Posted in August 2011 …

Aug 30 2011
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candidate education, goal setting, hazing, headquarters staff, new member education, personal servitude, pledging

A tale of two chapters – the opportunity cost of hazing

While your chapter was designing this year’s recruitment t-shirt (another beer logo, of course), my chapter was having lunch with prospective members and their parents.

While your chapter was creating demeaning nicknames for each pledge, my chapter was taking the time to learn each candidate’s name, hometown and life story.

While your chapter was debating what embarrassing costume each pledge should wear for this weekend’s party, my chapter was helping each candidate set personal goals for the semester.

While your chapter was out buying family drinks for Big Brother night, my chapter was arranging a mentoring program for each candidate to work with an alumnus in his field of study.

While your chapter was holding the weekly line-up in the basement to grill pledges on arbitrary questions they can’t answer, our brothers were at the library studying with the candidates (our candidates learn Fraternity history from the brothers).

While your pledges were out stealing road signs, defacing property, and breaking into campus buildings during the annual scavenger hunt, our candidates were listening to a guest speaker talk about time management skills and effective study habits at our weekly chapter meeting.

While your pledges were running errands and performing arbitrary tasks to complete their interview books, we were hosting a parents’ dinner to learn more about our candidates and their families.

While your brothers were harassing pledges in front of their dates at last weekend’s mixer, our chapter was hosting an etiquette dinner with the top sorority on campus.

While your chapter was trying to coordinate manufactured stories for the upcoming “nationals” visit, my chapter was updating our strategic plan to free up time for feedback and guidance during the leadership consultant’s visit.

While your chapter was searching for loopholes in the risk reduction policy for this weekend’s off-campus party, my chapter was hosting a speaker on alcohol education open to the entire campus. (We hosted a party that weekend too, except we followed our insurance guidelines.)

While your members were swapping stories of drunken female conquests from the previous night, my chapter was hosting a campus-wide program on preventing sexual assault.

While your chapter accepted mediocrity, we sought excellence.

While your chapter slowly fumbled everything away, we gradually earned our way to the top.

And while your chapter looked for someone to blame, we resolved to reach for the next level.

Rock Chapter recipients proudly display their awards during the 64th Grand Chapter in Boston.

Aug 25 2011
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hazing, new member education, personal servitude, pledging

“We can’t just let anyone into the chapter.”

Just a few of our favorite responses to today’s #40Answers hazing excuse:

@KeithEllis02: “A bid is an invitation to join, not an invitation to be hazed. Make better decisions on the front end not 6 weeks into pledging.”

@bgibson27: “We can’t let just anybody in.” Doing pushups, tolerating yelling, memorizing your interests. Quality new members there…

@David_Stollman: “If u REALLY believe in hazing, promote that u do it & stop lying! Then see who joins. I dare u. At least ur not hypocrites then.”

@KPezzella: “A well-articulated recruitment plan and training for your chapter will ensure that you get quality new members without hazing.”

@TJatCAMPUSPEAK: “Challenge hasn’t been to keep the unworthy out. It’s getting the worthy in & they have better things to do than tolerate hazing.”

@SigmaNuDrew: “Riiiight. Who needs grades and character when we can have a chapter full of people with good memory and no self-worth.”

Read all of the outstanding responses to today’s excuse here.

Aug 25 2011
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hazing, new member education, personal servitude, pledging

Will rookie hazing help the Titans win more than six games?

The Tennessee Titans finished the 2010 season tied for last place in their division. With such a disappointing record, you’d think the team would be spending precious training camp hours on activities that actually contribute to winning football games (e.g. reviewing blocking assignments, watching film, timing routes, etc.).

But the “team,” if you can call it one, seems more interested in taping rookies to the goal post and dumping ice-cold water all over them.

Will the Titan’s rookie hazing help them suck less than they did last year? Not likely. As the Dallas Cowboys learned last year, rookie hazing failed to deliver on its promises. (It’s no surprise that the Cowboys took a decisively different stance on rookie hazing this year.)

Meanwhile, Peyton Manning, though currently recovering from recent neck surgery, is focused on getting rookies involved in the team as soon as possible:

“You’ve seen all the highlights with the rookie hazing and haircuts,” Manning said, per John Oehser of FanHouse. “We don’t do that around here, because we don’t treat the guys like rookies. We expect those guys to play this year and to play well.”

