Lost In Translation - Translating Fraternity and Sorority Life For Student Affairs

Edit - This blog was written in response to a number of questions that faculty and staff have had about the structures and practices of F/S Life. I have been asked to facilitate a professional development on the subject. My second in two years. We all have our own unique languages when we talk about our particular fields of passion, but I wonder if F/S opaqueness is actually doing us harm?

It seems apropos doesn't it? After spending the past five years engaged in some form of work with or within the interfraternal movement, I think I am beginning to feel (and look, I dearsay) a bit like Bill Murray in the Lost in Translation.

Let me back up a bit and preface this blog post by saying that my comments are based purely on anecdotal information through my own lived experiences. Others may have had very different experiences and more nuanced perspectives than I, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I am not the only person who finds myself lost in the gap as it were.

What do I mean by lost in the gap do you ask? Being lost in the gap to me means being put in the position of speaking for different world perspectives for different people at different times. In this case, often times people ask me "What is Greek Life?" while I often times find myself the "voice of campus life" when working directly with chapters.

When I was a consultant for my fraternity for two years, I often translated the black and white regulations of risk management policies into the realistic practices of undergraduate chapters.

When I worked as a graduate student within a fraternity and sorority life office, I found myself at the nexus of conversations between students, staff, alumni, and faculty.

In the past two years I have moved away from direct involvement with fraternity and sorority life into leadership programming and academic support initiatives. Through my time developing and implementing a healthy masculinities exploration program called "Real Fraternity Men" and with the number of fraternity and sorority students who now come through my office, I find myself proud and privileged to continue to be connected to the movement that gave me so much.

But not everyone feels the same way. In every one of my positions, I have found myself translating issues and concerns for other groups. It can be tiring sometimes.

There are few universal truths in life. The closest I have ever gotten to one such truth is the statement that I have heard from over 52 chapters across the country and throughout my current institution where fraternity brothers and council officers have repeated the mantra "IF ONLY THEY KNEW WHAT WE DID BETTER, THEY WOULD LIKE US MORE!"

Part of me agrees. I have met many members of the movement, affiliated and not, who have had transformational experiences personally, professionally, and socially as a result of their involvement with fraternities and sororities.

But we need to do more than just put the burden on others to know US, rather, the movement (myself included) must do a better job of telling OTHERS about what we do while involving the community in our activities.

Why is this the case? It is simple really -

In the past two years, I have worked in positions with few publicly affiliated members of the fraternity and sorority movement. Those who were affiliated rarely declared themselves. But EVERYONE I have worked with had one, two, three or more compelling personal stories of a fraternity or sorority chapter doing some catastrophically bad things.

Poor grades, homophobic, racist, or bigoted social themes, feelings of isolation and exhaustion demonstrated by student workers, volunteers, or participants who were also going through their new member process, sexual assaults (far too many to count), and other incidents are common stories told by colleagues I have worked with. Just recently, one promising pre-med student dropped from a 3.5 to less than a .5 in one semester! As a result, tens of thousands of need and merit based financial aid is danger of being lost.

Theses stories aren't just rumours, although everyone I have talked asks me about animal house. These are real stories, real experiences, and real students for whom the movement has failed.

Which brings me back to my original point. For the second time in two years, I have been asked to give a presentation on "What Is Greek Life" as an advocate and as a professional staff person who works to promote student success. It is a presentation I enjoy, because it allows me to provide context to what can be a very opaque system to some. It also allows me to put forward a great number of positive stories.

Perhaps most importantly, I often frame the conversation as how fraternities and sororities have strived to meet the needs not provided for by college campuses over the decades.

I know the spiel.

I can cite the statistics.

I will put my best face on it and talk about the good it does.

I have seen the overwhelming number of people who have come away from their undergraduate careers far better off for having initiated.

But here's the twist - all of that is lost in translation precisely because it is a spiel.

This post isn't about living your values (although you should). It isn't about developing value congruent recruitment strategies, better returns on your investment programming wise, or even leadership theory.

This post is a warning.

