Blog #2

Elissa Forsyth

Blog #2

In the Ethics in Higher Education book, I read about issues with greek life. I read “The Effects of Fraternity/Sorority Membership on College Experiences and Outcomes: A Portrait of Complexity” and “Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses”. Reading these articles created my concern for problems relating to sororities and frats, and I came to the conclusion that I wanted to solve the problem of hazing occurring in the greek system. I would like to solve this issue because of its exigency.

The inability to speak about problems that characterizes fraternities has led to a dangerous culture. In the “Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy…”, its general point was that students do bad things to others because they know they won’t be held accountable for their actions. Action needs to be taken to control the dangerous behavior within frats. The stakeholders in this issue include the students in frats or wanting to join them and the college that hosts the greek life systems. The students would lose or have reduced ability to carry out hazing. Since it is the college’s duty to keep their students safe and pleased with their college environment, the college would gain future student’s favor to continue to join frats, giving their students the soundness of mind that they will not be in danger and the college would be saving student’s lives in the future by discouraging fatal behaviors. In my proposal, my audience and stakeholder I want to address is the Dartmouth College. This is a logical audience because Dartmouth supports frats as it is tradition and hasn’t taken extreme action against frats like other colleges have, but has the power to do so because they host the greek systems for their campus. My reasoning in choosing Dartmouth is that if you can get Dartmouth to change their thoughts and actions to solve frat hazings, other colleges will likely follow. Check out this link showing problems with frats through time and what the colleges did: http://www.newsweek.com/inside-colleges-killed-frats-good-231346 .

By addressing Dartmouth, my purpose would be to convince them that it is exigent that we address the alarming activities in frats, to use my step-by-step plan, and understand why my plan would be to their best interest by synthesizing data from many different sources to build ethos. I would also be including logos in my claim by giving them more of an insight into how hazing has been occurring because they may not be aware of the situation considering they haven’t taken intrusive action. I would also include pathos by understanding where the head of Dartmouth is coming from considering they are all college educated, quality education-minded, middle aged and middle or upper-class people listening to my proposal.

My solution is a multistep process. This begins with disbanding all frats off the campus for a single semester. This would break apart existing members in each frat, particularly the more senior members trying to carry out the “brotherly” traditions of hazings, ending the passing of the negative actions to new members. After frats are allowed back onto the campus, they would be closely monitored for another semester by security. This would allow the frats to regrow with members that would not be wanting to carry out hazings or able to carry them out either. The rebuilding in a safe environment would create strong pillars for the future of the frat. Maintaining the hazings at a minimum after the monitoring would be carried out by random checks on the frats especially during times of introducing new members. I know I will be able to make an effective claim to Dartmouth with my plan.