Over the past year, the Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL) team has made several drastic changes to its previously established systems. This coincides with new leadership in Director of Student Engagement Jarvis Clark and FSL coordinator Breona Jones, along with assistance from Associate Dean of Students Benjamin Williams. This group served as the catalyst for a lot of the alterations made, and I have personally been part of a lot of the conversations surrounding these issues with the leadership team. As such, I wanted to reflect on my discontent with the process behind standards, risk management and the overall role of student voices in FSL.
As a standards chair for my FSL organization, I’ve spent a lot of time working with Jones on standards updates. Reporter Julianne Dunn reviewed the rather positive changes in another article about standards, but the process of getting to this point has been frustrating. This “new” system we settled on is nearly identical to our old one — albeit featuring more clear categories and some new jargon. It makes me question why we have spent all these weeks discussing it just to revert to a prior iteration. From the beginning, I had expressed disdain with building a more complex system, and it seems that feedback was implemented, only months later and after my time was thoroughly misused.
Overall, I am happy with where this new standards framework landed, but the efficacy and goals of our meetings — in addition to the roles student voices play in them — needs to be re-evaluated. I think this becomes even more apparent when examining the issues of red zone and risk management which were addressed this past fall.
Most if not all of Trinity is familiar with the “red zone,” aka dry recruitment situation that happened last semester — a response made to address an abnormally high number of alcohol misuse cases on campus. One of the changes resulted in multiple town hall-style meetings and discussions with members of the FSL community on how to move forward and ensure this never happens again. I was very invested in this process early on. This was a real issue that needed to be addressed, and I wanted to work with the university on a solution. Unfortunately, I soon discovered just how flawed these meetings were before abandoning them entirely.
Going into this process, I assumed we would have a substantive discussion about reforming risk management practices so that history would not repeat itself. I raised my concern directly: “The University has a responsibility to train its risk managers before the dry recruitment period ends.” The response I received was dismissive — something to the effect of, “Am I to believe that the risk managers and fraternities are incapable of enforcing safe practices without the university holding their hand?” That moment made it painfully clear that the leadership in the room had little interest in finding real solutions.
In a later meeting, we had an almost two-hour long conversation simply addressing how we could advertise parties. The conclusion of this? Flyers — which clubs often post on Instagram stories to advertise — must only appear on individual member accounts, as opposed to the public facing club profile. To waste our time on such frivolous matters while still not addressing the fact that people were literally hospitalized was complete insanity to me. Student voices cannot be expected to solve the university’s problems for them, especially when we lose focus on the real issues and they simply choose to not listen.
That is my biggest frustration after being part of all of these processes throughout the year. For all the emphasis there is on student voices being part of the conversation, there were very few moments where I genuinely felt that what I, or any of us, said was actually being heard and taken seriously, particularly when it came to dry recruitment and risk management. It’s a paradox: for the amount of time I have spent in these discussions, it often felt like we were doing FSL’s job for them, yet somehow we still walked away having accomplished almost nothing.
It’s important to say, especially with my criticisms, that a lot of these initiatives are essential. Focusing on keeping first-years safe, updating standards to be more fair and clear and updating risk management curriculum are all vitally important. The only problem has been how these things were handled internally and the methodology in working on them.
I write this as both an insight for students, but also as a request to the FSL team in the going forward. None of us would engage with these discussions if we didn’t believe there was a genuine need for improvement. We all want progress — but there is a meaningful difference between hearing a voice and actually listening to it. That distinction needs to be understood before any of this can move forward. I look forward to seeing how Clark and Jones approach FSL in the future, and I hope the role that students play in shaping it continues to grow.
** Read Julianne Dunn’s news coverage of this event here.
