt or traumatize someone.” And with that as the focus of our conversation, we can explore the grey area between “drunk sex” and incapacitation, helping men come to terms with the fact that perhaps they are lucky that they haven’t previously been accused of sexual assault – that perhaps they are just fortunate that their previous sexual partners did not identify those experiences as sexual assault.

With this realization in mind, we can then help them understand how to recognize an incapacitated person, help them understand blackouts, and help them draw a line in the sand WELL before someone is incapacitated. In doing so, we are recognizing that perhaps their previous sexual encounters may very well NOT have been sexual assault, but perhaps they are fortunate that this is the case. This requires us to acknowledge the ambiguity of drunk sex/sexual assault, and to acknowledge that different people may respond to things in different ways. In doing so, I will share the picture and scenario depicted at the beginning of the article and walk them through the fact that different people respond to things in different ways. Equipped with this understanding, they are now prepared to take responsibility for their actions in order to ensure that they do not engage in ANY sexual activity that could possibly even be CONSIDERED as sexual assault. In other words, we’ve helped them understand that drunk sex might well be sexual assault if a person is incapacitated, and why that matters (emotional trauma), without making the oversimplified and inaccurate statement “drunk sex is rape.”

Strategies for Educating Women

Equipped with the knowledge that binge drinking is the leading predictor of both sexual assault minimization and victim blaming among sorority members, our prevention strategies with women must include conversations around alcohol and social culture. Unfortunately, this has become very unpopular in many prevention circles.

At a recent prevention conference, I heard an industry expert, a renowned researcher on the topic, stand before a room and say “alcohol does not cause sexual assault, because we know that those who use alcohol to rape would find other ways to rape in the absence of alcohol.” While I agree with the first part of the statement, that alcohol does not cause sexual assault, I vehemently disagree with the second part of that statement. There is a new wave of thought within some circles of the prevention field that basically assumes that there are no “accidental rapists.” This way of thinking assumes that all men who are involved in sexual assault are, by definition, sexual predators. I bit my tongue during the session, but was very to tempted to stand up and ask “if all men who rape are sexual predators and incapable of being helped, then sexual assault cannot possibly be prevented. If that is the case, then why are we all wasting our time here at a prevention conference?”

I operate from an assumption that the vast majority of sexual assaults CAN be prevented, that many college men who find themselves involved in situations where alcohol is involved and capacity and consent are in question are NOT intentional predators or sociopathic serial rapists but instead are caught up in a culture where binge drinking and “drunk hookups” are not only normalized, but glorified. Don’t believe me? Go check out the TSM website and get back to me. If I am correct, then I think it is wholly appropriate to talk with sorority women about the social culture of their chapters while acknowledging that alcohol DOES NOT cause rape, a survivor is NEVER AT FAULT because she drank too much, and that the top priority in prevention is and always will be to educate men NOT TO RAPE. We can do all of those things while still acknowledging that the social culture of a chapter creates conditions in which sorority members may be more or less likely to be assaulted, and also creates environmental conditions that can help or hinder women from feeling supported by their sisters if they experience sexual violence. It is appropriate to help sorority members understand that it is everyone’s responsibility – men and women – to work to create environments where sexual assaults are less likely to occur. We cannot have an honest conversation about preventing sexual assault if we are not willing to consider the role that alcohol plays in the environments in which those assaults are taking place. Our goal should not be ideological purity around issues of consent and sex – our goal should be preventing sexual assaults from happening. And if that is our goal, then we need to be willing to have honest conversations about social culture and its role in sexual assault. (And, to give credit where credit is due, I think the "ideological purists" bring much needed clarity to our dialogue and are generally spot-on in the things they say, but being "right" and being an effective educator are not always the same thing).

In addition, when we are talking with sorority members about these issues, we need to revisit the three young women in the scenario depicted earlier. After explaining the scenario, ask sorority members the same question I asked you at the beginning of the article - which one of these women is correct? Eventually, I promise, someone will give you the right answer – all three of the women are correct. Each of those three women are free to define what happened to them in their own way. It is not our job to define their experiences for them. Just because I interpreted something that happened to me differently than my friend interpreted her similar experience does not mean I am right and she is wrong. Or vice versa. And whether or not a university policy or any laws were broken will be subject to an investigation and a review of the facts of the case applied to the appropriate laws/policies.

Conclusion

Preventing sexual assault is important work. It is work that we need to get right. It is a complicated topic, and it requires expertise and great skill to do this work in a meaningful and effective way. I regularly see well-intentioned prevention educators completely botch their conversations with fraternity and sorority members because their messages ignore the complexity of the issue, ignore the lived experiences of the students they are trying to educate, and ignore the realities of the social culture in which sexual assaults are occurring. If we are going to be good at this work – and by good, I mean we actually change student thinking in a way that might change their choices and behavior – then we need to be clear and precise about our messages. This will require some people to set their own ideological purity aside and be willing to engage in conversations that acknowledge the complexity of the issue, clarifies where the lines are actually drawn, and ultimately prevents harm. The topic of drunk sex and incapacitation is complicated enough; we don't need to further complicate it by being careless about how we communicate these messages. Doing this requires us to acknowledge that different people define things in different ways, but ultimately it is everyone’s responsibility to both make our social environments safer and to know where to draw the line in order to ensure that we are not traumatizing or harming other people by violating their most basic human right – choosing what to do, and not do, with their bodies.

*Author’s Note – I acknowledge that this article is written from a heteronormative perspective. Not all sexual assaults are perpetrated by men, and not all victims of sexual assault are women. The unique issues involving sexual assault falling outside of the heteronormative “male-on-female” gender binary merit a more thorough examination than this blog post would allow, and demand more expertise than I purport to have regarding those issues. I offer this explanation while fully acknowledging the very serious issues involving sexual assault that happens beyond the heteronormative examples used in this article.

Can Fraternities Become Victims of Their Own Success?

