Are Greek organizations really that special? Most people, including Greeks themselves, would argue that they shouldn’t be treated any differently than other students ? especially about discipline. Yet Assistant Dean of Students Matt Burns recently created a special council for Greek discipline with Greek students on the disciplinary board. Rather than dispel impressions that Greeks are different, it makes it worse.
This is a problem for many reasons. Burns’ argument for the creation of this council is that Greeks living on the Fraternity Quad are lacking the lower levels of authority like the live-in figures of residential advisors and graduate head residents that the dormitories have. Instead, Burns argues, students living on the Fraternity Quad go straight to the dean. If this is the heart of the problem, then a Greek council won’t fix it, because there are non-Greek groups that live on the Fraternity Quad not covered under the council, and also Greek groups in Towers and Hill Court who will gain additional benefits, because they already have RAs and GHRs. If uniformity of coverage is the goal, the Greek council fails.
A second reason that this is dangerous is that it allows a select group of students to have an additional level of student representation that no one else gets. While RAs may be the same age as their residents, they are superiors when they discipline residents, while the Greek council will be made up of peers. No other group on campus gets this privilege, and Greeks shouldn’t either.
Students already have All Campus Judicial Council as a jury of their peers, and no group needs more coverage than that. ACJC was designed as a group that any student can appeal to for judicial coverage, and the students that make up the ACJC are there to represent all types of students, regardless of group affiliation. It should not be taken out of the loop of student arbitration, and should treat Greek discipline equally.
This council goes opposite of that purpose, and goes against what UR’s disciplinary code should stand for. The council should be dissolved, and Greek disciplinary problems should go through the same channels as every other problem.