When I sit around a table of staff who counsel students about all of the resources available on campus, fraternities and sororities are often left out. When I try to talk to them about why the movement is a positive one, I know for a fact that they are skeptical. Both Phired Up and Recruitment Bootcamp taught me the importance of building bridges to cultivate social connections to promote the movement. Yet I watch chapters squander the connections with advisors across the country! Many students who are unsure are going to their advisors and being VEHEMENTLY counseled AGAINST joining one of the many excellent fraternities and sororities across the country. The end result is that when concerned parents and students come to staff to have their concern about our organizations allayed, they are in fact reinforced. While none of this is malicious in nature, it does reflect a careful judgement made by professionals who do not know the full extent of what fraternities and sororities can do.

From my experience, we focus a lot on competing amongst ourselves. Holding better parties, building better floats, getting more awards. But at the end of the day, many across our respective campuses just don't care about the minutiae of it all.

Unfortunately, no amount of dodgeball philanthropy tournaments are going to counter the very real horror stories and the magnified threats propagated by stereotypes of "Total Fraternity Move" and the vocal minority of harmful individuals.

One day at a time, one person at a time, we can make the difference. Some day WE can show OTHERS just how truly amazing the interfraternal movement CAN be.

To my friends in the movement, don't get lost in the translation. Don't give up the challenge!

Proud to be a brother of Phi Kappa Psi,
Jacob

Is It Time To Go Big? The Case for Big Data in Student Affairs

Big data gets a bad wrap sometimes. The vast amount of information that exists about a person often raises the specter of   Big Brother in ways that were not even possible just a decade ago. In fact, it seems as if everywhere we turn, our online presence exists solely to expose us to others. The government seems dead set on hoarding that information to prosecute you, Google wants to aggregate it so they can be your advertising portal, and Facebook seems intent on exploiting your data to sell wholesale to other marketing firms.

But can this explosion of information be useful? Moreover, can we use it to promote student development and success in higher education? The more I consider the scope of the approach, the more I am coming around to believing that the Big Data philosophy is beneficial for higher education for a number of reason.

What is Big Data?

Big Data, broadly defined, is an approach to data analysis that can only be done on a big scale to "extract new insights or create new forms of value in ways that change...organizations and institutions." (Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2013, p.6). In many ways, it is as much a philosophy and practice as it is a methodology.

Google is perhaps the biggest advocate and practitioner of Big Data. Its search analytics depend up consuming massive amounts of data to provide the most efficient, effective, and useful results to large groups of people who themselves may not know exactly what they are searching for.

In practice though, it has far reaching implications for assessment and proactive programming. Borrowing from the book "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think" I would reference an experiment that Google ran to compare their analytics against that of the Center for Disease Control. In years past, the CDC has used a series of forms, surveys, and reports from hospitals, clinics, and individual doctors from around the country to predict what strains and how severe flu seasons will be. They use that data to order flu vaccines and send supplies where they might be needed most. This can take weeks at best to process and consumes significant people power at the CDC.

Google had an alternative theory. They would use the massive numbers of searches to try and predict flu outbreaks in near real time. For the past two years, the Google model matched the CDC's own internal predictive model but surpassing its time. While this year's results were not as effective, many experts remain hopeful with continued tweaking of algorithms to adapt to public fears, the predictive model will once again prove accurate.

In my mind, what makes the Google model particularly useful is that when they first released their flu tracking model, they do not not ask "why" things happen but specifically look at "what" things happen. By aggregating their data they could start with nearly 45 different variables and ultimately settled on 16 different search terms which had the highest correlation of actual flu outbreak.

But that is a fundamental shift in terms of philosophy for higher education. Being intentional is not just concerned with WHAT you are doing but HOW you are doing it and WHY you are doing it. Big Data, on its face, appears to reject the intentionality that has been a cornerstone of higher education and student affairs.

In many ways, the field of education is already wrestling with this fundamental question when it comes to holding institutions accountable for their education. In High Schools and Higher Education alike, public officials have pushed for strict measures of accountability that look at loan repayment, mean incomes of graduates, graduation and persistence rates, as well as standardized test scores. The problems of these metrics are plethora though.The Educational Policy Institute indicates that there are a significant number of factors that have adverse impacts on student learning. factors ranging from peer interactions to family support, to the physical conditions of schools all have significant impacts on students, but not every student is affected in exactly the same way. On the other hand, there are no universally accepted ideas about what constitutes necessary skills and content mastery necessary for individual success. Only broadly defined terms that can be manifested in different ways by different students.