As I have traveled around the country working with fraternity chapters over the last few years, I have discovered a few universal truths about fraternity life. Foremost among them is this – almost all fraternity chapters crave social status within their respective communities.

Every campus fraternity system has what I call the “social pecking order” – a social hierarchy into which groups are divided by those within the community. On most campuses, the system is more or less equally divided into three general categories – top tier, middle tier, and bottom tier. During my time at Alabama, there were only two (old row vs. new row). The chapters on any given campus are keenly aware of the existence of this social hierarchy and, more importantly, their place within it. Improving or maintaining their ranking within this social pecking order is among the primary goals of most fraternity (and sorority) chapters in America. Fraternities within any given campus system are almost always jockeying for position, doing all in their power to climb the social ladder and achieve “elite” status on their campus.

This mentality is actually a construct that we measure in our research at Dyad Strategies. Our Social Status Importance scale measures the degree to which chapters place an emphasis on their place in the social pecking order, and the construct is strongly correlated with a variety of negative behaviors (including alcohol abuse, unethical behavior, and attitudes about hazing and sexual violence). The more that a chapter cares about its place in the social hierarchy, the more willing they are to cut corners, break rules, and engage in unethical behavior in climbing the social ladder.

What we have found in our research is that, within a sorority system, the social hierarchy is very rigid and fixed. Sororities spend vast resources attempting to improve their status (often measured by Relative Recruiting Strength, a horrible measure of the quality of a chapter), only to find that they are unable to climb in the rankings, stuck in their position for seemingly all of eternity. This is true for a variety of reasons – top/middle tier sorority chapters rarely close, and the sorority recruitment system is designed to ensure consistency, homogeneity and the elimination of variance within a campus community. The result is that, once a sorority’s place in the campus social hierarchy becomes apparent, it is incredibly rare for that position to change. They are, in effect, stuck.

This is not the case within a fraternity community. With fraternities, the social hierarchy is fluid and always changing. Top and middle tier groups are regularly closed or reorganized for various risk management violations. The fraternity recruitment system on most campuses is loosely organized, allowing for a variety of approaches leading to a variety of outcomes – where the sorority recruitment process eliminates variance, the fraternity recruitment process encourages it. A middle-tier fraternity can have a good string of recruitment chairs and over a period of a few years can quickly climb the rankings and find themselves in the top tier, especially if a few top tier chapters get in trouble, are placed on probation, are reorganized or get closed during that time. The result of this fluidity is that the social hierarchy within most campus fraternity communities is completely reshuffled every 5-10 years.

I regularly work with fraternities who are the beneficiaries of this fluidity. Recently, I had the opportunity to do work on a campus that has closed five groups for hazing and other risk management violations over the last four years. All of the closed groups would have been considered top tier at the time of their departure. The result of this is a new group of previously mid-tier fraternities, those who were working the hardest to achieve social status on campus, now find themselves on top of the social ladder.

And this is a big problem for these fraternity chapters.

These chapters are extremely likely to become victims of their own success.

When a fraternity is in the middle tier on a campus, men usually join that chapter for altruistic reasons. Perhaps they feel a strong sense of belonging. Perhaps they are attracted to the fraternity’s values, or their academic success. Whatever the reason, the members of this chapter are generally not joining because of the group’s place in the campus social hierarchy. But when one of these fraternities wakes up one day and realizes that they are in the top tier on campus, a strange thing begins to happen. Men begin joining the chapter not because of a sense of belonging or a connection, but because the chapter is in the top tier and will provide them with the social capital they crave on campus. Members begin joining social status instead of belonging.

Eventually, the fraternity catches on to what is happening. They realize that they have members joining the chapter in order to exploit the social benefits associated with group membership. Once they come to this realization, a vicious cycle begins within the chapter. The natural, and most common, response to this revelation is to devise clever ways to prevent prospective members from exploiting the group’s social status.

In other words, the chapter begins hazing.

It may not be completely accurate to say that they “begin” hazing, because there is a good chance that they were already engaged in the behavior before coming to this realization. But, even if they were engaged in hazing before they became “top tier,” the motivation for the hazing is very likely to change once the group becomes aware of the problem associated with members exploiting the chapter’s social status. Once this realization occurs, the motivation behind the hazing shifts from building solidarity among the new member class towards having new members “earn their letters” through acts of hazing designed to test their loyalty/commitment to the group, or towards hazing designed around social dominance - reminding freshman of their place in the social hierarchy. As Aldo Cimino has articulated in his research, the hazing is now designed to prevent “free-riders” – those members who seek to exploit the benefits of the group without doing their fair share of the work. New members must now show how much they want to be in the group. How much pain, humiliation, and abuse are they willing to withstand in order to become a member of a top tier group?

Once fraternity chapters switch the focus of their new member education process away from teaching and building brotherhood and towards making new members “earn their letters,” the next phase of the cycle begins. Chapter members who have endured the social dominance or commitment-based hazing begin developing a strong sense of entitlement. They feel that nothing should be expected of them once they have earned their membership during the new member process. They become lazy and apathetic. The freshman  do all of the work, while the older members enjoy the benefits of having freshman around to do all of the things that they don’t want to do. Motivation goes down. Involvement goes down. Chapter members become less engaged in the life of the chapter, concerning themselves only with social events and hazing the next crop of pledges. 

Eventually, well-intentioned chapter leaders notice what is going on, and instead of fixing the new member education program, they often decide that the problem is that they are not hazing hard enough. The reason they have lazy, entitled, apathetic members, they believe, is because they still aren’t doing enough to build loyalty and commitment among the pledges. As a result, the hazing escalates. It becomes more intense, more abusive, and more degrading. Eventually, the hazing becomes so severe that something bad happens, the fraternity gets caught and closed down, a new fraternity takes the old fraternity’s place among the “top tier” chapters on campus, and the whole process starts over again.

Fraternities can, and often do, become victims of their own success. After years of striving and effort, they become a top tier group, which launches a vicious cycle in which they begin hazing, creating a sense of entitlement among members, which fosters even more hazing, which eventually leads to the group's closure and the process starting over again with a new group on campus.

