we need to disassociate from iu

Administration wants to keep IU’s GLOs under its thumb & they’ll use GR as a pretext to get back at us for wanting actual change to happen. Their loss, because dissociation is inevitable at this point.

No they don’t. If you look at the records, they do not own the land. That’s a common misconception that (personally I believe) is spread by IU to keep a sense of control over the houses.
I know for a fact my house and the land we are on is owned by our nationals/housing corporation. My chapter has heard this directly from our nationals, so I know IU doesn’t own our land - meaning other houses aren’t owned by iu either. A lot are privately owned with landlords (ex: ZBT, former TKE house)

Well if thats the case it feels like disaffiliating should be every house's top priority. Its pretty obvious that at this rate fraternity life isnt sustainable

they got kicked out of their house so pretty much

The question is, where do we start? For sororities and frats

Some alumni laid out an incredibly in-depth plan on here (like a 5000 word essay, extremely well-written) that gave a starting point in my opinion

The alumni posting that had all the instructions on how to break from IU and the legal background was completely gutted by SLL. I read it when it was first posted and then checked back a couple days later. IU paid a lot of money to remove any helpful information from that post.

One of our board members knows the guy who wrote it. I can try to get him to post it again.

That would be great, someone should immediately copy and paste all the information into a word document; forward to it to the chapter executives, just get the ball rolling basically

Ya,

An IU alumnus wrote a pretty insightful post about this issue some time ago; SLL yanked it off GR. It’s 5,000+ words long but worth checking out if we can get it copied/linked up to it again.

Someone should REALLY send that to all the chapter presidents, they all have each other’s contact info anyways

Please make a TLDR post too cause honestly, it was so long I didn't read. Make it like an instruction manual too.

I disagree with the above response; I read the whole thing and I think it was incredibly informative in its entirety. While it didn’t give a step by step way on how to break ties, it provided extremely valuable information and guidance.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems as if IU is unfortunately not going to foster a productive relationship with the Greek system. As such, coupled with the fact that disassociation is gaining steam and support, it might be helpful if you focused on how to cut ties.

ATO was kicked off campus officially for a combination of having the strippers violate pledges AND having vodka bottles in the chapter house. Look at the 29 second video that brought them down. There are clearly multiple bottles in the background. People are quick to blame the downfall of ATO on one single thing, but the truth is they were habitual offenders going way back. The strippers and vodka bottles were the last straw.

Advice on how to cut ties would be appreciated, just in case
But anyone in a fraternity that sees this - PASS THIS ON TO YOUR EXEC. We don’t have a shot unless this actually gets in the hands of members in charge. Who cares if it’s embarrassing you went on Greek rank - it’s more important to save our Greek life.

It’s because IU makes us feel like it’s not a possibility, and most schools don’t really have to deal with the possibility of doing this so it’s not common.

IU would like to have us believe that disaffiliation is a lost cause, so what point? Add to that a lack of initiative, indifference & unwillingness on the part of some Greeks at IU & then you wonder why more heads aren’t rolling on this issue. Until people get past the groupthink mindset (that is to say, disassociating is impossible), we’ll remain at an impasse with administration.

Given how IU is out for heads, it’s time to act instead of talking about disaffiliating. There’s too much at stake right now.

The first path is to continue the concessions. Based on my experience, IU will keep moving the goal posts. A few years ago, the “ask” was event registration, then it was the Housed Greek Organization Agreement, last year it was the suspension and on and on it will go. The next ask is deferred rush even though the only multi-campus study on the matter, which was done by Gamma Sigma Alpha, shows that fall rushees have better academic results. IFC’s leaders made these concessions with the best intentions but over the years, it has only weakened our chapters and IFC. Presently, four 100+ year old chapters are off campus. These were organizations that survived WW1, the Great Depression, WW2 and the 1970s, yet they all have been expelled from IU in just four years. I have no doubts this path will eventually result in the death of Greek life at IU.

The second path is what I recommend. Restore self-governance and a true partnership with IU. How can IFC claim to be a self-governing organization, when the important questions, such as what organizations live or die, are made by outside bodies? IU’s current system has resulted in a greater percentage of our chapters being suspended than at any other campus in the US. At most Big Ten campuses as well as all the strong SEC Greek systems, discipline is handled by an IFC judicial board instead of the Dean’s office. This results in greater compliance as it ensures fair and equal treatment. IFC used have a judicial board appointed by its executive board. This must be restored but it requires coordination between IFC and IUSG. Chapter executives must make sure no fraternity member votes for any ticket for IUSG that does not make full restoration of this judicial authority its primary policy. This partnership will benefit IU as well as fraternities will view themselves as part of the university and not as its advisories. Fraternities can be a positive for the university as Herman B Wells understood. If you want to see what a IFC and university partnership looks like in the modern era, look at Alabama. Here you have the strongest Greek system in the country that also does a tremendous amount of good for the university.

