Guest Post - Comments on Alumni Volunteers

This post was originally entered as a comment on the Cal Zeta post. The staff at S&P think it derseves to stand on its own. Thanks to Roger Festa for Letting us 'promote' his excellent comments.

My name is Roger Festa. I have been the Chapter Counselor at Missouri Mu (Truman State University) for 14 if the chapter's 24 years. I received a copy of the letter that Sean Miller wrote to other SigEp chapters to alert them to the imperative of maintaining consistently the best possible academic performance and not falling below SigEp's minimum standards in this area. I encouraged Sean to send his letter to Sanguine et Purpure because of my tremendous respect for this SigEp blogspot. If anything on the Internet is "fair and balanced," it's S&P. My heartfelt esteem to the editors...

I know Dave Calderon and I respect him tremendously. My godson was a SigEp at Fullerton, and I am good friends with the current SigEp president at UCLA. Brother Calderon works assiduously on behalf of the SigEps in southern California. "Fair and balanced" are apt descriptors of Brother Calderon's character as well.

Two issues were raised in the preceding missives to which I will contribute my $0.02.

First is the matter of Cal Zeta's "past transgressions" to which Brother Calderon refers in his initial comment. The transgressions cited are serious, but I inquire as to how past they are. I got my butt boiled four years ago because I invoked "past transgressions":

One of our sororities posted on the bulletin board in our house a flyer inviting SigEp to a holiday mixer at an off-campus venue at which there would be kegs and for which each SigEp attending was asked to contribute $3.00. In addition to the audacity of the announcement, the flier was decorated in the SigEp and sorority's official colors, with the Greek letters of each house emblazoned boldly on the announcement. I found this horror on the bulletin board after midnight when I stopped by the house to leave some papers for the chapter president. Everyone was asleep, so I quietly ripped this abomination off the board, walked back across campus to my office, made photocopies of it, and mailed the original to the headquarters of the sorority with a letter of explanation on university letterhead. This was serious. But I committed a blunder in reporting this particular incident to the sorority's national leadership. In my letter, I cited a litany of irresponsible "party ideas" proposed by the sorority which resulted in my SigEps getting into trouble or for which they would have gotten into trouble if they participated. I cited the enclosed flier as the most recent example.

The problem was that, because of my fastidious record keeping, I cited by "chapter and verse" all the transgressions of the sorority that had or potentially could have had a negative impact on my SigEp chapter going back nine years!

Although the sorority was dealt with sternly by its national leaders, the undergraduate women demanded that I address their chapter in due assembly and apologize for invoking the sins of their predecessors while addressing a current violation. I gave this request careful and prudent consideration, and I agreed to do so. The women in the chapter nine years earlier were not the women in the chapter at the time of this particular faux pas, and to invoke the past to make my point to the sorority’s national leaders seemed, after all, inherently unfair. I realized that the current transgression was serious enough to achieve the intervention I sought from the sorority’s headquarters. But in my anger and disgust during the wee hours of that December morning, I had lost this perspective. So my caveat here is to give careful consideration when invoking disciplinary history in an institution such as a university or a fraternity chapter, where a “generation” is measured in four-year increments.

My second caveat addresses overlapping roles of alumni volunteers.

As Chapter Counselor, I sit on the board of our AVC ex officio.

Although my advice and perspective are requested regularly by the AVC leaders, I have declined through the years to serve as an officer of our AVC, which is a Missouri not-for-profit corporation required to have a particular configuration of officers and directors (probably the same as California law in this regard). The Chapter Counselor, as a member of the AVC board, is the conduit of information between the alumni and undergraduate members, and he often must represent the undergraduate perspective during decision-making by the alumni leadership.

Based on my experience and longitudinal perspective, I believe that there needs to be a respectful “arm’s length” between the AVC and the undergraduate leaders and members. In my opinion, a Chapter Counselor serving as an AVC officer – and in particular, an AVC president – may engender a perception of a conflict of interest, sometimes from the alumni leadership’s perspective, sometimes from the undergraduate members’ perspective.

A Chapter Counselor must have the respect and – most importantly – the trust of each individual man in his chapter. Chapter Counselors often become “second fathers” or “older brothers” to some of the undergraduates, and these critical relationships cannot be compromised, not even in service to the AVC. Although the AVC, too, is working on behalf of the chapter, it is easy for an undergraduate member (and even undergraduate leaders) to lose this perspective when the alumni and the students approach an issue along different vectors.

Brother Calderon, as well as others who have posted here, has pointed out the critical need for committed volunteers, and I concur heartily with this concern.