As I’ve traveled the country talking with fraternity and
sorority members about brotherhood and sisterhood over the last three
years, I’ve had countless conversations with both chapter leaders as well as
FSL professionals about the challenges associated with accountability and
self-governance in fraternities and sororities. Student leaders are generally
candid and open about the struggles their chapters face with regards to holding
members accountable. Sorority members don’t respect a standards process that is
perceived as impersonal and overly punitive. Fraternity members struggle to
hold one another accountable at all. Meanwhile, campuses are stripping away all
remaining vestiges of student self-governance and imposing top-down,
administratively-driven organizational conduct processes that are unnecessarily
adversarial. Council judicial boards are defunct or on life support.
Stakeholders (alumni, headquarters, advisors) are viewed by overzealous conduct
officers as adversaries not to be trusted.
It’s a big damn mess.
The research we are doing at Dyad Strategies, as well as the
conversations I’ve had with both students and administrators over the last
three years, have helped me come to an understanding of three important lessons
when it comes to rebuilding cultures of accountability and self-governance
within our fraternity and sorority community. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be
posting a series of blogs related to those lessons.
Lesson #1 - There are two systems of accountability
operating simultaneously in fraternity and sorority chapters, and one is much
more impactful than the other.
When you mention the word “accountability” to
students, they generally associate that word with the formal systems of
accountability in their chapters; specifically, their chapter’s
standards/judicial process. If a student gets drunk and out of control at a
social event, they are called to meet with the standards committee or judicial
board and some sort of sanction is handed down.
Running parallel to these formal systems of accountability
is each chapter’s informal system of accountability. The informal system of
accountability is the peer-to-peer accountability that happens outside of the
formal process. If a person is showing signs of problematic alcohol use, one or
more of that person’s friends may confront that person about their alcohol use
outside of the chapter’s recognized disciplinary procedures.
When you discuss these two parallel systems of
accountability, students easily recognize that the informal process is more effective
and impactful than the formal process when it comes to changing behavior. Going
to your peers out of a position of love and concern is more likely to elicit
behavioral change than punishing members through the standards process. Students
intuitively understand what student developmental theory (specifically Kohlberg)
has taught us for years – that most 18-22 year-old college students are in a
stage of conventional moral development, taking moral cues from their peers. For
most students, knowing that their peers disapprove of their behavior is the
most powerful motivator for behavioral change. If a student’s peers go out of
their way to confront the student about their behavior, that conversation is
much more likely to influence behavior than that student being punished by
authority figures (even if the authority figures are, in fact, a student’s
peers, as would be the case with a standards committee).
In a recent research project for one of our national clients
at Dyad Strategies, we measured the sisterhood in each of their 150 or so chapters,
then went in and qualitatively studied those chapters with the “best”
sisterhood. What we found about chapters with the strongest sisterhood based on
accountability surprised us. Their formal systems of accountability were
unremarkable – no different from other groups we’ve studied and observed. What
stood out about these chapters was how well-developed their informal systems of
accountability were. Members whose behavior ran counter to group values were
dealt with informally by peers long before it rose to an issue worthy of a
standards meeting. In fact, one of these chapters had even gone so far as to
formalize their informal process. If a member’s behavior became problematic,
the executive board would meet with the standards board to discuss the member’s
behavior, and as a group would decide who the best people would be to go talk
to this member informally about their behavior. Whether it be a best friend, a
big sister, or some other person, the leaders of this chapter put great thought
and intentionality into figuring out which person would most likely be
successful in confronting the errant member about their behavior. Once
selected, the executive board and standards committee would meet with the
person selected to have the confrontation and explain to them what they were
hoping to accomplish through the confrontation, then would follow up with that
person after the confrontation had taken place to gain an understanding of how
the message had been received by the problematic member. The standards process
in these chapters was reserved for only the most egregious violators, or those
for whom the friendly confrontations had little or no impact. By emphasizing
informal over formal accountability, these chapters helped their members see
the value in accountability as a function of a healthy and vibrant sisterhood.