To try to find some answers, I started out by putting together a huge data set of comps. I looked at how IU’s fraternities were performing in discipline and academics compared to the 49 most similar fraternity systems in the country. How many house chapters does each system have? How many members? How many chapters have been suspended over the last 20 years? How is discipline handled? Is it run top down like IU with little to no student input or do students have some say in the process to ensure reasonability and fairness? I will provide that data a little later in this work. After looking at our comparative performance, I identified the primary operating deficiencies, their causes and sources, and suggested specific remedies.

This is advice is targeted only at the fraternities and their leadership as that’s where I have the most knowledge. While I am certainly concerned with the direction IU’s sororities have headed in recent years, being a guy, I really don’t have the experience and knowledge necessary to give detailed advice to those organizations and thus I feel it would be inappropriate for me to make any detailed suggestions on that front. All I will say on the matter is that it is of very little surprise to me that within just a few years of getting rid of bed quota and having very few seniors live in, we went from zero sororities ever being kicked off campus to one sorority suspended and at least three others on very thin ice. I don’t believe in coincidences.

Before jumping into anything, I want to make it clear that this post is not about bashing the IU administration. However, I am not the type to ignore a situation when I think a wrong has been done. I also apologize in advance for my naturally sarcastic tone. Generations of my family have attended IU and have donated generously to the school. I love IU and have been coming to basketball and football games since before I could walk. I count my time on campus as some of the best times of my life and I want the university to succeed. However, I also want an administration that fully supports student rights. Part of the mission of any great university is to prepare its students to become leaders and productive citizens. How can it do that while encroaching on the very rights citizenship grants? In this write up, I am particularly concerned with the issues of due process, self-governance and free association.

The faculty opinion of the fraternities is not good. If you want insight into the views of the faculty, look at the Bloomington Faculty Council meeting minutes. They are available online and searchable by keyword. Faculty members recently have suggested things like requiring RAs in the fraternities, regulating the private chapter houses as if they were no different from university dorms, reducing the pledge period (at Cornell, pledgeship is limited to four weeks), deferred men’s rush (like Vanderbilt, GW, USC, and Penn State), and a whole host of other bad ideas. Members of the faculty that have also directly expressed their desire to see fraternities eliminated altogether. If you are a leader in the fraternity system, please take the time to read some of these minutes. It is important to understand where university faculty and staff are coming from if you want to make changes.

It seems that while fraternities and their alumni are still committed to making IU stronger, IU does not share the same commitment towards the fraternities. What was for decades a successful partnership between the chapters and the university has become a dysfunctional relationship.

Members of the IU staff have on occasion crossed the line when it comes to dealing with fraternities. Some members of university administration their way through threats, bullying, and abuse of the IFC/PHA officers and chapter presidents. I won’t get into the details of my personal experiences with IUs administration as an undergraduate as this is not about me. Suffice to say my experiences with some members of the administration do not reflect well on the university at all.

Another concerning development is the circumstances surrounding the suspension last year. Now you can say that this was a decision IFC came to on its own but I don’t believe that for a second. I am familiar with how back room meetings go with IU admins and though I wasn’t in that one, I can probably write a script for it based on my own experiences. Suspending Greek life because other campuses do it isn’t a good reason. Did it solve anything? Sound policy is made based on fact, not for the purposes of social signaling or because “we have to do something”.

The simple fact is that if you and your leaders on IFC don’t stand up for your rights, then no one will. Alumni simply don’t have the time to fight this battle for you. If you don’t fix things, this encroachment will only continue to get worse as it has in recent years. If you don’t fix it, I don’t believe any chapters will survive the current purge.