Big Data, as a philosophy, can help bridge that gap since it doesn't rely on one standard metric of success. Moreover, our capacity to obtaining data and retaining data is significantly cheaper and more accessible than it ever has been at any other time. Even further, Big Data has already demonstrated success in certain areas of higher education.

Big Data and Higher Education

Big Data, or the collection of massive amount of data to sift through, is increasingly gaining momentum in higher education. From a purely educational philosophy, it is most pervasive in the "crowd sourcing" of knowledge. On one hand, crowd sourcing has been successful in identifying new galaxies culled from images collected by thousands of telescopes. On the other hand, crowd sourcing has allowed for a large collection of literary works to be shared by a great many students However, it has developed enthusiasts and results in other areas of higher education specifically when it comes to bolstering persistence and retention efforts.

EBI-MAPWORKS is one such initiative that aggregates massive amounts of data and allows every day professionals to, at a glance, determine a student's risk of dropping out of an institution. The program begins with a pretty significant first year survey and then factors in a wide variety of variables including demographic information, high school grades, test scores, and other incidents that happen on campus. These factors include student activities involvement, residency status, financial status and confidence, academic skills, social worries, and overall academic goals and dedication to completion.

MAP Works goes one step further though in that it allows a wide variety of faculty, staff, and students (specifically residence assistants) to input notes and track number of contacts between the University and its students. In this way, nearly every contact a student has becomes one more "data point" with which to evaluate their overall experience with the University.

It is the MAP Works philosophy that intrigues me the most about changing the way that student affairs and higher education pursues assessment initiatives. In the face of rising costs, the public has demanded a quick and easy way to "hold educators accountable" for the sizable investment that both the public and private sphere is making in an individual's experience. In my mind, it bridges the gap between the desire for a raw "beneficial or not beneficial" response of today's policy makers with the need to meet an ever growing diversity of experiences in higher education that are hard to encapsulate with a standardized test or as lengthy as waiting six years to see whether a student graduates and what they do with their education.

Big Data, as a practice, also fundamentally recognizes the intrinsic value that education holds by giving us new tools to measure growth in ways that we haven't been able to before. But it requires a change of philosophy that isn't necessarily intuitive.

1. We will never know with absolute truth the full experience of every student - Students as individuals have a plethora of different experiences and come from very different backgrounds. Different students affect their backgrounds in different ways. Elisa Abes writes in her theory about intersecting identities that salient identities can change over time, are often socially contextual, and can have differing impacts at different times in a person's life. Quantitative analysis has attempted to create constructs and isolate for a vast majority of variables, but the social fabric of our universities are constantly in flux and the time it takes to construct theory to practice models often times creates the false sense that theory (as represented by the study of higher education) and practice (as implemented by student affairs professionals) are two very different things.

Student affairs professionals have responded by flooding campuses with quick surveys, but with any survey, you make intentional decisions about what questions to add and what to leave off in order to produce the most useful information without creating the widely-recognized "survey fatigue" effect from students.

2. Intentionality is not the end all, be all of assessment - this is truly counterintuitive. When time, space, and effort are precious commodities, haphazard data collection is seen as the enemy of best practices. The Big Data approach does not reject implicitly the need to be intentional in questions we ask, but rather we need to ask more questions, more often.

As I said earlier, data facilities are becoming much cheaper than they once were and will likely decrease in cost as technology gets more advanced. Today, our ability to store electronic data would allow us to digitally encode all of the written literature in human history roughly ten times over without much concern.

The big concern is what do with so much data. As the Google Flu predictors shows us, so long as we can identify the right variables to search for, our predictions and assessments can be pretty accurate without the massive time and effort commitment of other methods. However, the trends are constantly changing, so our search parameters must also, lest our predictions are off base. In this way, the study of higher education and student affairs goes hand in hand as we constantly implement theory in our measurements

3. Conceptions of privacy will have to change - Right now, Big Data does feel a lot like big brother. Specifically, there are crucial elements of data that are legally prohibited from being collected and shared with other staff at a University. This is perhaps the biggest road block to adopting a true Big Data approach to higher education. FERPA is a big deal for a variety of reasons and one I do not wish to challenge lightly. However, there are some compelling reasons to at least reconceptualize what FERPA looks like in today's institutions.