Aug 23 2011
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group culture, Honor, values-based leadership

The honor system crumbles without peer accountability

In today’s Wall Street Journal writer William McGurn discusses the recent allegations at Miami through the lens of honor systems. Here are a few key paragraphs:

Our military academies are not filled with moral paragons. Like their peers, their student bodies are populated with young Americans in their late teens. They are every bit as human, and an honor code has never been a guarantee against scandal. From the huge 1951 cheating scandal at West Point that saw more than 80 cadets expelled (including nearly half the football team) to more recent scandals at Navy and Air Force, the academies have had their share.

The difference is they don’t delegate to the NCAA the idea of right and wrong, and they take community seriously. On these campuses, no man is an island. The message is: You are all in it together.

The parallel for fraternities is clear: any chapter is capable of making a mistake and getting in trouble. The difference between mediocre chapters and excellent chapters is how they respond.

Failing chapters circle the wagons, shift blame and look the other way when peers abandon their values. Excellent chapters acknowledge the misstep and hold their own members accountable rather than waiting for some higher authority to take action.

…

The ingredients of Miami’s vices—the nightclubs, the prostitutes, the yachts—make it far juicier than the typical pay-for-play. The scandal here is not that teenage football players behave badly when a wealthy benefactor indulges their every appetite. The scandal is what it says about the impoverished sense of community on our college and university campuses, and the fecklessness of those who know better.

The cover story for upcoming fall issue of The Delta takes an in-depth look at traditional honor systems, including one of the institutions mentioned in this article. As we’ll see, peer accountability combined with a culture of trust is the essence of the honor system. As the only fraternity founded on the honor principle, Sigma Nu chapters must show their communities that self-governance works.

Aug 18 2011
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hazing, new member education, personal servitude, pledging

“Hazing builds better members by instilling toughness.”

A few of our favorite responses from today’s #40Answers excuse, “Hazing builds better members by instilling toughness.”

@fraternalthoughts: Teaching someone to be submissive and take orders instills toughness? Let’s create leaders, not subordinates.

@TJatCAMPUSPEAK: Know what’s tough? Being a good husband, father, student, citizen, professional. Prepare them for that. Hazing doesn’t do it.

@bgibson27: Hazing instills toughness? Stop acting like you’re a military Drill Instructor–it is disrespectful to those who serve.

@GullsGoGreek: Be tough and accountable on what is important: values, grades, campus involvement. Hazing is for the weak!

Aug 10 2011
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group culture, group psychology, situational forces

The psychology of clinging to bad strategies

Here are some excerpts from Tim Hartford’s excellent piece in Fast Company:

While poker can be analyzed rationally, with big egos and big money at stake it can also be a very emotional game. Poker players explained to me that there’s a particular moment at which players are extremely vulnerable to an emotional surge

The economist Terrance Odean has found that we tend to hang on grimly, and wrongly, to shares that have plunged in the hope that things will turn around. We are far happier to sell shares that have been doing well. Unfortunately, selling winners and holding on to losers has in retrospect been poor investment strategy.

Most of the examples in this article deal with money, so what’s this to do with fraternity and student leadership? The closing paragraph offers a hint:

All four examples — poker, Paris, Deal or No Deal and share portfolios — show a dogged determination to avoid crystallizing a loss or drawing a line under a decision we regret. That dogged determination might occasionally be helpful, but it is counterproductive in all these cases and in many others. Faced with a mistake or a loss, the right response is to acknowledge the setback and change direction. Yet our instinctive reaction is denial. That is why “learn from your mistakes” is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.

Can you or your chapter relate to this instinctive emotional response to setbacks? Leave your stories in the comments section below.

Read the full story here.

 

Aug 09 2011
2 Comments
groupthink, hazing, leadership, new member education, personal servitude, pledging, purpose of fraternity, values, values-based leadership

Are you a fan or a fanatic?

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -Aristotle

We all have strong convictions about something. It could be a political belief (“taxes hurt small businesses”), or a historical narrative (“FDR ended the Great Depression”) or even the eminence of a favorite sports team (“Chicago Cubs are the best baseball team ever”).

Maybe it’s something as simple as a favorite TV show (“Hands down, Entourage is the best show to ever grace the airwaves”). Whatever it may be, everyone is passionate about something.