Over the last 20 years, the autonomy of the fraternities has been eroded. With each year, IFC gives up authority in an unending process. This is most notable in judicial authority. Starting in 1909, IFC managed its own judicial affairs. For decades, IFC maintained a judicial board. This was watered down in the 1980s when it was combined with the PHA judicial board. In the mid to late 1990s, it seems this board took on more of an advisory role as most suspensions seemed to come from the Dean of Students than this board. In 2007, IFC participation in the process was further reduced when the Student Ethics Board took over the judicial proceedings. Though nearly 100% of the cases were IFC fraternities, the rules limited the IFC representation on the board to 2 or 3 of the 15 members. What kind of people not involved in fraternities wanted to spend their time disciplining IFC chapters? What impact did that have on the rulings at the time? In 2016, even this participation in the disciplinary process was eliminated. According to former Dean Veldkamp, “the board was removed because there is a national best practice for organizational conduct cases, which includes trained professional staff to ensure consistency, prevent bias in the decision making process, and retaliation against students involved in the process”. This statement is at odds with the reality. IU is one of only four schools (of 14) in the Big Ten where fraternity men have no say in the disciplinary process. Additionally, the avoidance of bias was the exact reason that Herman B Wells included students in the disciplinary and governmental processes at IU.

Outside of the judicial changes, the other major recent change was the Housed Greek Organization Agreement in 2015. Fraternities had to sign a this highly controversial contract to be a recognized Housed Greek Organization. This new term conferred no new benefits that chapters had not already enjoyed. These benefits include academic reports, check listing and freshman housing waivers. In exchange for keeping these rights (some of which like academic reports have been enjoyed by the chapters since before World War I), chapters would have to give up rights regarding search and seizure, have a university approved live in advisor in the chapter house and establish a second advisory board with at least one faculty member.

Path Two

The second path the fraternity system could take is a renewal of the historic partnership with IU and restoration of self-governance. This is the path I recommend as I feel it is the best way to restore the balance in the relationship with the university. It happens to align with the views of the late President Herman B Wells who spoke on end about avoiding a paternalistic relationship with the Greek system and the leadership skills to be learned in fraternities through self-governance. He also felt that working with the fraternities proved far more effective than working against them.

There are many ways to restore the historic partnership between the university and the chapters. If you want an example of how this might work, look again to Alabama. The university’s partnership with its fraternity chapters has allowed their Greek system and the university as a whole to grow exponentially. This isn’t due to having high numbers of Greek life staff (I think they have as much staffing as IU) but rather the support the university gives to its Greek system. The university views the fraternities and sororities as a critical housing component and a way to keep upperclassman near campus and out of far flung apartments. The university issues bonds to loan the money to the fraternities and sororities at a low interest rate and the chapters then pay the university back. In exchange, the Greek system goes out of its way to support all aspects of the campus. The chapters buy block tickets to football games and attend the games dressed in coats and ties. The chapters also help with university admissions. All the Greek councils helped to organize out of state recruitment drives for the university. The fraternity and sorority system also hosts a sort of open house for parents and students who visit the campus.

What could such a partnership look like at IU? Well, you could partner with the Kelley School of Business to host students and their families during Kelley Direct Admit Day. Those invited are among the highest potential target students for the university and helping ensure more of those students enroll would be a major boon for IU. Hosting out of state gatherings would be a big help for admissions. You could also coordinate some of event with admissions for Red Carpet days. In southern chapters, fraternities serve as the major sports boosters, which is something IU could use right now. Last year, IU spent $50mm on football stadium renovations, yet attendance was down 7%. The fraternities could help with this if properly engaged. There are probably a multitude of other ways you could be of use that I haven’t thought of given the sheer amount of manpower you have.

What would IU provide the chapters in exchange? For one the restoration of IFC’s self-governance. Individuals are far more likely to comply with rules when they have a part in setting them. More than that, who has more expertize with the problems of IU’s fraternity system than the fraternities’ own members? You wouldn’t have someone lead troops into battle who had no practical military experience and whose only military knowledge was from watching Saving Private Ryan. It would probably a better choice to utilize the skills of an experienced surgeon if in need of medical assistance than relying on someone whose only medical knowledge was derived from Gray’s Anatomy (the TV show not the textbook). For some reason, instead of letting those who witness fraternity problems first hand address them, authority is given to people who have little experience in our chapters. For example, the Vision for the Ideal Greek community, which laid out most of the new Greek policy initiatives at IU, was written with very little IFC chapter participation. Though the IFC chapters are the ones most impacted by the policies, only 2 of the 45 members of the team were members of IFC fraternities. It is likely less than 10 of the policy makers had ever set foot in a fraternity at IU.

The problem with trying to restore self-governance is that you are trying to turn the tide that has been going towards heavy handed regulation at IU for decades. While in loco parentis was repealed for most of the campus in the 1960s, today’s fraternity men have less freedom now than they did half a century ago. How would one go about starting this process to begin to turn the tide back towards self-governance?