So how do we prevent this cycle from happening?

The most common mistake that fraternities make upon entering this cycle is assuming that the best way to weed out free-riders is during the pledging process. As it turns out, this is the WORST way to weed out free riders – even the laziest of free-riders could be motivated enough by the group’s social standing to endure a few months of hazing in order to enjoy four years of social clout guaranteed to them through their membership in the group. Once a free-rider receives a bid to join a top tier group, it is often too late. Instead of waiting until the new member education process to weed out free-riders, chapters must incorporate strategies of weeding out the students interested in exploiting the chapter's social stauts during the recruitment process, and then refocusing the purpose of their new member education process away from making new members "earn it" and towards the creation of belonging. 

These strategies include:

Asking Better Questions – instead of “selling” the chapter’s social clout to potential members, chapters would be wise to ask questions designed to weed out those potential free-riders seeking to exploit the chapter’s social standing. A simple question like “what are you looking to get out of a fraternity” can often elicit an illuminating response. “Why are you interested in our chapter” is similarly well-designed to weed out would-be free riders. Some chapters I have worked with even have a “quality control” process by which prospective members are interviewed and asked these questions, along with questions about substance abuse and what the prospective member will bring to the group. Through the questions we ask prospective members during the recruitment process, we are able to screen out those men who are only seeking social capital. Not only are the answers to the questions we ask illuminating for us, but the mere fact that we ask them may cause a prospective member seeking only a social experience to look elsewhere for that experience.

Sell More Than the Social Experience - Chapters are, in essence "selling" their brotherhood to prospective members during the recruitment process. A common mistake that fraternities, especially top tier fraternities, make is that they oversell the social aspects of their brotherhood and undersell the other aspects of their brotherhood (belonging and accountability). In a previous post, I've shared strategies for selling brotherhood beyond the social experience. As chapters find themselves in the top tier, it is incredibly important that they sell more than just their social clout on campus. If they only sell the social aspects of brotherhood during recruitment, they will wind up with members who ONLY care about the social aspects of brotherhood, which will contribute to the chapter's demise.

Focus on Belonging – As I’ve written previously, fraternities who want committed members should build their new member education process around the creation of belonging, and not around the construction of solidarity or the testing of loyalty/commitment. The fraternities with the highest degree of commitment are those in which members feel the strongest sense of belonging, and the severity of hazing within a chapter has no relationship at all with belonging OR commitment.

The “victim of our own success” cycle is not inevitable. It can be stopped, or prevented altogether. By assessing and understanding your chapters’ attitudes about the importance of social status and the motivations behind their new member education process (things that Dyad Strategies measures in our campus and organizational assessments), we can target those chapters most at risk of falling into this cycle and intervene before it is too late. By helping fraternities understand the importance of screening out free-riders during the recruitment process (as opposed to waiting until the new member education process), and by helping them build a new member education process centered on the creation of belonging, we can beat the cycle and help our fraternity chapters enjoy the fruits of their success instead of becoming victims of it. 

I Hereby Proclaim the Death of Values-Based Recruitment

Vestige (noun): a trace of something that is disappearing or no longer exists; a part of an organ or organism that has become reduced or functionless in the course of evolution

In February of 2014, I called for the death of the values movement. I, along with others, began pointing out the absurdity of guilting our students into “living their values” as a means by which to change their behavior. Noah Borton famously quipped during the inaugural AFA “Ignite Fraternity” program that “I don’t care what your founders would think.” And in the last three years, a funny thing has happened. We have seen a steady decline in the number of programs and conversations focused on “living your values,” less imploring our students to consider “what their founders would think” and a steady rise in conversations centered around brotherhood and sisterhood, accountability, belonging, and authenticity/vulnerability. The language of our field has shifted significantly in the last three years, and frankly, I’d like to take some credit for that. The values movement is dying a slow death, its adherents becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of our industry, and that is a good thing for our field. Guilt-tripping our students into living their values and considering what their founders would think was both developmentally and pedagogically unsound.

In fact, only one vestige of the values movement continues to hang on and fight for life. This vestige has continued to thrive, despite the well-intentioned efforts of a number of people. This vestige has support from the highest echelons of our industry – it has long been considered an untouchable sacred cow. Its defenses are seemingly impregnable, its status as the end-all-be-all for saving the fraternal experience has heretofore gone unquestioned. It is the gold standard that we are all supposed to be teaching our fraternity and sorority members.

I’m talking, of course, about values-based recruitment.

And I’m here today to kill it off once and for all.

In the last year, our team at Dyad Strategies (including Josh Schutts, Sarah Cohen and myself) set off on an ambitious project. Using sequential explanatory strategy, we embarked on a project to understand the practices of sorority chapters who demonstrated extraordinary levels of the most altruistic versions of sisterhood (common purpose, accountability, and belonging). Working with one of our national organization partners, we surveyed the entire undergraduate membership, identified chapters with the strongest sisterhood, and then spent two days with six different “exemplar” chapters. We observed them in action, we conducted interviews and focus groups, and met with hundreds of students ranging from chapter officers to new members, all in an effort to find out what really matters when it comes to having strong sisterhood in a chapter. We plan on releasing a white paper on this research later in the year.

In our conversations with these exemplar chapters, we were shocked at how often the chapters’ recruitment processes came up in conversation. While we were curious about how these chapters recruited, we did not expect that recruitment would end up playing such a significant role in forming the sisterhood within these chapters. As we discovered, recruitment plays arguably the most important role in forming the strong sisterhood within these exemplar chapters.

Each of the chapters we studied share a great deal in common with regards to their approach to formal recruitment. In particular, they focus a great deal on authentic, deep conversations with potential members, activities that portray a realistic demonstration of the chapter’s sisterhood and activities, and have a variety of methods by which they screen out potential members only interested in the social aspect of sisterhood. As a result, these chapters recruit members who join because of their sense of connection and belonging and NOT because of the chapter’s place in the campus social hierarchy or any other superficial marker of social standing.

