“We’re about Quality!”
by Matt Mattson
“We’re about quality!” says nearly every fraternity/sorority member.
Prove it. Please. Prove it.
Be exceptional. Be people your alumni can be proud of. Be “high quality.”
Today is another dark day in the history of Greek Life. Our demons are haunting us. The former members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at The University of Oklahoma proved that our members are not all “high quality guys.” Those guys were horrible. They are an embarrassment to fraternity and sorority. And they’re in all of our organizations. All of them. We have so much work to do.
When you say your chapter is about “high quality” members, please be ready to prove it. Be excellent. Be kind. Be special. Be people we can all be proud of.
When you recruit new members this coming year, there are two things you should probably consider.
1. Be ready to PROVE that you’re not racist sexual assaulters. Because the evidence available publicly would suggest otherwise. Start having some very real conversations about how you can prove your quality to people who have been taught otherwise. Not just claim it, prove it.
2. Please only recruit people who are VERY different from the idiots in SAE’s former Oklahoma chapter who were filmed chanting on a bus. There are two ways to do that… a) build a big Names List – the more people you know, the more people you can choose from – Quanity Drives Quality. b) Use a Values-Based Selection Criteria that disqualifies anyone except truly remarkable people who will make our organizations better.
If you love fraternity and sorority like I do because it taught you the opposite of what we’re all reading in the news today, please decide right now to work much harder to stop this sh*t from happening. Fraternity and sorority is something that I believe can and does make the world better. But too often we’re making it worse. I know that only really high quality people read this blog so I’m “preaching to the choir,” but we have to DO business differently, not just post about it on Social Media. It starts with recruiting differently, selecting differently, and educating new members differently. VERY differently. We were founded to be models of humanity to the collegiate communities that host us, but lately we’re allowing mediocre to terrible members (that we recruited) be perfect models of utter inhumanity.
I’m still committed to making us better. I’m promising to continue pushing and doing and creating. I know many others are too. Certainly our team at Phired Up (and Innova and TechniPhi) are. Let’s get to work.