First, the very concept of privacy is changing in the United States. If there is one thing that came out of the exposure of the National Security Agency's metadata collection (a technique already being used by the Post Office  and the FBI regularly trolls internet searches to identify problematic trends) it is that the American Public is not as concerned with internet privacy as it once seems.

Students in particular have exposed themselves in ways that were nearly impossible a decade ago. The rise of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr have created a new public square that is not limited to physical presence and speech. Foursquare, Instagram, and Vine have also pushed the boundaries of fundamental conceptions of privacy as we become more and more willing to put ourselves over a medium that is not fundamentally secure.

This is not to say that we have given up on the idea of privacy, since privacy locks are still a major consumer demand. The shift is in the base level concern for creating a digital footprint. At some point in time, these services are all fundamentally designed to be SHARED.

The only question is SHARED with who.

I would argue that when it comes to academic success and tracking the development of students, institutions of higher education have a compelling reason to know as much about their student populations as possible.

Which is NOT to say that disciplinary boards have a compelling reason to know about every single student infraction enforcement, but rather that the field of higher education and purposeful programming REQUIRES us to know as much about broad groups.

My response then to privacy concerns is less to limit what is already being put out by students explicitly or implicitly, but to limit who has access to the specific data that allows us to utilize aggregated trends. This is the principle behind academic records collection in the first place and is a fundamental tenant of the EBI-MapWorks program.

Conclusion

If we want to get the best picture of what institutions are doing for their students, we cannot limit ourself to artificial indicators based on the subjective desires of individuals. We must look at the whole student and whole groups of students. Currently, we have devised a plethora of tools that look at individual components of the student experience, but the time has come to step up our game.

The great part is that the information is already out there to bridge the gap between the quantitative assessments and the qualitative experiences. We just need to devise a mechanism and a philosophy that encourages us to admit that we don't know everything. We also need to admit that theory to practice is messy. Theories can be sound, but limiting or expansive by but weak in their descriptive and predictive powers. Similarly, a good theory can be messed up by poor implementation while a bad theory can be adapted to be useful by a great practitioner.

Knowledge is rarely constructed in a vacuum and student affairs is certainly not practiced in one. Whether we are looking at risk factors of a student and trying to determine a proper intervention or investigating a student organization for hazing, more information (if properly queried) can lead to better outcomes. When we aggregate the data we increase our ability to make predictive decisions based less on subjective and artifactual observations. Nor does the approach require constant surveys. Let us instead ask for little bits of information from a lot of people, all of whom are interacting with our students.

Big Data lets us bridge that gap. As a philosophy and a practice, I believe it shows a lot of promise.

The information genie is already out of the bottle. Shouldn't we make the most of it?

In Pursuit Of A Personal Promise Land: Reflections on Passover and My Life In Student Affairs

Pesach, or Passover to you gentiles, is the Jewish holiday remembering the Israelites exodus from Egypt. It is celebrated from sundown to sundown over the course of a week in recognition of the ancient Israelites plight and in celebration of God who acted through Moses to bring the disparate tribes of Israel together to get to the promised land.

If you are Jewish, and your level of religious commitment was anything like mine, the holiday was best remembered by bitter gafilte fish, horseradish, endless stories, and a desperate pursuit of the afikoman, or a piece matzo that was hidden at the end of the meal with a bounty of a dollar placed on it for the young children to claim.

But now I am no longer six, Passover has taken on a more significant role in my life and the lessons of the holiday seem more relevant than ever.

After nearly a decade of being away from home, family, and close friends, I have finally begun to appreciate the stories of the exodus. Though I am by no means comparing my own travels to that of the Israelites (or any more modern story of oppression and slavery), my own travels have deeply influenced my personal and professional life within the context of student affairs.

The Passover story begins with an abandoned child, a reed-woven basket, and kicks into high gear through the crucible of a burning bush. My story begins with parents who love me, a Subaru station wagon, and a last minute phone call from the Director of Chapter Services of my national fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi.

Going to college and then into student affairs was certainly no forty year tale of woe, but it definitely had a huge impact on me. It began an adventure one that spanned almost ten years of self-exploration and a pursuit for a place to call a home of my own.

