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 11 ARROW • week of March 13 - 26, 2013

REINSTATEGREEK community to self-govern

GREEKS WHO VIOLATE THEIR ORGANIZATION’S RULES ARE NOW PUNISHED BY THEIR PEERS INSTEAD OF THE OFFICE OF STUDENT CONDUCT

A member of each Greek organization to compose reinstated judicial boardANDREA GILS COPY EDITOR

The Interfraternity and the Panhellenic Coun-cils at Southeast Missouri State University have reinstated judicial boards this semester. Students who violate the rules in their Greek organization’s bylaws are now punished by their peers and no longer by the university’s Office of Student Conduct.

Christine Loy, interim assistant director for fraternities and sororities, said the aim of having these boards is to provide the Greek community with self-governance. If there are any issues, people can choose to report it to the judicial board of their council first, instead of sending it to the Office of Student Conduct as it was done before.

Each judicial board is formed by one mem-ber of each greek organization in the coun-cil, who applied and interviewed for the posi-tion, with one of them being the appointed chairperson. Patrick Vining, pre-med major, is the chairman of IFC’s board, and Tory Loving, exercise science and pre-physical therapy major, is the chairwoman of NPC’s board. Loy operates as an adviser to the board but does not have any voting privileges.

Loy said every officer received training at the beginning of the semester and both boards had a mock trial to see how a normal hearing would take place and decide on sanc-tions for a sample case. She said that the uni-versity still would know about an infraction if there is a violation of the Student Code of Conduct.

“If it’s something that is serious enough, like a hazing case, then it would automatically

go through student conduct, and the judicial boards could also hear it so that they could provide their own sanctions,” Loy said.

Infractions of the bylaws or the consti-tution of the individual council, such as recruitment or T-shirt infractions, would go to the Greek judicial board.

A T-shirt violation could occur when a Greek member volunteers during freshmen move-in day and wears a T-shirt including the letters of their Greek organization, ins-tead of wearing the university-issued one. Loy said that wearing a T-shirt with Greek letters could be considered giving that organization an unfair advantage because students will be more familiar with it.

A recruitment violation example would be when Panhellenic sororities give anything to a potential new member or contact them during the recruitment process. Loy said Greek students can only promote Greek life as a whole during recruitment process.

Bruce Skinner, assistant vice president for student success and director of Residence Life, will work with students if they have any questions regarding university policy. Skin-ner said that IFC and NPC provide each indi-vidual governing council with best practices, one of which is having some kind of judicial mechanism in place.

“Nationally, Panhellenic is required to have judicial boards, and we’ve had them set up in the past but in recent years we haven’t, so we’re pretty much just bringing back something that we should have been having all along,” Loy said.

It is also recommended that IFC has a board, but the bylaws that a judicial board is

set up have not been followed in the past few years either, Loy said.

“We were supposed to have been having it, but they [IFC and NPC] just weren’t being informed,” Loy said.

Loy added that all of the issues that would have been handled by the Greek judicial board were automatically sent to the Office of Student Conduct.

According to Skinner, reinstating both boards does not mean Greek students will have a less severe punishment when it comes to sanctions.

“It’s scrutiny from their peers, which I think is far more effective than the university always being in the position of ‘You did this wrong, so here’s your sanction.’ Now it’s your peers saying ‘Here’s our policy, here’s why we believe you did that wrong and here’s the sanction,’ and students relate better to students, some-times better than they do to an administra-tor,” Skinner said.

Loving said that by reinstating the boards, the Greeks wanted to take some of the pres-sure off the university.

“We think it’s really important that it [judi-cial board] is in place and starts off right the first time so that the university can see that we can handle these things ourselves instead of them just cutting us down because they don’t understand the kind of punishments or con-sequences would really be helpful for us and to be effective as a whole,” Loving said.

Loving’s aim is to give punishments that benefit Greeks educationally or service-wise such as requiring a set amount of ser-vice hours as opposed to “fighting them and taking away things from their chapters.”

She said that these types of measures will help them grow and learn not to do these things while not being detrimental to the organization.

“By taking away one chapter’s phi-lanthropy, that organization isn’t getting that money, it’s not really hurting that chapter but that organization,” Loving said. “I want our Greek community to thrive and grow and bet-ter ourselves, and I think that we can do that.”

Loving said that she was picked for her position because she was believed to be unbiased, to be able to hold all of the chapters up to a higher standard and said that conflicts of interest would not be a problem.

“I don’t think that [conflict of interest] will be an issue,” Loving said. “I won’t let it be an issue.”

According to the Southeast IFC bylaws, if the chief justice of the IFC Judicial Board, in this case Vining, is a member of the accused or accusing fraternity, he must excuse himself from hearing the case.

Skinner also said that they have found that, in general, students are more interested in being heard by the administrators than their peers because peers tend to be harsher.

If a sorority or fraternity member makes an infraction, an infraction form will be sent to Loy. If Loving decides a hearing is necessary, other steps would follow, resulting in a two to three week process, Loving said. She also said that after alcohol and other violations at the beginning of the academic year, the uni-versity is looking at Greeks and waiting for them to “mess up.” She said that the new judi-cial board would give more credibility to the Greeks.

SEXUAL ASSAULT AWARENESS MONTHSoutheast will have a 5K run and one-mile walk to raise awareness of Sexual Assault Awareness Month on April 18. Students can sign up by March 29 for a T-shirt and glow in the dark items.+

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