This week’s edition of The Lafayette contains an article quoting Brother David Eckelmann ’13 as captain of the fencing team. Fencing Hosts NCAA Regional by Ariana Giorgi ’13, discusses Lafayette College’s hosting of the Mid-Atlantic/South Regional tournament. The article goes into detail about the funding of the fencing team, which is funded as one team rather than separate men’s and women’s teams :
“The most important thing the school could do right now would be to fund the program as two separate teams,” captain Dave Eckelmann ‘13 said.
Read the full article for more fencing details and news.
Another newspaper article about the closing months of President Weiss’ tenure as President of Lafayette College briefly touches on Greek Life:
The Implementation and Assessment Group on Greek Life (IAGGL), which was established by Weiss in late 2011, is nearing its conclusion. Weiss admits he is encouraged by the progress.“Over the last three or four years, we’ve had a series of studies and working groups and we’re now at a stage where the standards have been set and the monitoring mechanisms are in place and the administration, the board, the students—everybody—understand where we are and we’re making good progress,” he said.
It is encouraging to hear that everyone, including the administration and Board, continues to acknowledge the progress already made in the Greek Community.
Finally, the newspaper also covered a New Public Safety Advisory Committee.
“It is helpful for Public Safety to have a group of students to get ideas from and to bounce ideas off of,” Director Public Safety Hugh Harris said. “The main focus is to work with the students in a positive way.”There are two seniors, two juniors, three sophomores, and one freshman on the committee, which meets periodically to discuss how they can improve the department.
Hopefully the next Director of Public Safety will continue this Committee following Hugh Harris’ retirement at the end of this year. Such a Committee could provide an avenue of direct communication from students to the Public Safety, which may avoid controversies such as the alcohol patrol issues that came to a head last year, ultimately being resolved during a forum hosted by President Weiss in the Spring of 2012.
In August 2012 DKE’s leadership published our thoughts on the progress towards fulfilling the Board of Trustees directives from their October 2011 meeting. As promised, we’ve updated the dashboard to track the progress since August. With the help of the administration, the Greek community has made significant progress, often already achieving the Board’s end goals for the Greek community, as recognized in the recent update to the community from the chair of Implementation and Assessment Group on Greek Life (IAGGL), VP of Campus Life Annette Diorio, and coverage in the school newspaper article Halfway There: Greek GPA Promising including comments by President Weiss, both of which we discussed here and here.
Highlights of Positive Trends Since August 2012
The dashboard is available in .PPTX and .PDF formats. The speaker’s notes in the PPTX document contains the explanation for why DKE’s leadership scored progress for each item.
There has been progress even on those areas that give us the greatest cause for concern (1. Transition from a punitive conduct model to an educational and student development model and 2. Allowing student demand to drive bringing expansion/contraction of the Greek community), although we’ve also seen a backslide in terms of varsity athletic teams (particularly the women’s teams) forbidding their student athletes from joining a fraternity or sorority. Hopefully the momentum the College is building will help overcome these last few remaining hurdles.
Challenges Remain
As always, we welcome questions, comments or concerns, especially if there’s anything we’ve missed. Please send your thoughts to president@rhodke.org.
Powerpoint: Board-of-Trustees-Greek-Life-Directives-2011-2012 Updated Winter 2013
PDF: Board-of-Trustees-Greek-Life-Directives-2011-2012 Updated Winter 2013
This week’s edition of The Lafayette contains two articles about Greek Life at Lafayette College. The first covers information from the recent Winter Board of Trustees meeting and an update posted by the IAGGL chair, which DKE’s leadership reacted to in an earlier post. The article Halfway there: Greek gpa progress promising by Julie Depenbrock ’13 contains the following quote from President Weiss:
“The evidence that we’re gathering from the data that we’ve seen is that the Greek organizations are performing very well,” Weiss said. “Their academic performance and behavioral issues seem to be consistent with the student body as a whole, which is what I asked for at the beginning of this.”
Its good to read that President Weiss recognizes the progress in the Greek Community, that we are meeting the President’s expectations, and that the President and VP of Campus Life are both “optimistic about the future of Greek Life.”
The second article So-long sorority by Samatha Praman-Linton ‘16 details the demand on campus for an additional sorority as well as discussing Sigma Kappa, the first sorority at Lafayette College. Importantly, the article also reports about the process for bringing chapters onto campus, which seems to indicate that interested folks (students and alumni) should begin working on applying now so that swift action can be taken following the completion of IAGGL’s review period in 2014.
Vice President for Campus Life and Senior Diversity Officer Annette Diorio believes the next year and a half will answer the question Greek life’s expansion.
Although the review period officially ends June 1, 2014, discussion to add new organizations will begin a year in advance because of the planning and approval needed from the national headquarters of fraternities and sororities.
Rho DKE 160th Anniversary Campaign
Undergraduate news- DKE Summer Series – Jeff Michelson July 31, 2015 Nicholas Gates
- DKE Summer Series 2014 – Will Garson September 3, 2014 Michael Morgan
- DKE Summer Series 2014 – Nicholas DiNino August 15, 2014 Michael Morgan
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