Same Destination, Different Planes: Why Theory and Assessment Matter

As a professional at an institution of higher education, I want the students I work with to be successful, graduate, and find their own strengths as productive and active members of their communities.

My conversations however, have revolved around the details of how we get there. That is why theory and assessment are important. Without it, we're just stumbling in the dark and talking at odds. Let me illustrate with a travel example.

Lately, I find myself traveling again in ways that make me a happy camper. California, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Florida all within two and a half months. I've flown (or in one case failed to fly) on American, Southwest, Delta, and Allegiant Airways.

I've been on large trans continental aircraft ten seats across and small regional jets three seats across and ten rows back. Some were new, some were older retrofits. Then I ran into an article about how United Airlines is purchasing new jets while Delta is retrofitting its fleet.

Delta, as one of the larger international carriers, has come to rely upon a series of regional carriers and fewer mid sized hubs to get passengers to their destinations. Upfront cost, Delta argued, could be mitigated by deferred maintenance and owning their own oil refinery.

Southwest, like United, is also modernizing their fleets of Boeing 737s, opting to improve maintenance by standardizing their fleet making bulk purchases of new aircraft and parts as a way to make their employees more efficient with cheaper parts. Unlike the other airlines though, this once "low cost" airline is actually providing MORE services (like a free checked bag) and expanding strategically their destinations.

American is not pursuing a major purchasing strategy for aircraft but has opted to merge with third largest carrier US Airways. They have also outsourced their maintenance facilities in order to cut costs on payroll.

And if you have ever flown Allegiant Airlines, you pay for EVERYTHING. While their tickets are cheap, their operation costs are passed directly to the consumer.

All of this is to say that each airline is primarily interested in one overriding goal, profit. How they get there differs both technologically and philosophically, but they are all striving for the same goal.

Who says which one is better than the other than the other? Well that depends on who you ask. The stock market certainly has some say. Others would argue that passenger satisfaction surveys are another major indicator. Ability to contribute to their local communities is probably another great indicator. It really depends on how much value you assign to a particular variable and outcome.

While we sometimes quibble that success is a subjective term or intangible, we need to hold ourselves to higher standards. This is why I am coming back to theory and assessment. We need to be intentional in our designs. If we do not establish firm and concrete outcomes for our programs and our offices while holding ourselves accountable through useful/timely measurements we are far more likely to end up like the failed airline industries of the past - bankrupt or burning. Theory informs us of what types of strategies we wish to pursue and assessment tells us whether our strategies are working.

"Because I think so" may be ok for a blog post, but the students, the challenges, and higher education as a whole needs better.

If we want to change the world, we need to design grand plans and measure the small steps. How else will we know if we're getting "there?"

Productive Healthy Gender Conversations and Bystander Intervention Tactics

Please pardon the excessive title. I am afraid it is the byproduct of far too many excellent academic conferences attended.

I also want to preface this blog entry as a foundational inquiry into the challenges of violence and hazing prevention. There is a great deal of research being conducted in a variety of fields that hold great promise for the practice of higher education and student affairs. I will cite as much as I can, but some of my questions, suppositions, and assumptions are based on either anecdotal experience or extensions of other arguments that while might not hold muster in front of a PhD dissertation committee, I feel have significant value added components to be considered.

This blog entry is all about not moving to throw the baby out with the proverbial bath water. It is my claim that bystander training has given us tools that students don't want to use, while traditional conversations around power, privilege, and healthy gender roles has given us the how with no tools to implement change.

Rather than go to the extremes of either type of conversation, I think we can see some very significant gains in sexual assault and hazing prevention by "threading the needle" of these two types of education through an intentional and approachable pedagogy.

The Power of Bystanders

"When you see bad behavior, say something."

"Real leaders aren't silent."

"Live your Ritual and uphold your Oath."

These are common statements made when I have talked with professionals as they have started their conversations around what is a bystander. As far as ice breakers go, they aren't bad. They tend to be pro-social, positive, and they don't assume that the audience is a perpetrator of the particular kind of violence or "bad act" that the presenter is trying to prevent.

Bystander education, as a practice and a theory, when done in isolation to challenge both sexual assault and hazing faces significant hurdles and here is why.

WHEN a person feels responsible to intervene and IF a person recognizes a behavior as a problem, and a person knows HOW to intervene, bystander intervention trainings have shown to be one of the few strategies that has consistently pushed the needle in the positive direction of safe, respectful, and healthy communities.