In all, six recruitment-related themes emerged within these exemplar chapters:

1. Focus on Authentic Conversations

Each of the exemplar chapters we studied place a tremendous emphasis on authentic conversations during the recruitment process, moving beyond surface-level conversations in an effort to truly get to know the potential members. They evaluate prospective members not based on appearance or “cuteness,” but in some cases purely on the prospective member’s conversation skills and authenticity, asking them questions truly designed to elicit genuine conversations.

As a result, new members from these chapters similarly report, when asked why they joined the organization, that it was the “chapter where I felt I could be myself,” “that they really wanted to get to know me,” and that “the conversations here were different from the conversations in other houses.” As the recruitment chair from one of these chapters stated “the feedback that we received from our new members is that the questions we asked here were so unique compared to other sororities.”

Members of these chapters also take great pride in their ability to have genuine conversations with potential members during recruitment, and the selection process focused on conversation skills provides a self-perpetuating process. As natural conversationalists, new members are easily able to join in and appear to actually enjoy the recruitment process because they genuinely love getting to know the next group of potential members.

2. Depth Over Breadth

Another recruitment technique shared by these exemplar chapters was their focus on depth of conversation during recruitment, as opposed to breadth. In other words, they prefer that a small group of chapter members get to know a PNM in a more in-depth fashion, as opposed to multiple chapter members meeting a PNM but having no more than a surface level conversation. As one new member noted “Here I felt like I really got to have a real conversation with people, but at other sororities it was like the same five questions over and over. How are you supposed to get to know someone in five minutes?”

Two of these exemplar chapters specifically mentioned that they intentionally limit the amount of “bumping” that takes place within the various recruitment rounds. This practice was noticed and appreciated by the new members of this chapters, and they appreciated the opportunity to have more in-depth conversations. As one new member noted “this was the only house during first round where I didn’t get bumped, and it was so nice to just sit down and have a conversation.”

3. Open the Door to Vulnerability

Another practice that emerged as among these exemplar chapters was the creating of moments where active members opened up and shared about themselves to a PNM, with the hope that the PNM would then do the same in turn. One chapter in particular discussed an activity in which they engaged during their philanthropy round. After being told about the chapter’s “Girls on the Run” philanthropy, PNM’s and active members were given a crescent moon made of construction paper and were asked to write the name of the person for whom they were being strong. Once the names were written, the active paired with a PNM would share her story of who she was being strong for and why, and would then invite the PNM to do the same. By opening the door and being vulnerable first, the active member encouraged the PNM to also share and be vulnerable, which, according to members of this group, often led to in-depth conversations about important people in one’s life.

4. Buck the Status Quo

One of the chapters went against the “status quo” in a significant way. The most visible example was the chapter’s approach to “Sisterhood night” in the wake of the NPC removal of skits. When all other chapters on campus performed songs, listed “top 10 facts about…” and showed an overproduced glittery recruitment “sisterhood” video, this chapter opted for an authentic exposure of their true sisterhood. Members submitted their favorite moments and memories—which were then subsequently read aloud with the PNMs present in the center of a large circle. Members never knew if, or when, their memory would be read, so they were constantly engaged to see whose memory would be read next.  The women described the process as electric – full of laughs, tears, hugs, and smiles. Having not been there, we can only imagine the power and electricity that must have been felt by the prospective members. They sat in the epicenter of the love and appreciation these chapter members show each other daily – and at such a powerful time – the night before they must make their preference decisions. It no doubt took courage to do something different, and the new members all talked about the power of that experience, and how it shaped their decision to join. As one student noted “you could literally feel the energy in the room.”

5. Group vs. Individual Conversations

Chapters with strong sisterhood in these areas also provided opportunities for new members to see how chapter members interact in a group setting during recruitment. For example, on preference night, a chapter has a group of 3-4 actives go into a room with 3-4 PNM’s where they all just talk, laugh and get to know one another in a group setting. PNM’s particularly liked this, noting that it gave them an opportunity to see how close the members really are, how much they genuinely liked one another, and how they could see themselves fitting into the group. As one PNM noted, upon leaving one of these parties, “I knew I wanted a group of friends like that.”

6. PNM Red Flags

In addition to creating opportunities for meaningful, authentic conversations during the recruitment process, these high-performing chapters also displayed similar systems of screening out potential members who may only be interested in the social aspects of the sorority. Several chapter members, including recruitment chairs, from these groups discussed a variety of “red flags” that they take note of during the recruitment process. PNM’s displaying any of these behaviors were subject to additional scrutiny and were often dropped by the chapters. This list of “red flags” included the following:

• PNM’s who showed interest, made comments or asked questions regarding the campus “social hierarchy” or discussed or brought up the sorority’s place in the tier system (interestingly, each of the groups in our research would best be described as being on the lower end of the top tier according to recruitment statistics)
• PNM’s who talked negatively about other chapters on campus (fraternities or sororities)
• PNM’s who are overly concerned with the social aspects of the sorority (i.e. asking “what fraternities do you social with?” or “what do you all do on the weekends?”)

NOT About Values-Based Recruitment

Interestingly, what was NOT discussed in conversations about recruitment was as illuminating as what was discussed and has been outlined above. In particular, the notion of “values-based recruitment” was one that never came up in our conversations. When new members of these chapters were asked why they joined these exemplar chapters with extraordinary levels of sisterhood, the answers almost inevitably had some connection to belonging, authenticity, and meaningful conversations. In other words, new members of these chapters joined because of a sense of belonging, and NOT because of any connection to the organization’s values. And when asked about recruitment strategy, the chapter recruitment teams echoed these sentiments. They often spoke of “really getting to know the girls” and “having genuine conversations with depth” but never did they discuss an effort to “sell” prospective members on the organization’s values. As a result, our research team was left to believe that, in these chapters that demonstrate values congruence (vis a vis high scores on common purpose sisterhood), the congruence comes about as a result of joining a sorority because of a sense of belonging, thereby making a connection to the organization’s shared values easier upon being initiated, and not because of some “selling” of the organization’s values during the recruitment process.

