IFC reintegrates, examines values

The Interfraternity Council and the President’s Council are reincorporating values and teamwork into the men’s greek system. The Student Life and Learning Center, which oversees the greek community, has a pledge of excellence based off of five pillars: values integration, leadership development, civic engagement, brotherhood and intellectual development and academic support.

“We understand that people have a negative connotation of the greek community,” IFC Vice President of Communications Sean Jordan said. “We get a lot of negative press, and there have been some practices that aren’t what we stand for.”

Jordan said they are pursuing excellence by using the pillars to get back to their roots.
“Each organization is founded off of different values, so we are giving a framework for everyone to uphold,” Jordan said.

Jordan said the value integration mission statement is that each “chapter teaches and upholds the values of their organization, fraternity and sorority community, and Indiana University. Chapters are responsible for its actions and understand their implications within the fraternity and sorority and campus community.”

The council is going to have roundtables for positions and their counterparts. Groups such as the recruitment chairs will meet and talk about what is and is not working within their community.

“We want to work to continually improve ourselves and improve collaboration,” Jordan said. “Two minds are better than one.”

In addition, Jordan said the council is working toward each chapter holding one another accountable. At the last meeting, the council voted to amend its constitution and give the vice president of standards more power. Now chapters can anonymously report another chapter to the IFC for review.

“Before, only the school and the ethic board would hold us accountable,” IFC Vice President of Standards Aaron Millberg said. “Now we are holding each other accountable as well.”

Kappa Sigma President Nolan Rains said there was a problem in his fraternity more than a year ago. Since then, the chapter has made changes in order to reaffirm its values.

“Something needed to change if we were going to survive as a house and as a chapter,” Rains said. “We had a good program and a lot of things going for us — we just had some problems. So, we asked how we were going to change the culture in our house.”

Kappa Sigma did a membership review, and several men moved out. The fraternity created new goals to focus on academics, philanthropy and brotherhood.

“It was not an easy process at first, and nothing becomes perfect overnight,” Rains said. “We created little changes, and it has been a good, positive thing and feels good to see the change.”

Jordan said he thought they handled leadership very well with a self-governed community. He also said the greek system does well academically because the greek GPA average is higher than the IU men’s overall average.

In addition to value integration, Jordan said the council wants to improve philanthropy events and community service. He said there is a difference between raising money for a cause and actually “getting your hands dirty” with community service. They also want to improve the way the chapters work together.

“Guys are going to have a little rivalry, but we can lead by example and adapt as a whole,” Rains said. “We don’t have to all be best friends to collaborate and work together. We have a lot of differences and a lot of similarities. There is work that we could have gotten from another house if we had asked for help.”

Jordan said he hopes the new values and teamwork will help the greek community continue to move forward.

“We want to keep chapters moving forward toward values and being leaders for IU,” Millberg said. “We want to increase trust between each other and IU and our self-government.”