6:00 The evening began with the faculty members gathering for an opening session to reinforce the talking points for the weekend. No alcohol until everything is over tomorrow, let the staffers know if anyone gets unruly or there is an imminent bottle-rocket incident, etc. Then a quick rundown of the wonderful stats and goal v. reality: lots of "wheelhouse chapters", GPA is improving, chapter size is up, closing bad chapters, yada, yada. We were rewarded for being polite with club sandwiches and bow-tie pasta salad. yum.
7:00 A session for Volunteers: More stats, mostly saying how well we are doing.
8:00 Volunteers go in to join the undergrads for the general session. After about 15 minutes we got kicked out again and ended up wandering the halls like Spinal Tap looking for our breakout room. Muttering about how 'organized'things are.
One Scoop - you heard it here first: Richie Proud has been selected to fill the new position of the Director of Volunteers.
Interesting presentation of the NIC Standards. They are pushing to have whether or not a fraternity has accepted the standards published in rush material.
We also learned the the "Fraternity Housing Act" has an 80% chance of passage this year. The act would allow contributions to fraternity housing to be deductible, like the contributions to the Educational Foundation are now.
A discussion of the Residential Learning Center initiative followed. RLC is a major focus of the Ed. Foundation and is popular with schools too. If it is so major, where is the bold outline on the HQ Web Site?
In the "tooting our own horn" department, we learned that one District Governor found out about a new expansion chapter in his district from S&P.
While the Volunteers were having gangs of fun, the undergrads were having a program on conflict resolution - perhaps a few days late for some, but that serves to underscore the importance of the topic. Later, they did chapter self-evaluations. I bet the ones from the guys who showed up just in time after driving several hours to get here are particularly interesting.
More tomorrow...