Put more simply, successful chapters with strong sisterhood achieve that sisterhood by making the recruitment process about genuine connection and NOT about selling a set of proscribed values. Students are not joining these exemplar chapters because of values alignment, they are joining because of a deep sense of connection, authenticity and belonging. Then, once they get into the organization, values congruence is being achieved through informal systems of accountability, which are made possible through the high levels of belonging and connection within the chapters. In other words, values congruence can only be achieved AFTER students have developed a strong sense of belonging and connection within the organization. Values congruence is not an antecedent of the sorority experience; it is a descendent of a sorority experience in which one feels authentic, meaningful connection, support, and belonging.

“Values-based recruitment” implies that our organizations should actively “sell” their values to prospective members, and that these prospective members should “select” the organization whose values most closely align with their own in a process of mutual selection. The flawed logic in this model should be obvious to all of us who work in this industry.

First, as we know from Baxter-Magolda’s theory of self-authorship, most 18 year-old college freshmen are living their lives through external formulas. They have no idea what their actual values are, as they have been living according to the values of their parents and adolescent communities. To suggest that they should make a life-long commitment based on externally construed values, when they have yet to even develop their own values as a person, seems counter-productive to me. As I stated in the “Problem with Values Congruence” article, taking a student’s pre-existing external formulas and trying to replace them with another set of external formulas (the organization’s values) is not only counter-productive, but anti-developmental. If we are really interested in helping our students connect to their organization's values, we would be better suited to create environments where students feel comfortable exploring personal values through authentic relationships than by foisting a set of organizational values on them the minute they walk through our door.

Secondly, values-based recruitment is a horrible concept because the values of all of our organizations are pretty much the same! If we were to take all 26 NPC member groups and construct a Venn diagram of their stated values, the area of overlap would be, in a conservative estimate, 75 percent. How are 18 year-old college freshmen, in a rushed and frenzied recruitment week, supposed to decipher and distinguish one organization’s values from another in an effort to find the ONE group whose values most align with their own when the values of these groups are all mostly the same?!?! This is a Herculean task that I don’t suspect many of the adults in our industry could do, yet we have asked it of our students. The whole idea seems ludicrous to me.

Lastly, and most importantly, students joining sororities (and fraternities) are not doing so because they seek values alignment in their lives. At worst, they are joining because they want a social experience in college that will expose them to the best that the campus social culture has to offer. At best, they are joining because the crave meaningful connection and belonging. The best we can ever hope to do is to help more of our organizations shift away from selling a social experience, promoting their own social status by selling a glamorous image of sorority membership that often has little to no basis in reality (Look at all the cute boys we hang out with! Look at our cute girls blowing glitter in conspicuous places around campus! Look how cute and fun we are! Cute and fun! Cute and fun!) and, instead, help them understand that the purpose of recruitment is not to SELL anything (the fun OR the values). Rather, recruitment should be about creating authentic conversations in a way that will allow more potential members to join the chapter where they will truly find the most meaningful connections and a place to belong. Furthermore, would we suggest to a PNM that she join an organization because of a connection with the organization’s values even if that PNM felt no sense of belonging or connection at all to the members of the chapter? This seems to me to be a recipe for disaster.

Let’s stop trying to guilt our students into selling their values and start teaching them how to make recruitment about creating authentic, meaningful connections. To give credit where credit is due, the women’s side of Phired Up Productions have been talking about this for a few years now. I continue to be impressed by the intersection of their work and what we are discovering in our research.

So today, I’m declaring the death of the “values-based recruitment” movement and proclaiming the birth of the “authentic conversation-based recruitment” movement. Values-based recruitment is the last remaining vestige of the values movement, and, like our tonsils or appendix, it is time for our industry to remove this wasteful, counter-productive appendage from the body of our collective work.

My Dad the Feminist

You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but my old man is a feminist. You read that right – John McCreary, the pipefitting, bass fishing, skoal dipping man who calls me his son is one of the biggest feminists I know.

About five years ago, my older sister, younger brother and I were all home for Thanksgiving, sitting around Dad’s kitchen table playing cards. We are a card-playing family. Our rook games are epic battles known to stretch into the wee hours of the morning, with nothing but bragging rights at stake. Our card games are great because, in addition to giving us an opportunity to scratch our “McCreary Competitive Itch,” it also gives us a chance to talk, laugh, connect and, as we often do, reminisce about funny stories from our childhood.

On this particular evening, we began questioning my Dad on his parenting philosophies. Neither of my parents graduated from college, but it was never a question that us kids would go to college. All three of us graduated from college and two of us have advanced degrees. I suspect that we all take some measure of pride about our blue-collar rural upbringing and the fact that we all turned out to be successful, well-adjusted (most of the time) adults. Dad (and Mom) had high standards for all of us, but my brother and I will be the first to admit that our older sister was held to the highest standards of all.  In fact, she was held to what some might call ridiculously high standards. She once brought home a B+ for her first six-week report card in her high school Health class, and was grounded for the remainder of the semester to ensure that she got an A in the class (which she did, and later graduated with a perfect 4.0 and got a full honors scholarship to East Tennessee State University). She had a strict curfew, was rarely allowed to spend “alone time” with boys (much to Mack Raines’ and Kent Leach’s chagrin), and she had a weekly list of household chores that would rival that of Cinderella’s (pre-glass slipper, of course).  By comparison, my brother and I had more than our fair share of weekly chores on the farm, but we were able to generally come and go as we pleased, and the occasional B on the report card was no reason for any cruel or unusual punishment. We were held to high standards, but were under considerably less scrutiny than our older sister.

We asked Dad that night “why were you so much tougher on Jennifer that you were on us?” Honestly, I expected his answer to be something about her being the oldest child and him just getting a little more laid back as time went on, which is typically how parents behave when multiple children are in the picture. The story of the over-programmed oldest child, the lonely, attention-starved middle child (i.e. me), and the baby who gets away with murder is so commonplace as to be cliché, and I expected that Dad’s answer to our query would fall within that familiar narrative.