There is some very positive research coming out of the public health and social work fields that show if those assumptions are met, institutions of higher education (and society at large) has become very good at talking about the HOW of interventions. Yet we've been asking why people differ responsibility or ignore it since the 1970s when the term bystander first entered our collective conscious.

In one study of male advocates of sexual assault prevention (Casey & Ohler, 2012), a disturbingly high number of participants responded that they struggle to intervene when they see dangerous behaviors because they feel like they would be punished by the men and women in their social circles for a "wrong intervention."

In my own personal experiences working on a number of college campuses with fraternity chapters, I see similar fears with the individual men I work with. Peer attitudes have a significant impact on an individual's own perceptions of right and wrong.

One student I worked with put the common fear succinctly to me during a one on one conversation. "I watched one of my brothers being led back to his room by a [potential hookup] even though he was clearly too drunk to be making any decisions. I looked around and I saw my brothers cheering him on. I guess I thought that was what I was supposed to be doing too."

Peer attitudes don't just influence our perceptions about consent and sexual assault prevention, they also have a high correlation with drinking behaviors, hazing, and its more pervasive variant, bullying. More recently, we are seeing a higher amount of scrutiny being paid towards bullying and bystander education in elementary and middle schools (see the Men of Strength Clubs sponsored by Men Can Stop Rape). Perhaps one of the most striking examples of such bullying involved a group of children ganging up on an older bus monitor, making her cry. Meanwhile, the other children film the bullying on their phones and post it online! There are plethora of other examples, but it highlights a growing trend of high tolerance for aggressive behaviors earlier and earlier in childhood.

So here is the problem, if we don't identify certain behaviors as problems, then the likelihood of a student intervening (even if they felt both comfortable and knowledgeable) goes down significantly. I've seen this first hand when working closely with six different chapters and 19 different men over two semesters. Given, this was not an IRB approved program study, but the anecdotal evidence was striking the pre/post test questionnaire. Overwhelmingly, all of the chapters and participants showed marked increases in knowledge about harmful behaviors and talked about the need to work with other chapters about dealing with problems in their chapters. However, only TWO of the chapters (both colonies) talked about the need to address issues of sexual assault prevention and hazing within their own chapters.

Why is this?

My hypothesis is that two significant forces are at work within the undergraduate fraternal experience that overrides voluntary oaths, rituals, and founding values.

The first force is what various scholars have argued underpins a vast array of experiences around masculinity. "Don't snitch."

"Bros before hoes"

"Man up."

"Real men don't run from their problems."

"Real brotherhood means always having your brother's back."

It is a rule that permeates masculine cultures from grade school on. We see it formalized in the oaths undergraduates take when they join their fraternities. We see it when the military talks about "unit cohesion." We see it in police forces through the so called "thin blue line." We saw it clearly in the backlash against Jonathan Martin of the Miami Dolphins, David Byrd of the Buffalo Bills, and Dez Bryant of the Dallas Cowboys. While these organizations are not the only ones who condone hazing, we do see a preponderance of hazing rituals occur in so-called "masculine" activities.

Which brings me to my second point.

Many students come in with some form of tolerance, understanding, appreciation, or support of hazing or hazing-like behaviors. Cornell University summarizes many of the components that lead to hazing tolerances including group think, perceptions of masculinity, shared coping, "symbolic interactionism" and rites of passage.

Whether these tolerances stem from a need for ritual, presence of psychopathic tendencies, or a strong desire to be accepted, hazing is becoming a significant experience for students not just in college but High School as well.

The problem is these tolerances increase the threshold in which a given student would determine whether to intervene in stopping harmful behavior. There are several responses to this barrier (threats of liability, conversations around values, or personal leadership philosophies) but their effectiveness may be similarly limited due to the developmental stages of the audience (King and Kitchener, 1994), biological stimuli that overemphasizes success versus the fear of consequences (Steinberg, 2008), or poor facilitation environments.

Without a doubt, training students to identify and stop harmful behaviors is one of the most intuitive and well documented means of achieving success in preventing hazing and interpersonal violence. Dr. Gentry McCreary has written more eloquently than I in this area and has many great insights on the theory and practice of how bystander intervention strategies can get us closer to interrupting harmful behaviors such as hazing.

