Virginia Tech just published a feel-good piece about their Greeks Giving Back event, and honestly, it's the kind of story that makes Panhellenic councils look great on paper. Chapters showing up, logging hours, doing visible community work. The university gets a win. The chapters get coverage. Everyone posts photos. And I'm sitting here thinking about how many of those same chapters are the ones I've watched skate through standards hearings on the strength of their philanthropy numbers alone.
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Ask your parents what it was like when they went to college. When it comes to dining, we’ll bet they don't say they had a 24-hour Taco Bell on campus, multiple Starbucks, and the option to dine at a restaurant that was almost in the running for a Michelin rating. But for college students these days, it’s not only common but expected. ...
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October 2016’s philanthropy event of the month was chosen not because of how many participants it attracted or because how much money it raised, but because it was a first-time event for two organizations looking to make moves. For the first time in either of the chapters’ histories, two Virginia Tech fraternities joined forces to raise money for philanthropies...
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With over 800 campuses in the United States and Canada that participate in Greek life, naturally it would seem that any college town is a city made for Greeks. However, these five cities not only have the largest amounts of Greeks, but they also have the most thriving Greek life...
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You have made one of the biggest decisions of your life to go to college. Congratulations! However, that’s not the only decision that you’ll have to make when it comes to college life. Another important decision that you’ll probably make is the decision to go Greek in college.
Greek life has lots of benefits to offer to its members – opportunities to build a network, social/community activities to participate in, a strong brotherhood bond to maintain, and many more! However, one of the biggest challenges college guys face at the beginning of their Greek life is choosing the right fraternity for themselves....
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I'm not gonna pretend the job market in 2023 was friendly. It wasn't. I graduated with a communications degree from a mid-sized state school, a solid GPA, and about three months of genuine panic about what came next. What I didn't expect was that the thing that actually moved the needle wasn't my resume or my LinkedIn profile. It was a text from a chapter alumna I'd met exactly twice at an alumnae brunch.
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Every fraternity house has one. A shared drive, a binder on a shelf, a folder in someone's email chain - years of old exams, professor-specific notes, highlighted study guides passed down like they're sacred texts. And the weird thing is, almost nobody talks about it openly. Not the brothers who use it, not the advisors who probably know it exists, not the university offices that would rather look the other way. The test bank is one of Greek life's open secrets, and I think it's time somebody actually said something real about it.
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Onward State put together a running compilation of every Greek life scandal at Penn State, and honestly, reading through it feels like scrolling through a highlight reel that nobody asked for. It's long. It's messy. And if you've spent any time inside a chapter, some of it is going to make you uncomfortable in a very specific, recognizable way.
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Most chapter events don't fall apart because of bad ideas. They fall apart because nobody figured out who was actually in charge. I learned this the hard way during my first semester as an active, when what should have been a straightforward mixer with a sorority turned into two weeks of group chat chaos, three people who thought they were in charge, and a venue that got double-booked. The event still happened. It was fine. But fine isn't what anyone was going for.
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Every few years, a wave of high-profile assault cases hits the news cycle and suddenly everyone's got an opinion about whether fraternities should exist at all. The ABC News story making rounds right now is the latest version of that conversation - calls to shut down frat houses entirely as public anger over rape cases grows louder. I've heard this argument before. I've sat in Panhellenic council meetings where the exact same pressure was bleeding over into how we handled our own policies, our own relationships with IFC chapters, our own event approval processes. And I'll say what I said then: closing houses doesn't close the problem.
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