I was wrong.

Here is what he said:

“I knew you boys would be OK no matter what happened. If college didn’t work out you could find a good job working construction and everything would be fine. But I knew that Jennifer’s only chance to get out of here (here being Campbell County, TN) was to go to college and be able to support herself. I didn’t want her stuck around here having to be dependent on some loser from Campbell County. I pushed her really hard because I wanted her to be able to live the life she wanted to live without having to depend on someone else.”

See, I told you he was a feminist.

I think my Dad, when he was in his 20’s and 30’s raising my sister (he was only 20 when she was born), probably had no idea he was a feminist. Hell, at 60 he still may not consider himself a feminist, but his way of thinking about raising his daughter speaks right to the heart of the feminist movement.

Feminism is not the ultra-left-wing, man-hating, baby-killing, angry, purple-haired lesbian movement than many in our society have made it out to be. At the heart of the feminist movement, as far as I can tell, are three simple beliefs:

1. That every woman should be in charge of her own destiny
2. That we should not have a society or an economy designed around the concept of a woman being dependent on a man (or anyone else, for that matter) for her happiness and well-being
3. That all women deserve to be treated like humans with equal rights to men and not merely as objects of sexual desire.

Find any father who has a daughter, and ask him whether or not he believes that his little girl should be in charge of her own destiny, whether or not he wants his daughter to one day be completely dependent on a man, or if he likes to think about his daughter as a human being or a sex object. By those three standards, I would like to think that 99.9 percent of the fathers in America would define themselves as feminists. My old man is not an oddity – I choose to believe that most fathers in America would share my Dad’s goals for his daughter with their own.

So why such hostility towards the feminist movement? Why the Republican animosity towards the recent women’s marches across America? Why don’t more fathers, husbands, and brothers in America consider themselves feminists? I can answer that question with one word – abortion.

The right to choose has been at the center of the feminist movement for at least 50 years, if not longer. It is the line in the sand that the feminist movement has drawn – when it comes to abortion, you are either with us or against us. There is little room for wavering, and a lot of fathers, husbands, and brothers – those who might otherwise consider themselves feminists but are opposed to abortion – are unable to take up the feminist cause.  And in our polarizing society, if you do not consider yourself a feminist, you generally then must consider yourself “anti-feminist” and therefore deride and dismiss things like women’s marches. I think it is sad and unfortunate that abortion has become the dividing line that has kept otherwise feminist men (and women) from being part of the feminist movement, leading to fathers, brothers and husbands voting against the best interests of their daughters, sisters and wives (not to mention the women who vote against their own interests for the same reason).

While I am often frustrated that abortion becomes a line in the sand for the feminist movement, I understand why such is the case. If you fundamentally believe that women should be in charge of their own destiny, and that they should not ever be dependent on a man for their well-being, then you must be, by definition, pro-choice. The choice to have a child or terminate a pregnancy has much more impact on the destiny and well-being of a woman than it does on the man, even though he is equally responsible for the pregnancy. Beyond the obvious physical impact, it is incredibly difficult for young women, particularly low-income women from marginalized communities, to establish paternity and enforce a paternity ruling in this country in order to gain financial support for a child born out of wedlock. District Attorney’s offices are woefully understaffed, and enforcing paternity suits are not among their top priorities. 

The fact is, if a woman chooses to have a child, or is forced to have a child, the chances are high that she will end up bearing the overwhelming majority of the cost and burden of raising that child.  It will impact her ability to continue her education. It will impact her career choices. It will completely and fundamentally change her life. The decision to have or not have a child impacts a woman’s destiny in very real ways, and in ways that it does not impact a man. One cannot say “I think women should be in charge of their own destiny, and should determine the course of their own lives without being dependent on a man or on the government, but if a man gets a woman pregnant through mutual carelessness, the woman must be forced to have that child.” Those two ideas are not reconcilable with one another. We cannot say that a woman is in charge of her own life and destiny, but then mandate that if a man carelessly impregnates her, she must have that child. In other words, one cannot be a feminist and be anything other than pro-choice.

I think this concept is where the abortion rights movement has lost its message. The most common message we hear from the pro-choice crowd is “my body, my choice,” which is countered by the pro-life crowd with “abortion is murder.” I would argue that “my body, my choice” is a lousy slogan precisely because it ignores the fact that another “body” is at play here. We can have an intelligent, thoughtful conversation about when life begins (conception, birth, or somewhere in between), but even the staunchest pro-choicer is forced to admit that the pro-life crowd has a good point. A strong argument can be made for life beginning at conception, and if such is the case, there is more than one “body” involved in the decision to terminate a pregnancy.

If you’ll pardon me a little “man-splaining” here, I think a much better slogan for the pro-choice movement would be “my destiny, my choice.” By using the word “destiny” instead of “body,” we elevate the conversation to a much higher plane. The word “destiny” covers not only the physical impact of a pregnancy, but the entire gamut of issues involved in what might happen if a woman chooses to terminate, or not terminate, an unwanted pregnancy. Whose destiny is impacted by raising the child? How will that decision impact one’s life and career goals? Financial goals? Who ultimately faces the moral and ethical consequences of the decision to terminate a pregnancy? All of these questions, both practical and moral, must be considered when making the decision to terminate a pregnancy. Ultimately, a woman making this decision has much more at stake than her body. The decision to have a child, or not have a child, impacts the entire course of her life in ways that it would never effect of impact a man’s. And we can’t truly believe that women should be treated equally, that they should be in charge of their own destiny, and that they should not have to be dependent on others for their well-being if we do not believe that she has the ability to choose whether or not to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. I think some subtle shifts in messaging might create an opportunity for more men and women to come on board the feminist movement, despite their well-founded moral and ethical concerns involving abortion.