The question in my mind is no longer HOW but WHY ought students intervene in situations where violence (in its many forms) occurs. This is where we have to look more systemically at the motivations behind interpersonal violence and be able to help students process their own moral decision making mechanisms. Many of the students said they would intervene if they saw physical violence occur and have high confidence in their ability to intervene, but violence is so much more. Not to mention effective bystander interventions are significantly more complex when you want to de-escalate violent situations.

This hold true especially when we are looking at intimate partner violence (dating violence or sexual assault) or hazing. Both have significant underlying motivations that in my mind are deeply embedded in our perceptions of gender.

Reframing the Gender Conversation

Inclusive-ness isn't a buzzword. It isn't a box we check off. It isn't something we can say "been there done that." Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) have already demonstrated that members of fraternities and sororities are significantly less able to engage in awareness of and experience difference in their collegiate days. There are further studies showing significant income as a major component of the fraternity and sorority experience . Men and women who identify outside of the strict confines of heterosexual norms face routine discrimination. Even at places like the University of Alabama, race can still be a major stumbling block for potential new members in some organizations.

As our campuses and our society becomes more inclusive, we are seeing more Trans* individuals who are seeking membership in organizations across the United States. Regardless of your own campus or organization's policies, we at the very least must be capable of having informed, compassionate, and productive conversations with all people about these issues.

Enter my passion for enhancing our conversations around gender. Like race and ethnicity, gender is a formative binary in which we literally code every interaction from before a person is even born.

We demand to know a child's sex so we can buy them blue things or pink things. Boys get action figures, girls get dolls. Boys play sports, girls play princess or house. We directly tell young boys how handsome they are, while parents of little girls are told that their daughters are "pretty or precious." Boys must become men while every girl will always be "daddy's little girl." Boys must Man Up and Don't Cry while girls must be protected at all costs.

Social gender codes only become more complex and more rigid. We train boys to be independent automatons while we have deprived girls of agency and power in their own lives.

We also enforce these codes through social and personal attitudes that reward unhealthy behaviors. This is especially true in fraternities and sororities where group think generally tends to lead towards some particularly bad behavior but then celebrated in movies (like old school and the upcoming Neighbors). In fact, the founder of Snapchat emailed a friend saying that he and his friends were "certified bros" because their fraternity had just been kicked off campus.

So here are a few challenges that come from this socialization:

-Biological sex and gender identity are not the same thing. Neither exist on a binary.
-The current structures reinforce binary notions through self-selection and give preference to white, wealthy notions of privilege and power.
-Gender performance is a choice and one that can manifest in many different forms.
-Previous efforts when talking about gender have gotten bogged down into the "men are from mars, women are from venus" track which tends to essentialize and problematize masculine and feminine experiences without providing effective tools to challenge problematic behaviors.

So let me start with the elephant in the room. I do not think that talking about masculinities and feminities ALONE will solve our problems. Far from it, I fear that reinforces systems of power and privilege. So often we talk about "hypermasculinity" as one monolithic enterprise. Jackson Katz of "Tough Guise" discusses hypermasculinity in terms of excess - violence, stoicism, silence, excersize, drinking, sex, etc. It is true that hypermasculinity is both present and very much a problem in acts of hazing, but it isn't the only lived experience out there. In various cultures, there are MANY definitions of masculinity, each archetype complete with overlapping and competing demands simultaneously. The dandy, the thug, the billionaire, the factory worker, the metrosexual, the bro, the nerd, the cowboy, the father, or the playboy. These are just SOME of the archetypes that serve to confine and define modern masculinity. The picture becomes increasingly complicated as you look at the intersection of race and sexual orientation (Guardia & Evans, 2010; Liu, 2010; Harper, 2010)

I also think that, relatively speaking, starting a conversation around gender in college is almost too late. The most promising work in anti-bullying work involving critical conversations on healthy masculinity is being shown in high schools and elementary schools involving mentors, families, and friends. In fact, fraternities and sororities offer some great developmental opportunities both personally and academically even in their first year of membership (Martin, Hevel, Asel, & Pascarella, 2011).

But I think we short change ourselves and our students if we think that student's development as men and women stop when they get in college and we sure as heck know that many develop stronger senses of their own sexuality and gender expression on spectrums as they find new safe spaces. In fact, from my own observations, college as a whole (and fraternity and sorority involvement in particular) is a time when students attitudes and behaviors are significantly shaped by the social environment around them (F&S Advising, CAS Standards).

