Good for you Alpha Sigma Phi.
If you have not yet seen, Alpha Sigma Phi national fraternity is suing former members of their (now closed) chapter at Rutgers University who engaged in hazing that hospitalized a 19-year-old new member in October of this year.
I’m in a number of online communities on Facebook (my millennial card is showing) that promote fraternity and sorority life, and I’ve seen mixed reviews of this decision. Some are criticizing the national fraternity for this move, claiming that they are not accepting responsibility for the fact that it was their members who engaged in these behaviors. This is an absurd take. I’m not a member of Alpha Sigma Phi, but I am a proud fraternity member of more than 20 years and I find it commendable that the national organization is taking this action, as it demonstrates a commitment to their own mission, “to provide values-driven brotherhood experiences through life,” and it sends a message to every member now and into the future, you don’t get to haze in our name, ever.
I am a speaker with ForCollegeForLife, America’s leading college speaking agency. For more than a decade now, ForCollegeForLife has offered me a platform to bring programming focused on bystander intervention as a means of preventing hazing, sexual violence, and drug & alcohol misuse and abuse to college students across the country.
In my program, Intent to Prevent: Hazing, I cite the creed of my fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega as a means of demonstrating the relevance of a paragraph written in 1880 by Otis Allen Glazebroook on my life as a nearly 40-year-old man in America and on the everyday lives of college students today. “To teach, not politics, but morals; to foster, not partisanship, but the recognition of true merit wherever found; to have no narrower limits within which to work together for the elevation of man than the outlines of the world.” Whatever your politics, religious beliefs, or personal moral compass might be, we can get behind the idea that an organization designed to elevate others is a good thing.
I use this keynote to inspire and to challenge members of my organization and all other Greek lettered organizations (GLOs) to recognize that when one of us betrays our purpose by choosing to haze, it hurts us all. I had the privilege to return to Northern Kentucky University, where in 2006 I pledged membership in the Theta Omega chapter of Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity as a member of the fraternity’s Board of Trustees (an alumni group that helps advise the active chapter). For years I was invited twice a year to speak with prospective members during fraternity recruitment week on the night they would be handed their bid (invitation to membership). Every year I would look the active and prospective members in the eye and tell them why membership mattered to me, why I’m grateful that they’re considering joining our brotherhood, and then I would say three words on hazing. “Don’t you dare.”
In many ways, it was a chance to send a clear message to these young men that they were going to be safe in this fraternity, that they wouldn’t be hazed or hurt, but rather bettered by membership. It was also a clear and concise threat. I love this fraternity enough to help shut it down if necessary. I am more committed to preserving what is true and worthy about Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at my alma mater, and everywhere than to you, who are choosing to lead or join it today. Fraternity is bigger than you. It is more important than you. If you’re going to join my organization and disrespect it, then you’ve not become a part of this brotherhood, you’ve borrowed it, and we will gladly take it back.
I work with college students on ways to combat hazing within their chapters, communities, and teams so that we can steward the gifts that fraternity and sorority gave to us now and into the future. I’m going to continue to walk into auditoriums, gymnasiums, theatres, or wherever schools are willing to hand me a microphone to give practical, research-supported, reasons why organizations need to eradicate hazing in all forms and hold one another accountable as members of these organizations that for hundreds of years have (as the creed of Alpha Tau Omega states) bound men and women together in brotherhood and sisterhood “based on eternal and immutable principles.”
If you know of a community that could use some help framing this message, please reach out to me. I’m @ReynoldsKevin on all social media accounts and you can learn more about my programs at www.ForCollegeForLife.com/Kevin.