I would recommend beginning by making a statement and adding a preamble to the IFC Constitution. The statement would simply be to clarify the rights and authority of the council. It could be something as simple as saying “The InterFraternity Council of Indiana University, established in 1909 as the Men’s Pan Hellenic Council, is a self-selecting membership organization. Since its formation, the council has retained the right to include or expel a chapter regardless of an organization’s status or recognition with the university”. I would also pass a regulation stating that “Unless a chapter is suspended by 2/3rd majority vote by the IFC Presidents Council or its by majority vote of an IFC appointed judicial board, a chapter is still deemed to be recognized and a member of the IFC.” This is not claiming any new rights, simply affirming the authority that the council has had for over a century. This is a matter of defense not defiance.

The second step would be the establishment of a full and independent IFC governed judicial board. The key here is making it known that no fraternity man should vote for any IUSG ticket that does not make restoration of this disciplinary authority priority one.

This is not just a standards board as IFC has implemented from time to time over the years but would have all the disciplinary authority the IFC judicial boards of the past have had. This is the most critical aspect of all of in self-governance. How can you claim to be a self-governing community when the most critical issues, i.e. whether a chapter lives or dies is determined by an outside party without any of your input? I firmly believe that many of the problems that IU’s Greek system has experienced are a direct result of the structure of the disciplinary system. When compared to similar fraternity systems at other schools, IU’s chapters tend to receive punishments that far are more severe in both intensity and duration for similar infractions.

Why does having student input on the disciplinary system matter? Based on my research, it has a major impact on the stability, conduct and success of a fraternity system. I looked at the 50 largest and most comparable large Greek systems in the country (Alabama, Ole Miss, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Penn State, Michigan, Ohio State, UVA, UNC, Cornell, USC Cali, Indiana, LSU, Wisconsin, University of South Carolina, Kansas, Purdue, K State, Nebraska, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, UC Boulder, Iowa State, Tennessee, Auburn, Florida State, Georgia Tech, U Penn, Arkansas, Iowa, Maryland, Washington, Arizona, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington State, Minnesota, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, NC State, Clemson, UCLA,SMU Michigan State, Mississippi State, and Rutgers). On average, these chapters have 2000 men in IFC fraternities and had 25 chapters. I tried to understand what distinguished successful and stable fraternity systems from the others. Of the 50, 36 have significant student input in the fraternity disciplinary system. Of what are arguably the strongest, most successful and most stable large fraternity systems in the country (USC, Texas, Illinois, Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, UVA, Cornell) all of them have IFC run judicial boards (or at least recently did as of the documents I can find online). Unsurprisingly, the schools where IFC runs the judicial process have fewer disciplinary issues and far more reasonable corrective actions when violations occur. Cultures of mutual accountability absolutely can work when they are given the chance.

In addition to having clear punishment guidelines, the IFC judicial board should affirm the right to have legal counsel represent chapters at hearings. Since 1997, all but four housed chapters have been suspended. If the chapter houses each hold ~80 men and their rent averaged $1100 per person per month over that time period, and 19 houses lost out on a half years rent, then the rent losses total $6.7 million. In addition, Alpha Sig, Delta Chi, ZBT, SAM, and Pike lost ownership of their houses (Beta sold their old house but I think they got a decent sum of money). If each house was worth $6.5 million, then the suspension of chapters at IU has cost the men’s chapters nearly $40 million. The number probably is a lot higher once you factor in the impact disciplinary proceedings have on alumni support. Indiana allows you to have an attorney at small claims court where you are arguing over trivial matters as small as $25. Surely, then it would make sense to allow fraternities active legal representation in disciplinary proceedings that have cost IFC chapters millions over the last 20 years. All in, IFC fraternities at IU own around $125 million in real estate (assuming $6.5mm per property X 19 chapters that own their own property). Yet IU’s fraternities operate in a judicial system where the rules constantly change and are arbitrarily enforced, putting all these assets in jeopardy.

Though your chapter may not have been suspended recently, this arbitrary judicial structure still costs you. Let’s say a chapter is considering remodeling their house. Typically, your board might take on a mortgage to cover the cost of the renovation and pay back this debt over many years of stable cash flow. Now chapters have to be very carefully about this. If the chapter gets suspended and their board can’t pay the mortgage they will lose their house. So the amount of debt that IU boards are comfortable taking out is limited. You might think rather than finance renovations you could just raise alumni money for the remodel. Think again. The kind of alumni who donate to such a projects typically either run their own company or are in private investments. Not one of these guys would invest millions of dollars of his family’s or an employer’s money into an investment where the rules are arbitrary. Why would such individuals behave less prudently when it comes to evaluating risk in charitable giving?

