WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TODAY??

For our in class assignment, we were asked to go around campus in search of fellow Greeks to ask them a few questions. There were three questions regarding ritual, chapter involvement and priorities. These three questions seemed easy enough to ask, harder to answer, and were even more difficult to hear. The answers sure did shed some unfortunate life on the amount of knowledge and lack of values within the Greek community.

As soon as we were told to find fellow Greeks, my mind went immediately to the O Patio. I even whispered to Sam that this was where we should head first...so we did. I spoke to a gentleman who was not afraid to give me the truth. What did his fraternity spend the most time on? Partying, drinking and girls. What was his motto? "Sex, drugs, and FRATeral." Seriously???! What kind of service did they do? ..uh can't remember is the reply I got. However...he did recite his Creed for me.

So, as for the "Sex,drugs and frateral" comment, I was at first annoyed that he wasn't taking the questions seriously. We all wanted real answers, and he was joking around. But..after thinking about this for a while, the answer he gave me might have been the real truth. Maybe this is what his fraternity spends time on, what they like to do, and don't really care about other opportunities out there. Afterall, he did throw out those answers in .343464 seconds and then asked if he would get in trouble for his answers. Anyways, this just showed me that maybe for some people, the point of fraternity life was only partying, drinking, and girls.

Please only watch the first 20 seconds of the video..

Seems like exactly what this gentleman was describing...

As for the next house I stopped at, the girls were able to give much more service oriented/purpose driven answers. They could not however, remember the words to their Creed and then preceded to say it was a secret.

The next house really made me understand the point of this interaction (at least I think so). I asked them all the same questions, and they could not answer any of the questions with straight answers. They had to think about what their chapter spends the most time on, what their values were, and most surprisingly...revealed that they did not know what a Creed was and that it was probably too long to remember anyways.

So what happened today? I realized that working with the 4 council exec boards, we as the leaders, are obviously not categorized into the general consensus of Greek life. We know our purposes, know our Creed, and find more purpose in Greek life than partying. We are not the reason that Greeks run into so many complications trying to reverse the stereotype. But, we are the minority in our beliefs. This is why it is so hard to build up our reputation and reach out to all the non Greeks because there are too many Greeks living up the stereotypes to the maximum potential. I realized even more that our quest to change Greek life is going to be much more difficult to do because how can we make a difference if individual chapters don't even know their purpose of existance?

The saddest thing I heard all day? One gentleman told me, "IFC makes the rules, and we are here to rebel against them." Now where are we even supposed to start with that???