In everyday usage, “fan” describes someone passionate about a sports team, a TV show, a musician, and so on. “I’m a lifelong Redskins fan,” one might say in casual conversation, or “I’m a huge fan of Tom Petty.“

But the root word of fan carries a much different, and more harmful, meaning. Merriam-Webster defines fanatic as “marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion.” (Synonyms include “extremist” and “radical.”)

For a fan of the Detroit Lions a win brings him a sense of joy, but he can acknowledge, after observing the team’s record over the past ten years, that the franchise is not the best in the League.

For a fanatic, on the other hand, evidence doesn’t matter. The Detroit Lions are the best team in the League, period, and no amount of reason or logic will change his mind. It sounds silly in a sports analogy, but from time to time we’re all prone to such blindness in our decision making in other areas of our lives.

So what happens when we’re confronted with new evidence that conflicts with an existing worldview? How will you react? Will you take a big gulp, swallow your pride and change your mind? Or will you frantically search for stories that confirm your narrative and ignore anything that refutes it?

Thankfully for us Sigma Nus, the anecdote to fanaticism is right in front of us. Our founding principle of Truth expects us to make decisions based on sound information, even if it might not support our existing belief.

In short, Truth calls on us to keep an open mind–to consider the possibility that we made a mistake in our thinking. It requires us to walk away from a false paradigm no matter how psychologically painful it might be.

Which brings us to the #40 Answers in 40 Days Campaign. Beginning tomorrow, and continuing through National Hazing Prevention Week, hazers will be confronted with a steady assault of evidence and logic that questions a deeply rooted worldview—a worldview that regards the arbitrary mistreatment of new members as a legitimate way to build lifelong friendships and commitment to the fraternity.

For hazing’s True Believers we ask one thing: Consider the possibility that you might be wrong.

Aug 05 2011
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community service, purpose of fraternity, stereotypes, values

HuffPo: Want to Build a Better World? Go Greek

Collegians participate in teambuilding activities during 2009 College of Chapters in Lexington, Va.

Huffington Post College published a piece today explaining why fraternities and sororities are well ahead of other student organizations in discussing and solving common campus issues. Here are some of the highlights:

In truth, the college Greek system may be one of the healthiest forms of community in our nation, and any student who refuses to consider entering the community may be doing himself or herself a disservice.

…

In that light, the college Greeks have actually been heroic in their attempts to move beyond conformity in order to achieve diversity. Brian Johnson, an African-American professor at Bloomsburg University and Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for Academic Excellence, is a sought-after speaker and consultant on multicultural issues among Greeks and other college audiences.

…

“As I travel the country speaking to student leaders about stereotypes,” he says, “I find a great number of students who, with their national organizations, are pressing for a return to the true mission of fraternal organizations — those being service and philanthropy, academic excellence and being good stewards to the campus community.”

…

The genuine challenges that fraternities and sororities face are hardly unique to their communities. What may be unique is their collective commitment to addressing their challenges head on.

Read the full story here.

(HT Drew Logsdon)

Aug 03 2011
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leadership

Leadership Lessons from Earnest Shackleton

Here are some highlights from The Art of Manliness on leadership lessons from Earnest Shackleton:

On setbacks:

Numerous times, Shackleton and his men felt incredibly hopeful that a goal was in sight and things were turning their way, only to have these hopes utterly dashed.

…

And here is the mark of a real leader: the worse things got, the more cool and collected Shackleton became. Worsley remembered that Shackleton could sometimes be irritable when the going was good and he could afford it, “but never when things were going badly and we were up against it.”

On maintaining morale:

A leader who serves and loves his men as Shackleton did, makes a sacrifice that is not simply altruistic, for such actions have the effect of forging the deepest loyalty.

Read the full story here.

Aug 01 2011
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hazing

#40 Answers in 40 Days Returns August 10

#40 Answers in 40 Days, a crowdsourced resource for eliminating hazing, will return August 10 and continue through the beginning of National Hazing Prevention Week on September 19.

For more information visit the press release at http://www.sigmanu.org/documents/anti_hazing_40_excuses_for_hazing.pdf.

For coverage of last year’s campaign, visit here and here.

Lastly, don’t forget to browse the compiled answers from last year’s campaign here. Through our partnership with HazingPrevention.org, we’ll be looking to build on this resource with an ever growing army of crowdsourced contributors. Stay tuned for more info.

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