This vague definition of hazing is a problem at a lot of universities. LSU, in its report following the death of a pledge in 2017, specifically identified the vague use of the term hazing as a contributing factor to the cultural problems of their Greek system and indirectly to the death of a pledge. This whole report is worth reading. It claimed that LSU definition of hazing was so broad that made it impossible to run any pledge program and so the hazing rules where completely ignored. LSU is working to narrow down the hazing definition to something more practical. Pledge rides, for example, aren’t hazing; they were implemented in the 80s to address the serious issue of drunk driving in the Greek system. Requiring pledges to clean around the house, attend study tables or dress in coat and tie should not be the same infraction as beating pledges, force feeding them dog food, or requiring them to deadly amounts of alcohol.

The legal definition of hazing by the state of Indiana is “as a condition of association with a group or organization; to perform an act that creates a substantial risk of bodily injury”. It is a much clearer definition that if IFC adopted would allow you to effectively eliminate activities that are dangerous while halting harassment for infractions that aren’t really hazing. Is it not surprising that with organizations like Delts, SNU and Kappa Sig kicked off campus for hazing in recent years it appears no individuals were held accountable for their actions (as far as I can tell)? If members of these chapters were engaged in activities that were a “danger to the health of the IU community” such that their 100+ year old organizations needed to be closed wouldn’t you think that at least one member of those organizations would be expelled or criminally charged with hazing? Again, correct me if I am wrong on this and if anyone was expelled from the university for hazing in either of these instances.

Indiana is one of only ten states where hazing is an actual criminal offense. The current Indiana state hazing law was actually written with help from IU IFC officers sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s in a student and alumni led effort to end dangerous hazing. Make it known that if a chapter is found guilty of hazing (again as defined by the state), the IFC Judicial board will notify the local DA. Potential individual criminal charges for chapter leaders are the only way that I see to effectively and permanently end dangerous hazing at IU. It has to happen but you can’t make that threat when IU’s current definition of hazing is so broad that it is entirely meaningless. Chapters and individuals that truly pose a danger to their pledges will get the punishment they diserve while sparing everyone else from erroneous hazing charges and unnecessary harassment.

Path 3

If none of the above work, then it is time to explore the third, nuclear option. Assume that after putting all the ideas and research together, both SLL and the Board of Trustees are unwilling to partner with you to make a stronger fraternity system at IU. Desperate affairs require desperate remedies. There is the option for the council and its member fraternities to completely sever ties with the university. Though this has been casually discussed around the IFC office and in fraternity houses a number of times through the years, this is a very serious decision and should not be considered without taking all risks into account. However, sometimes in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connect them with another. It would be unfortunate if circumstances require dissolving the relationship between IU and the fraternities because I think a partnership can be much stronger. However, fraternity systems can be successful without the universities involvement and I think there is a national trend starting towards separation.

In fall of 2004, a fraternity pledge at UC Boulder tragically died from alcohol poisoning. The following spring, the university issued a Draconian set of policies similar to our Housed Fraternal Organization Agreement. UC allowed no student input; the only option given was to submit to all the terms or be shut down (sound familiar?). The document required a fulltime live in staff member, deferred rush (as members of IU’s Bloomington Faculty Council have suggested) and other requirements. Unlike at IU, the fraternities at CU consulted with their alumni boards, the National Interfraternity Conference, each fraternity’s national office and attorneys and broke ties with the university. While CU predicted disaster for an independent fraternity system after losing the advice and regulation of the university, the opposite occurred. A culture of mutual accountability was fostered. Since ending university affiliation, UC’s fraternities have grown from 12 to 20 and membership has grown from 800 to 1,800. The system is not anarchy, as three chapters have been suspended for not upholding the shared standards. If you want to find out more details on this, read the article entitled “Fraternities Can Change on Their Own” posted in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

There are other institutions where fraternities have no formal relationship with their host universities. At both Harvard and Yale for example, fraternities, secret societies and final clubs have no relationship with the universities and are entirely governed by their undergraduates, their alumni boards and when applicable, their national offices.

SHOCKER LMAO thanks @ IU !!! Oppression is not the way to stop us from doing this. Someone get that sent to exec now!!

Literally over 10 comments were deleted lol geez, kinda just proves how badly we need to get this done.

IU doesn’t want to hear the truth; it’s harsh reality that administration doesn’t want to confront/deal with.