Interestingly, these chapters with strong accountability
also measured very high in belonging. This is consistent with our quantitative
research – for both men and women, of all the brother/sisterhood schema,
belonging is the strongest predictor of accountability. Qualitatively, what we
observed in these chapters is that the belonging/accountability connection is
through the informal systems of accountability, and not the formal systems.
Think about it – if you feel a strong sense of belonging to a group of people,
this will involve deep emotional connections. It is much easier to have a difficult
confrontation with someone with whom you have a deep emotional connection as opposed
to someone you barely know. Belonging doesn’t automatically lead to
accountability, but it creates fertile ground where informal systems of accountability
are much more likely to take root and grow.
Students will also readily admit that they often struggle
with the “informal” system of accountability. College students today are
incredibly uncomfortable with peer-to-peer confrontation, and students will
readily admit it when you discuss accountability with them. Again, what our
students understand intuitively is backed by research. College students today
are less comfortable with confrontation in large manner because of the way they
were raised. Recent research has suggested that the problems with confrontation
experienced by this generation of college students traces its roots back to the
way they were raised – it is a side-effect of helicopter parenting. This
generation of students, relative to previous generations, received less of what
researchers call unsupervised, unstructured playtime. Previous generations of
children and adolescents regularly experienced large blocks of time playing and
interacting with their peers without any adult presence. When conflicts arose,
children learned to resolve those conflicts on their own. But this generation,
because of their helicopter parents, did not experience as much of that
unsupervised, unstructured playtime. Parents were always nearby keeping a close
eye on things, and when conflict arose, the parents often stepped in and dealt
with it. As a result, we have an entire generation of adolescents with little
experience resolving conflict and who, as a result, report difficulty both
offering and receiving critical feedback from their peers.
And then they come to college, join fraternities and sororities
and we ask them to self-govern, even though they are developmentally ill-equipped to be successful at the task. Then, we do very little to prepare them for the work of holding one another accountable. It's a recipe for disaster.
I’ve previously written about other research related to the
challenges of self-governance, but this emerging research regarding this generation
of students’ inability to engage in confrontation is particularly troubling. Luckily,
chapters that I have had the opportunity to work with in the last few years,
when presented with this research, have devised activities with their new
members designed to help them overcome this discomfort with confrontation. One
chapter, in particular, developed a rather ingenious activity designed to have
their new members gain comfort with confrontation. In the first week of new
member education, the new members are required to memorize the fraternity’s creed
(which contains the values of the fraternity). After ensuring that their new
members have learned the creed and understand its meaning, this fraternity ends
its weekly pledge meetings with an activity. The new members stand in a circle,
and they go around the circle twice. The first time around, each new member
states a time in the previous week when he saw one of his pledge brothers do
something that upheld or exemplified a quality in the creed. The second time
around, they are asked to state a time during the previous week when they saw
one of their pledge brothers do something that ran counter to one of the values
expressed in the creed. It’s a pretty simple activity, but if done well, can
have a profound impact on a chapter’s culture.
Chapters that have implemented this activity with their new
members have all reported the same thing back to me – the new members struggle
with the confrontation piece of the activity the first few times they are made
to do it, but over time, they become more and more comfortable confronting one
another when their behavior runs counter to the fraternity’s values. When they
are given a chance to practice peer-to-peer confrontation in a safe place, their
comfort levels in confronting one another grow over time, to the point that it
becomes a normalized, expected behavior. Once these men are initiated, peer-to-peer,
informal accountability will be second nature to them, and accountability
within their chapters will skyrocket.
When it comes to our work with chapters, a focus on informal accountability is probably where we’ll get the most bang for our buck in boosting accountability and, ultimately, self-governance. In the next installment of this series, I’ll be taking an in-depth look at campus organizational conduct procedures that provide incentives and motivation for chapters to self-govern in meaningful ways. Stay tuned!
