Incongruencies at Ohio State and in my chapter

There are a lot of incongruencies here in my fraternity that I don't like to talk about or discuss just because of the negative mood it brings to the table.  While saying that, i know that it can only be changed by looking at a problem and creating a solution.  We don't get the grades that we should.  I personally have a 3.4, but everyone doesn't have the same major and talents as myself.  Some people just need to be more focused and work hard in the week.  I stay true to the work hard, play hard philosophy.  Because of this i am able to get good grades and also to have a good time and be social.  We need to fix this, by implementing very strict grade requirements and study hours requirements.  This can be said for the entire greek community.  We come to college to get an education first.  Greek life enhances the educational experience, but in all fairness, employers are more likely to care about your GPA rather than what you did in college.  That is the first incongruency we need to work on.

The second incongruency we need to work on as a chapter and community, is our new member education and recruitment.  The more unified the greek community is in the recruitment of young men and women across campus, the larger our greek community will grow.  If you look at the size of our campus and how many people we have, you would think we would have 4-8 thousand greek community members.  We don't, and I think that is because of the incongruencies in our community over recruitment.  We need to team up and raise numbers.  Rather than having all different stands on Information day at welcome week, we should have one stand for sorority and fraternity life.  From that booth, we could have brochures and pamphlets to distribute out.  We should also have a list of events that students can go to while searching for an organization to join.

Another incongruency that could very dangerous to our appearance to people around campus is TG themes.  Some Tg themes can be very fun.  With that being said, I think that some of the costumes people wear to TG's can be offensive in some nature to one person or another.  I think that they can give a negative stereotype to certain groups of people.  I think to solve this, we should have an approved list of TG themes.  Noone gets offended by people wearing toga's.  One such thing people could get offended by is jersey shore.  We had this theme of TG last year, and one member brought to our attention how some people around campus could view this as offensive towards italian americans.  It's all up for discussion what is right and what is wrong, but it can be guaranteed that someone will be offended at sometime or another.  All I'm saying is we need to watch the themes that we use for TG's.  I personally am not offended by any TG themes I have seen, but that is not to say someone else hasn't.

That's all folks,

Zach "Big Mac" McManus