I came to college with little experience dealing with other people, crippling social anxiety, and little interest in involving myself with others. My fraternity experience bonded me to others in ways I had never expected. Friends, faculty, and staff worked to help me as student body president, risk management chair, alumni relations chair, social chair, and the funding board chair of student government. Moreover, it gave me a sense of purpose that I had never felt before.

It also allowed me opportunities to socialize in ways I never had before. For better or worse...

Though terrified, you could not keep me from volunteering to help out in some way shape or form.

And though I was not a slave building a pyramid, I had become hooked. Though I did not know it at the time, I had majored in student affairs and had bought into the college hook, line, and sinker.

But that did not stop me from nearly dropping out. I had many difficult times and did some not so wonderful things. In fact, sophomore year I nearly dropped out of school altogether. But it was those very same mentors and my fraternity brothers who brought me back from the abyss and helped me address some very difficult questions and behaviors in my own life. Where the Israelites faced oppression from others, I had become my own worst enemy.

Not only did I almost not graduate, but I nearly failed to land any job whatsoever. But two of my mentors came to me and compelled me to begin my own journey into the promise land of higher education and student affairs.

In mid-April, I received the call from my soon to be boss. Would I like to be a consultant for the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity? Absolutely. I packed my station wagon, dropped off my goods in storage, and never looked back.

And here begins the story of how Passover truly relates to my future career as a student affairs professional.

I wholeheartedly accepted the offer. Though I was never enslaved nor did I spend forty years in the desert, I did undergo a radical transformation from who I was even in my undergraduate career.

Though the traditional story of Passover emphasizes the impeding attack by Egyptian soldiers (and the famous scene of Charlton Heston parting the red sea), some Hebraic scholars have emphasized that the rapid Israelite flight from Egypt was also in part a reaction to God’s perspective that they were nearly too awash in sins themselves to be worth the holy land. Therefore, some interpretations of the Talmud argue, the Israelites were also running from themselves.

It is the internal chaos and redemption interpretation that so resonates with me. I spent two years traveling to fifty two chapters. I have travelled as far to the North East as Binghamton and Oneonta, New York, I have traveled down the east coast through New Jersey and Washington DC, I have gone north to Minnesota/St Paul, and south to Louisiana State, University of Alabama and Georgia. I have also had my own homecoming of sorts by going west to the University of Arizona, through to UCLA in Los Angeles, and North again by way of the Pacific Coast Highway to the University of Washington.

And the entire time, I was learning to unlearn who I was and meet chapters where they were at while emphasizing what I thought were the essentials of fraternity management taught to me by experience and formal curriculum.

In the subsequent four years of my life (including my two with my fraternity and two as a graduate student), I have fallen in love, fallen out of love, fallen in and out of love all over again again, fought, made up, cried, laughed, reveled and felt utterly dejected, lost, found, inspired and confused.

I have had to re-learn many of the essential lessons from my undergraduate life at the same time that I accepted the awkward realization that I felt more at home in my car than I did anywhere else.

And therein brings me back to the story of Passover an why it has become so important to me as a student affairs professional.

Unlike the Israelites of old, there is no burning bush to compel a person to take up student affairs. There is only a process of self-discovery, self-care, guidance, mentorship, teaching, and learning that occurs that brings us to a field that is so instrumental in the development of others.

But as a student affairs professional, I had to travel through my own desert to find out how to be the best person and best professional I could be. I had to acknowledge my past sins, learn to get back on my feet, and learn to care for myself and others so I could make it through my struggles as a consultant and in graduate school.

So this year for Passover, I want to suggest some alternative meanings to the normal Seder plate for my fellow Jewish practitioners as well as anyone who cares to join us in the next week of retellings.

These suggestions are non-denominational, do not require a faith in God, nor are they meant to replace the meanings for those who are actively practicing.

The Stories Of Seder – Seder is a retelling of the exodus of the Israelites. As student affairs practitioners, we all have our own stories and perspectives on practice and theory. Embrace it. Accept your own exodus for good and bad and everything in between. It remains a cornerstone of who we are as practitioners in terms of how we approach conversations and what our strengths and weaknesses are.