Students may not understand or find immediate appreciation for terms like "hegemonic masculinities," "patriarchy," "internalized oppression," or "gender role conflict" but they live it none the less.

They live it every time a sorority woman can be either a slut or a frigid bitch / tease. They live it when the term "don't be a pussy" or "no homo" is used to inoculate the speaker or attack the recipient. They live it when no one is surprised that more judicial cases involve men (Harper, Harris, Mmeje, 2010). They live it every time they feel the need to drink to be social or an angry sorority woman sends a regrettable email that becomes an internet sensation over night.

The impact of gender norms and gender conflict reverberates throughout our practices whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Though I would like to think that statistics alone is enough to motivate students to change student behavior, but unlike smoking, STI testing, or seatbelts, gender norms are being set up and reinforced early, often, and with regrettably tragic consequences. The problem is that gender conflict has been normalized: in media, in personal interactions, in systems of power and privilege. Where the so-called "war on men"is commonly accepted, we buy into standard practices because we THINK THAT'S WHAT EVERYONE ELSE buys into.

Let me give you an anecdotal example of the mutual buy in. During my first ever Risk Management College sponsored by the Fraternal Executives Association, I vividly remember Dave Westol giving his "Too Late To Apologize" speech about hazing. It resonated and it shocked me. I remember turning to a group of sorority consultants and seeing them nod sagely along to the discussion around alcohol use.

Why, I asked?

"Our women would never go to a predominantly dry chapter" one of the consultants said. It just wasn't done for social events.

I reminded them that they've been talking all afternoon about how few women actually liked being in fraternity chapter houses for prolonged periods of time.

"They certainly wouldn't go alone and I would always encourage them to make sure no one got left behind!" The consultant replied. That was just the way it was she reminded me. I've seen men make the same arguments against their own brothers who tried to promote non-alcoholic mixers.

This story was echoed by my experience two years later at the University of Iowa. One graduate student remarked during a parent orientation that fraternity houses were the safest place to go when drunk. He assured the parents that fraternity men look after others. The parents, so I was told, laughed in his face. Few believed that platitude.

I've seen it during my two years as a consultant. Many fraternity men from chapters large and small at a variety of institutions. In my one on one meetings with the brothers, many complained about the expense of alcohol, the drop out rates of potential new members and older brothers, the fear of rejection, the drug use. I've even had a few brothers break down and cry in frustration at it all. One enterprising chapter president in collaboration with several alumni and the fraternity and sorority life office request a voluntary membership review.

But more often than not, when I try to repeat these conversations with the whole chapter, I get the same blank look. Not. Our. Problem, their silence screamed at me. Not in our chapter at any rate.

So let us re-frame the conversation. Rather than blaming men for being masculine, what if we adopted the public health model and talked about healthy and unhealthy behaviors? This is why I am a firm believer in re-framing this debate as promoting healthy gender norms. It allows you to continue to pinpoint harmful and violent behaviors, avoid blaming the actor, and empower individual students to feel responsible for making a change.

Conclusion

In the example I gave above, speaking out is definitely the way to make change. In the case of the one chapter officer, he went to extraordinary lengths to help correct his chapter, blatantly making himself VERY unpopular.

The problem, as I stated above, is that even men who see themselves as advocates for change, report a strong deference to popular opinion. The brotherhood, and loyalty therein, becomes a major stumbling block in speaking out against unhealthy behaviors (Carlson, 2008).

Bystander interventions give us an excellent tool for stopping violence, but I have bigger dreams. By negating social change, I would argue that we leave in systems of power and privilege that demand future violence for their enforcement mechanisms. We are saying that "boys will always be boys" and that women will always be required walk two competing ideals of the sinner and the saint that left an entire senior class telling me that they don't think that a) men cared about consent or that b) they didn't have the power to give consent.

I am distinctly uncomfortable with those two options. Especially because without a broader conversation around gender identity we continue to reify the very mentalities that promote violence against anyone who is outside of their respective boxes be it through their sexual orientation or gender identity.

But the gender conversation goes beyond just sexual assault prevention, it deals with hazing too. If hazing is about a rite of passage or ritual, then gender informs our rhetoric around what it means to be an adult and we can facilitate the intellectual and moral development of the students through intentional conversation.

