Incongruencies

          A simple explanation for why incongruencies exist in fraternity life is that no one is perfect. A better explanation would be that when people join social fraternities and sororities they are concerned MORE about the social aspect rather than the values the organizations are meant to live by. Think for just one moment. What was your first reason/thought for wanting to become Greek? There are many reasons, such as an opportunity to make connections, join a lifetime network, to have friends who party, attending formals, having older friends to get you into bars, etc. It is more of the social aspect of Greek life that probably got you interested in the first place. And you cannot be blamed since a big part of recruitment does involve a lot of socials.

This is where I think Greek life becomes incongruent with each organization’s values and mission statement. There is more of a focus (or more so the community sees this) on the social life and interaction WITHIN Greeks, and less time and energy is spent on reaching out to the community. I personally think that because we centralize our attention on planning events (and a lot of socials) with other Greek orgs (because we want to create a stronger community within ourselves and get to know other Greeks) we often forget to tailor our events more towards the OSU community. Although most of this is not done on purpose to exclude non-members, having too many socials that only attract members of the Greek community (whether or not you realize you’re narrowing your target down to Greeks only) may not always be the best thing to do.

In my chapter we face one of our incongruencies with the first part of our mission statement: To promote continued personal and collective growth of our membership. Our membership is lucky enough to have a mixture of personalities which at times gets in the way of maintaining consistency since there is so much diversity in characters; we face dynamic interpersonal interactions. This means that at times we bump heads with one another when deciding on something, or we prefer to stay quiet about our opinions instead of confronting a member about the issue that is bugging us. It is normal to have this kind of conflict when a group is involved, but the bigger problem is when members do not fully embrace the difference in personalities and look beyond them. We are here to help build each other into greater people, and by avoiding confrontation we hinder ourselves from accomplishing a part of our mission statement.