A 19-year-old student was critically hurt. Rutgers shut down the fraternity. And then - nobody got charged. That sequence of events should bother people more than it apparently does, because it's the part of hazing stories that tends to get skipped over in the coverage.
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When Oglethorpe University students launched Lambda Theta Alpha - making it the school's first Latin Greek organization - most people outside Atlanta probably didn't notice. No viral moment, no national coverage. Just a group of students deciding their campus needed something it didn't have yet. And honestly, that quiet kind of founding story is worth paying attention to.
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Ah, that time of year -- sorority recruitment -- where we find ourselves spending too much time in the guilty pleasure that is watching sorority recruitment videos. Usually a well-edited mix of time lapses set against pop techno, girls on speedboats, the latest trends in bikinis, and of course, convertibles cruising coastlines and/or desert backroads. Here are this semester’s best sorority recruitment videos....
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Greeks help others. Every chapter across the nation works hard to hold events to raise awareness and resources for their selected causes. These occasions also offer an opportunity for Greeks from different houses to come together to support each other’s efforts to make the world a better place. Here are some of the best philanthropy events of September 2016 from across the country....
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On April 15, 2016, the brothers of the Theta Delta Chapter of Sigma Pi Fraternity at The College of New Jersey raised a total of $12,528.91 for the College’s Relay for Life event. Their outstanding efforts secured a first place finish among a field of about 55 teams, but it is unclear if the fraternity’s achievement was celebrated by the rest of the College. Whether intentional or not, the fraternity’s name was not announced until 5am to a tired and sparse crowd, instead of the usual 12am announcement during the height of the event....
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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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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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There's a specific kind of chaos that hits Greek row the week before homecoming. Float builds happening at midnight. Someone's little sister from three towns over showing up unannounced. A chapter president stress-eating dining hall waffles at 2am because the banner isn't drying fast enough. I lived that chaos for four years, and I'm not even a little bit sorry about it. Homecoming week is the thing I describe to people who ask me if Greek life was worth it - and it shuts them up every time.
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Every few years, something happens at Cornell and the whole country acts like Greek life just invented itself. The New York Times is back on the beat, the op-eds are flying, and university administrators everywhere are dusting off their "embrace or ban" talking points like it's a policy debate and not a conversation about actual students. I've seen this cycle. I lived through a version of it. And honestly, the framing is what frustrates me most.
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