I jump out of bed with a smile on my face as I was reminded that this Saturday would be an exciting one. Penn State Game-day? Close, today is deliberation day. Sharing in my excitement, a friend invites me to her deliberation that begins earlier in the day. Appreciating the irony of deliberating on the presence of Fraternities and Sororities on State Patty’s Day, I eagerly agreed and tagged along with her past parades of green clad day-drinkers. Arriving at Fraser Street Commons where we were met a group of deliberators and moderators standing in the rain waiting for the door to be unlocked.
Although this deliberation had a wet yet humorous delay, it began smoothly with the presentation of the general topic of the deliberation and laying out the ground rules. Expecting the event to run identically to what we had planned for ours in the previous class periods; however, there where some notable differences. First of which is the style in which the approaches were first presented. The moderators presented their respective approach and lead discussion while standing up in front of the group. Although their mini speeches were well prepared and presented well, by standing up, it felt too formal and as though they were giving us deliberators the answers rather than helping us jointly come to a consensus. This was compounded with introductions that may have been too encompassing—leaving too little left on the bone to deliberate about. For this reason, conversations were difficult to start and maintain; however, in many ways this was overcome.
The first approach was focused on the development of the national Greek Life system. As of now, Greek Life is broken up into several regions. Their proposal was to establish one overarching governing body that each Fraternity and Sorority would report to. This was creating consistency that would encourage higher standards. Through deliberation, it was determined that the general consensus was that this approach may be affective, only if this central governing body would have power to enforce punishments. Also, the concern over the feasibility of getting support from every university and individual fraternity.
The second approach focused on giving the university a stronger role in restricting and monitoring fraternities. The initial solution presented was to move fraternities on to campus like sororities are, this would allow unfettered access by the university to cut down of dangerous behaviors. With limited availability of facilities and land to build new facilities, this idea quickly shifted to universities purchasing existing fraternity properties so that they would have more control. Also deeming this unrealistic, the idea of trading loser controls on number of parties each frat could have for heightened monitoring from police and universities within frat houses was popular.
The final approach initiated a conversation on how to educate fraternities to promote safety. The initial solution was to mandate that fraternity executives would have taken the same class as RAs at Penn State have to take because the essentially have a similar role. Within this conversation it became more popular that fraternities should have many people trained in safety measures such as CPR so that safety wouldn’t be so dependent on a small number of individuals.
Sufficient conversation was encouraged which led to a somewhat widespread conscience that the third approach has the most direct effect and is substantially more feasible compared to the other two. Overall, it was a successful deliberation that ran smoothly and was evidence of a group of student’s hard work.