In writing this, it is important to point out that I am not “pro-abortion.” I think there are tremendous moral and ethical decisions at play when making the decision to terminate a pregnancy. But I don’t think it is my job, or the government’s job, to make that decision for someone else. If I believe a woman is in control of her destiny, then I trust her to make that decision on her own. My Dad shares this belief.

I want to live in a world where more men, AND women, describe themselves as feminists. I want to see men AND women continue to stand up to a President who has made the objectification of women part of his life’s work, not to mention his campaign platform. I want to live in a world where my sister, my nieces (whom I adore), or my future wife or daughter are truly in control of their own lives and destinies and are never dependent on a man for their success or well-being.

I am a feminist, and I come by it honest. You might say it runs in the family.

Five Rules for Managing Organizational Misconduct

Over the last few years, as I have traveled the country helping colleges and universities improve their ability to investigate and adjudicate hazing, I have noticed a disturbing phenomenon; most college campuses are incredibly ill-prepared to address misconduct involving student organizations and varsity athletic teams.

Take a look at the NASPA Fraternity/Sorority Knowledge Community page, or the ATIXA listserv, or the ASCA Facebook group and you’ll notice the same glaring trend – LOTS of questions about how to handle organizational investigations and adjudication. As I work with campuses on these issues, I see a lot of common mistakes, many of which I now address in my training. In this post, I want to address some of those mistakes and offer “Doctor Gentry’s Five Rules for Managing Organizational Conduct.”

Rule #1 – Have an Organizational Conduct Policy that Is Separate from Your General Student Code of Conduct

This is the first rule, because it is the most common mistake that campuses make. Many campuses treat student organizations no differently than they treat individual students. In doing so, they only have one policy (a student code of conduct) laying out prohibited behaviors, procedures, and student rights. As many campuses eventually discover, this “one size fits all” approach rarely works cleanly with student organizations.

Campuses would be wise to adopt a separate set of policies related to managing organizational conduct. These should include a specific set of processes related to organizational investigation/adjudication procedures, a clarification of roles/responsibilities in the process (more on that later), and options for formal or informal adjudication (also more later). In addition, some prohibited behaviors also warrant their own separate policies. Almost all campuses now have Title IX/Sexual Misconduct Policies that lay out prohibited behaviors and procedure related to sexual harassment and gender discrimination on campus. But what about a hazing policy? Most campuses only mention hazing in the list of prohibited behaviors and never get into the details of how hazing will be investigated/adjudicated. Campuses would be wise to adopt a stand-alone hazing policy laying out these procedures. At NCHERM we have adopted a model hazing policy that we provide as a resource to the campuses with whom we work.

What should these separate policies include? Generally speaking, as an institution, you need to “give yourself permission” to use specific investigative tactics. For example, if you are conducting an investigation into hazing and you want to lock all of the pledges in a room and keep them there, restricting their communication until all have been interviewed, can you do that? Does your policy allow for that? Or if you want to require students to undergo a medical examination to examine them for signs of hazing (bruising, burns, etc.), does your policy allow you to do that? My guess is than 95 percent of current student codes of conduct do not address these issues, which could leave campuses in a legal quagmire if they attempt to implement these practices during an investigation. Campuses would be wise to write these polices in a manner that gives them wide latitude in conducting organizational investigations.  

This is why a separate organizational policy is important – there are some basic due process rights that are consistent (because they have come largely from the courts since Dixon vs. Alabama) across institutions when it comes to individual students and the conduct process. But the courts have been largely silent on issues of organizational rights in campus disciplinary proceedings. Generally speaking, a campus can create any system it wants to adjudicate these cases, so long as the process is not arbitrary or capricious. When campuses use individual rights to frame organizational due process rights, they are only making the organizational investigation/adjudication process more difficult than it needs to be. Campuses can do, in essence, anything they want with student organizations, so long as they are following their own policies. So a good organizational process begins with having good organizational processes that are spelled out in a separate organizational policy.

Rule #2 – In Your Policies, Clearly Delineate Roles and Responsibilities

When an organization on your campus is accused or suspected of wrongdoing, who investigates? Who adjudicates? Who hears appeals? Do these responsibilities lie with a single individual? A single office? Or are these responsibilities shared across campus based on the nature of the violation or the accused organization? Can the student conduct office “sanction” a varsity athletics team, or are those responsibilities vested solely within the athletics department? Who has the authority to issue interim sanctions or cease and desist orders, and can those be appealed? If so, to whom?

These are questions that often come up when I’m training campuses on organizational conduct. And they are all good questions. I could give you a list of “best practices” to answer those questions, but I’m not going to. Besides, what makes a practice “best” and who makes that decision? The short answer is this – every campus needs to address these and other important questions in the manner that makes the most sense on that campus.

As you come up with those answers, here are some guiding philosophies that I would suggest you apply:

• The key to any investigation is that it is fair, impartial and unbiased. Thus, those closest to the team/organization should not be the ones investigating. The campus fraternity/sorority advisor should not be investigating alleged misconduct of campus fraternities for the same reason that the soccer coach should not be investigating alleged misconduct of the soccer team. Those working with these groups on a day-to-day basis are incapable of impartiality (I’ve written more about this topic here).
  
• Investigations involving varsity athletics teams should involve investigators from both inside and outside the athletics department. Someone inside the department is critical in these investigations, as they will understand team culture and traditions better than others. But it is also important that these investigations not be seen as insular. Imagine if an allegation is received, and the athletics department conducts a thorough investigation of a team and is unable to substantiate anything. Then, the following year, a student on that same team is injured in a hazing incident. Regardless of how thoroughly the prior investigation was conducted, the appearance, from both a legal and PR perspective, will be that the athletics department knew there was a problem and did nothing about it, and only used inside people to conduct the investigation. Having an athletics representative as part of the investigative team also makes the sanctioning process much easier.
  
