This week, the Fraternity and Sorority Coalition Assessment Project arrived on campus to conduct a review of Greek Life. The Coalition aims to objectively assess and communicate the overall health of a fraternity and sorority community. The Coalition will produce a report of Greek Life at Binghamton University that Lester Coghill, the new director of Greek Life here, will purportedly rely on once he begins in January.
While we grant that we don’t yet know the Coalition’s conclusions, our hopes for its success are not high. The Coalition aims focus on the wrong things and does little to address the underlying problems with Greek Life at Binghamton.
Representatives of the Coalition said their goals were forward-looking and their focus structural. Both goal and focus are misguided: It is impossible to gauge the current health of any organization without looking at its past. Here, the present has a very public blemish on it. While the New York Times article that blew the top off hazing at BU is now a few months old, its backlash is still being felt here; and the recent arrest of two fraternity presidents is still fresh in students’ minds.
Focusing on “structural” issues is a relatedly poor measure of fraternal health. Improving Social IQ, Advancing Academic Interests and Developing Positive Interpersonal Relationships are all laudable goals. But they’re also somewhat universal to college — everyone could benefit from them.
What these goals ignore is the deeper, more insidious problem of Greek Life here. Greek Life is ailing at Binghamton, and the problem is not just that there is a lack of “positive interpersonal relationships.” It is the very culture of organizations here. It is a culture that has hazing at its essence and that resists any attempts at change.
The Coalition’s declared method for gauging interfraternal health is to talk to students. That has been tried before. Students simply will not talk. They are understandably reticent about the things they did as pledges that could expose them and their organizations to legal liability. So too are they unlikely to talk about the other sordid elements of Greek Life such as parties.
In short, a report based on testimonies from Greek members will paint a rosy picture that will be believed by precisely zero people. More than that, it will ignore the very real problems within Greek Life that threaten its very existence. Whether this is willful ignorance or simply because Coalition officials don’t have the empirical experience to know that they’re looking at the wrong things, in our eyes the Coalition is unlikely to produce answers to any of the right problems.
There is one objective of the Coalition applicable to the problems here: to determine the “Effectiveness of Campus Interface” with Greek Life. Though we have no idea how that could be improved, that is the key to fixing our fraternities and sororities. Maybe Lester’s the man to fix it, but until that time, our hopes for Greek Life at Binghamton are dim.