After the hospitalization of five sorority women last October, this year has been especially difficult for Fraternity and Sorority Life in terms of alcohol related incidents.
“This academic year has been horrible in comparison to previous academic years,” Panhellenic President Morgan Plew said. “I think it’s been a real eye opener for our members. Our councils put our foot down and said this can’t continue.”
In response, the University of Oregon’s Panhellenic Council and Intrafraternity Council’s Vice Presidents of Risk Management Emily Leadem and Max Lehman have formed a new social policy.
“Max and I both got our positions the beginning of winter term and really hit the ground running working on it right away,” Leadem saidabout the new rules.
The new social policy was modeled after University of Washington and University of Michigan’s policies and addresses issues the old social policy did not, especially calling attention to requirements for both functions officially recognized by the local chapter and unofficially hosted in association with the chapter.
“Basically we want to get rid of the terminology of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ functions. We want people to think of that as being one in the same and create a safer environment,” Leadem said. “Obviously since this is a new policy, there will be some trial and error and we will see how it all works, but hopefully that will create that safer environment and a better way of thinking about it.”
This idea of a shift in culture has been something that the executive boards have been discussing for months.
“The concept of official verses unofficial functions is basically don’t ask don’t tell, which is just naïve and ineffective so in result there are a lot of hospital transports and unsafe things happening so clearly the system we had in place was ineffective,” Plew said. “There’s been a shift in culture from having all your parties official at third party venues with buses and everything to people not wanting to deal with that so they just had big live out parties and that’s where problems come up.”
The new social policy is ten pages long and separates risks into four different tiers ranging from third party venues to individual live-outs.
The IFC and PHC Social Policy maps out specific regulations for basically any scenario that a member of Fraternity and Sorority Life could find themselves in.
“In the risk management policy that we all follow, it says 24 or more people at an event would constitute a function,” Leadem said.
The basic idea is that gatherings of 24 people or more must be registered through the chapters social chair and an online form must be filled out and sent into Leadem and Lehman.
“We call it social responsibility. It’s our members saying we’re taking responsibility for our actions to try to have the safest environment possible because it’s going to happen,” Plew said. “Everyone is going to go to a party at least once while they are in college and we just want to make sure that we’re taking the steps that we need to make sure that it’s safe.”
New University of Oregon Greek life Social Policy