Maror & Chazaret – Two bitter herbs symbolizing the harshness of slavery can now be embraced as the harshness that accompanies any major life change. Graduate school and professional life is tough, but by acknowledging the difficulties honestly, we can appreciate the joys of the job all the more.

Charoset – A sweet, apple/walnut combination that represented the mortar the Israelites used to build storehouses in Egypt can also represent the people we rely upon to help support our own efforts and the students who we work with, as well as the programs, theories, and resources we rely upon to help bring a cohesive, intentional, and transformational experience in many different ways in higher education.

Karpas – A bland vegetable, usually parsley, dipped in salt water to symbolize the tears of the Israelites as they fled slavery in Egypt. However, as any graduate student in higher education knows, this symbolism remains very appropriate. No transformation is easy. Student affairs is a field of long hours, busy schedules, low pay, and cyclical that requires us to repeat our efforts time and time again. Like my own story, entering the field can also have a personal cost as well. For my seder, I must come to embrace the tears as a part of my experience and recognize the stresses that have occurred in my life. Stoicism gets me only so far but crying is not a sign of weakness.

Beitzah - A hard boiled egg representing the sacrifices made in the first and second temples once the Israelites made it to the promised land. The egg in the Student Affairs Seder also represents a different type of sacrifice. For the long hours of work and the often times impromptu meals that professionals eat, it is a reflection upon the sacrifices and cycles of student affairs work.

Zeroa – A lamb or goat bone represents the sacrifices the Israelites made and the lamb blood put on the doors of Israelite families in Egypt to avoid having their first born killed during the plagues in Egypt. Though the Torah is often pretty bloodthirsty, I have definitely struggled with this portion of the Passover story. However, in the Student Affairs Seder, the Zeroa can indicate a need to ask for help. No one knows what is going on insider your head. In my life, I have often internalized my stress and sense of being overwhelmed which has led to outbursts that are neither productive nor healthy for me or others. This Passover, I will reflect upon the need to indicate when and how I need help so that I can be a better colleague, teacher, student, and person overall.

Finally, there is the Afikomen. In my last semester of graduate school, I am particularly struck by my scramble to obtain my degree, however the Afikomen can mean many things to many people. The Afikomen is originally split in half at the beginning of the Seder ceremony and reflects the fact that the Israelites did not have time to wait for bread to leaven while they fled Egypt. The first half of the matzo is passed around to be consumed during the opening prayers. The second half is saved for dessert and is pursued by the children. It is either consumed alone or with small parcels of other symbolic food to represent the sacrifices made in the first and second temples of Jerusalem so that the last taste in your mouth is that of the matzo that sustained the Israelites in the desert. While I took joy in pursuing it as a child, I now reflect on the humility that accompanies the plainness of the meal. While I thrive on positive affirmation, the Afikomen has for me become a symbol of my recognition that I do not do this work for personal or professional glory. I am a student affairs scholar and practitioner because I genuinely believe in the work that I do and my ability to effectively promote the best that college has to offer. Regardless of whether we are rewarded or not, student affairs is about working with and for others.

Last year, I explored Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a means of personal atonement and re-commitment to being better. In the intervening time period, I still struggled and felt increasingly isolated from friends, family, and ultimately my partner who whom I split. So this year, rather than let another holiday pass without mention, I wanted to take the time to seriously reflect upon my heritage and its role in my life.

I may not be lost in a desert, but my own personal exodus has played a significant role in who I am and what kind of a practitioner I want to be. Life is hard, but it does not have to be lived alone. Moreover, no one is ever truly alone it just takes a fine appreciation for what we do have a good amount of self-care and vulnerability to ask for the help that we all need.

To me, Seder is an excellent opportunity for all student affairs professionals (regardless of race, class, or creed)  to reflect on their personal journey and the network of people and places that helped us get to where we are at.

Seder is also an excellent holiday to remind us to be authentic with ourselves and others. There is no shame or weakness in seeking help when times are tough. But to ask for help, we need to know who we are and what we need.

I just want to conclude with one last parting thought – for all of the stresses, frustrations, and roadblocks, and struggles that exist in the world and in higher education, we should always take the time to appreciate the little things in life.

Now more than ever, we each need our own personal afikomen to scramble for.