• Only senior staff should be able to issue interim sanctions/cease and desist notices for organizations, and these should be used sparingly (more on that later). In assigning these roles, it is important to build a firewall between the adjudication process and the appeals process. For example, if the VPSA is the appeals officer, he or she should not be the one to offer interim sanctions. That responsibility should be designated to a Dean of Students or equivalent position.  Fraternity/sorority advisors or other campus organization advisors should not be responsible for issuing cease and desist notices, as this can jeopardize their ability to work with accused groups in the future. 

Rule #3 – Self-Governance Should Be the Goal of Organizational Conduct Processes

The entire organizational process should be centered around one goal – to promote and encourage organizations to self-police and self-govern. This theme should be woven into the investigation process, the adjudication process and, most importantly, the sanctioning process. Here are a few ideas that encourage self-governance:

• Self-Reporting Policies – our model hazing policy at NCHERM has a clause for self-reporting. The idea behind this clause is that you give organizations an incentive for reporting individual misconduct violations (particularly helpful in hazing, Title IX, and other serious crimes – less helpful with alcohol and other minor violations). The clause basically says this – if an individual in your organization violates a policy, and you address it and report it, we will work with you to address JUST that individual and will not sanction the entire organization. To borrow the “carrot and stick” analogy, self-reporting provides a great carrot aimed at getting organizational leaders to draw clear lines of acceptable and unacceptable behavior in their organizations.
  
• A Partnership Process – Out of all of the campuses I have worked with, LSU probably does the best job of giving student organizations an incentive to self-investigate, and on the back end does a great job working with organizations on “outcomes” as opposed to “sanctions.” You can read more about their process here.
  
• Students Play a Role – Auburn University has done an excellent job integrating students in at every level of the organizational adjudicative process. All investigations (with the exception of Title IX) are conducted by a trained student/administrator team, and students are involved in the adjudicative and appeals processes as well. By creating transparency and involving students in the process, student organizations are much more likely to buy in to self-regulation and have a more favorable attitude towards the investigative/adjudicative process.
  
• Create Incentives for Self-Governance Through Outcomes – When you develop educational sanctions (or as I like to call them, outcomes), you should do so with the goal of creating opportunities for students to self-govern in the future. Here are some examples of process outcomes designed to promote self-governance:
  
• Working with the group to overhaul its internal conduct/standards process and ensure that members and advisors receive regular training related to member accountability
  
• Working with the group to develop clear and articulated membership standards and behavioral policies
  
• Having social restrictions tied to demonstrations of self-governance (i.e. if a chapter hits certain benchmarks related to self-governance, some of its social activities can be restored) and providing incentives for future self-reporting/self-governing

Rule #4 - Campuses Should Invest in Training Investigators

Campuses need to invest more in having a team of trained investigators for organizational conduct cases, particularly those involving victims (hazing, sexual or physical violence, etc.). By allowing novice investigators with no formal training investigate these cases, we do a tremendous disservice to victims. Hazing cases, in particular, offer the biggest challenge for new investigators. Think about this – in a Title IX case, the hardest thing an investigator will ever have to do is make a credibility determination. Based on evidence gathered from third parties, whose version of events do I find more credible. This is difficult to do, but not impossible. Hazing cases, on the other hand, involve a concerted effort, even by the victims themselves, to provide misinformation to the investigators. A large percentage of hazing cases end with administrators being unable to substantiate the claims of the case. Investigators need to receive training on how to handle these cases. In a separate blog post, I’ve offered some advice on how to conduct these investigations in a manner more likely to result in a finding of the truth. Campuses who fail to invest in training their investigators will yield the inevitable fruits of that decision – dead end investigations and continued misconduct.

Rule #5 – Cease and Desist Orders Are Last, Not First, Option

I have worked with several campuses in the last few years whose automatic default, any time they receive an allegation of potential misconduct, is to place the organization on a cease and desist (the organizational equivalent of interim suspension). I think cease and desist orders should be used sparingly in order to have the most impact and to avoid creating unnecessary animosity between the students and the administration. Issuing cease and desist notices are appropriate when failing to do so could place students in harm’s way. In any sort of serious hazing case, or in cases of serious physical abuse or sexual misconduct that is clearly organizational in nature (like the Kappa Delta Rho case at Penn State last year), a cease and desist is the appropriate response. But many campuses have now taken the step of issuing a cease and desist for almost all cases, regardless of severity. A campus recently called me about a Title IX case they were investigating, in which an alleged sexual assault may have risen out of a fraternity party. The case was completely individual in nature, and nothing indicated that the chapter knew about, condoned, or was in any position to stop the alleged assault. The investigation had revealed that there were some other issues related to the party (namely distribution of alcohol) that may eventually lead to charges against the chapter, and the campus administrators asked if a cease and desist was appropriate. I responded, as I always do to this question, with a question of my own – “If this were just a standard run of the mill alcohol case, not involving a Title IX investigation, would you offer a cease and desist?”  The answer to that question being “no,” I proceeded to my next question. “Then why would the fact that this information came from a Title IX investigation and not some other type of report cause you to order a cease and desist?”

If an organization’s continued operation poses a threat to student safety, then a cease and desist is appropriate. Short of that, it is not appropriate and should not be used. Just because a fraternity or sports team is indirectly involved in a potential Title IX violation does not mean that the organization poses a threat to other students. Would we temporarily kick all of the students out of a residence hall if a sexual assault occurred after a floor meeting? Would be suspend the entire chess club if a student was sexually assaulted by a member of the team after a match? Did anyone propose suspending the entire Oklahoma football team after Joe Mixon punched a woman in the face at an off-campus restaurant? I ask these rhetorical questions to illustrate a point – holding entire organizations responsible for individual acts of misconduct is rarely, if ever, appropriate. When cease and desist orders are used as a punitive measure, and not because of a genuine concern for student safety, then they become problematic. They should be used sparingly, and only for the purpose of promoting student safety.

Organizational misconduct can be difficult, but if you follow these simple rules, these cases will be much easier to manage, you will be more likely to impact the negative behavior you are trying to address, and you will build trust instead of animosity as you navigate the organizational conduct process.