 | Scobel Wiggins/Democrat-herald
Outside the SigEp house during a fire drill, Scott Cowgill of Albany laughs at a fraternity brother (not pictured) trying to hide the fact that he’s clothed in little more than a towel. |
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Legacy support - an unexamined benefit of reform? An interesting take on the media juggernaut that Oregon Alpha has become.
Tom Cutsforth’s father was a Sigma Phi Epsilon man. So were his grandfather, two uncles and two great-uncles.
But up until about three years ago, Cutsforth and his father, also named Tom, were seriously rethinking the family legacy.
News reports about the SigEps at Oregon Alpha, the chapter at Oregon State University, hadn’t been good. In September 2001, {...)the chapter was hit with 26 counts of providing alcohol to minors and thousands of dollars in fines — all from just one party.
“The house I joined isn’t the house you’ll probably be looking at,” Cutsforth remembers his father saying.
[...]
To Cutsforth, a business major, the Balanced Man approach makes sense because it continues the kind of educational experience he’d come to expect. He had a 3.9 gpa in high school, played tennis and golf, and didn’t believe it was fair that a group of students who just happened to be older than he was would have the right to treat him “like scum just scraped off your shoe.”
“A lot of people nowadays come in almost strictly for the fact that they are going to be equals,” he said.
[...]
“He [his father] loves where we’re at right now,” Cutsforth said.
.: Corvallis Gazette-Times :. News
