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I checked out the results of the homecoming royalty election and noticed something interesting about our Queen and King. According to biographies, FirstClass resumes and facebook profiles, Johanna Peralta and Matthew Sullivan are not members of any sorority or fraternity on campus.
It’s uncommon for two unaffiliated students to be able to win an event that’s basically a fraternity beauty pageant. Still, quite a few members of the selection committee end up as finalist nominees every year, but that’s another fish to fry.
Fraternities have a reputation for dominating student-led organizations, like the Senior Skulls and Student Council. People don’t notice when unaffiliated students rise to leadership positions because there’s no organization to promote them. Unaffiliated student leaders include, but are not limited to, Andrew Eldridge, executive producer of the Maine Channel, David Kujawa, president of Wilde Stein and The Maine Campus’ own editor in chief, Matthew Conyers.
There’s a lot of talk going on right now about the reputation of fraternities. Are they party clubs or honor societies? Critics insist that the harshest Animal House stereotypes are true. Defenders insist that fraternity members do a lot of public service on campus and go on to succeed in life. What can the average student make from all of this information? The truth is somewhere in the middle.
There are a lot of unfair statistics supporting fraternities. They usually use tricky wording and often fail to compare numbers to unaffiliated students.
A few years ago former interfraternity council president James Wiseland wrote that the “majority of infractions of the Student Conduct Code” are caused by dorm students, not frat members. This isn’t a fair argument because it “forgets” that fraternity members make up a small portion of the student body. The way Wiseland worded his statement made it sound like fraternity members are less likely to break rules than average students.
Do frats haze? Yes, of course. So do the University Singers. Every fall the singers wake up everyone who lives on the same wing as a new member at 5 a.m. They get away with it too. Meanwhile, frats aren’t allowed to have their new recruits wear a pledge pin.
A lot of frat boys get high and mighty about how offensive it is to abbreviate the word “fraternity.” They like to dig up an example of a word where the first syllable is not socially acceptable. However, I have yet to hear a frat boy say, “You wouldn’t call your brother a bro.”
There are a lot of stupid people in fraternities on campus. However, there are a lot of stupid people enrolled at UMaine. If you take a 100 level class that involves discussions, you will learn that the average student is a moron.
Joining a fraternity is not the same as “buying friends,” as it’s often put. You contribute to a budget so you and other members can equally share the costs on things like big screen TV’s and parties. I wish my friends were that organized.
Do fraternities have parties? Of course they do. So do most off-campus students. They are no better and no worse then the rest of us.
Does being in a fraternity help you succeed in life? Yes. Is this because being in one makes you a better person, or is it because fraternity members give preferential treatment to one another long after graduation? You decide.
When people join a fraternity, they can get whatever they want out of it. If they want to drink a lot and scope out underage girls, they can. If they want to help out the community and hone their leadership skills, they can do that too.
With all of that in mind, it’s good that our homecoming King and Queen weren’t elected because of their ties to an organization, but instead on a more important factor: physical appearance.
Michael Hartwell really hates the University Singers. Seriously.