If hazing is purely about using and abusing power, then we not only interrupt but subvert the very system that tells us that "real men" need power and women ought not have direct control over others.

In regards to sexual assault prevention, I believe we are at a crucible moment where the various title ix investigations and public outcry has brought unprecedented levels of attention to what has for too long been a hidden crime. Thanks to the work feminist groups and allies around the country and abroad, we are finally having a public conversation. Where we know that most perpetrators tend to be men, very few men are themselves rapists. Rather than reinforce notions of fear and entrapment that has categorized various backlashes against sexual assault responses, we are now in a position to promote respect, equity, agency, and communication as primary means of a pro-social advocacy of consent.

In turn, we can minimize the consequences of trying to "fit within the gender box" while simultaneously raising awareness of how individuals respond to implicit and explicit pressures to be a "real man" or be a "real woman."

Healthy gender expressions, not hyper gender expressions, is my rallying cry. It is a nuance to be sure, but an important one in my mind. It is based on the principle of universal design. Rather than "accommodating" 100 different identities, we foster environments where by students become comfortable with their own identity because it no longer needs to be proven at another's expense.

That means learning a new language, one that is inclusive, diverse, welcoming, and all encompassing. It doesn't require "correcting" the deficiencies of a given gender but allows individuals to find their own strengths regardless of whether society deems it "masculine" or "feminine."

But don't get me wrong, this isn't a post racial, post gender kind of argument. This is a recognition of Audra Lorde's famous quote: "It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." Even within our own selves versus what we think society (and our friends specifically) think we should be.

If bystander interventions bring us closer to interrupting poor behavior and acts as a well crafted arrow, then gender becomes a lightweight composite bow capable of being handled expertly by many. Intersectionality would then be the fundamental, high strength bowstring that allows us to project the arrow not just into our immediate target to to send it far, true, and target issues we haven't even talked about yet.

I would agree that past efforts have not yielded the results I would have liked, but much of our understanding of the nuances of gender did not really come about until the feminist intellectual movements in the 60s and 70s. Most of the contemporary literature on masculinities in particular wasn't authored until the late 1990s. Even now the people I have talked to have predominantly been working around measuring men and women through their biological sex. Gender roles are changing, that is for sure. What we need is not to give up on the gender conversation, but refine it; develop better instruments so we can better understand our impacts and as a result refine our ongoing conversations around how gender enforcement contributes to the verbal, physical and emotional violence not just on our selves but against those around us as well.

I dream of a world where violence is not the norm. Call me weird, but I think we have the potential to help shape and develop that world in college, in high schools, and elsewhere. But only if we are intentional, research based, and use effective assessment to make sure our implementation of programs are relevant and appropriate to our individual campuses.

Different students have different needs. No one stich, response, target, or approach will work for everyone. But I believe talking about gender roles gives us a power value added component and will help engage our chapters in preventing hazing and interpersonal violence going forward. We're just in the process of learning more complex and nuanced approaches.

Citations:

Casey, E. A., & Ohler, K. (2012). Being a Positive Bystander: Male Antiviolence Allies' Experiences of "Stepping Up". Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 27(1), 62-83.

Carlson, M. (2008). I'd rather go along and be considered a man: Masculinity and bystander intervention.Journal of Men's Studies, 16(1), 3 - 17. doi: 10.3149/jms.1601.3

Guardia, J. R., & Evans, N. J. (2010). Factors influencing the ethnic identity development of latino fraternity members at a hispanic serving institution. In S. R. Harper & F. Harris (Eds.), College men and masculinities: Theory, research, and implications for practice (pp. 391 - 414). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Harper, S. (2010). Peer support for african american male college achievement: Beyond internalized racism and the burden of "acting white". In S. R. Harper & F. Harris (Eds.), College men and masculinities: Theory, research, and implications for practice (pp. 434 - 456). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Harper, S., Harris, F., & Mmeje, K.C. (2010). A theoretical model to explain the overrepresentation of college men admong campus judicial offenders: Implications for campus administrators. In. S. R. 

Harper & F. Harris (Eds.), College men and masculinities: Theory, research, and implications for practice (pp. 221 - 238). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.


Langford, L. (2008). Preventing violence and promoting safety in higher education settings: Overview of a comprehensive approach


King, P. & Kitchener, K. S. (1994). Developing reflective judgement: Understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.


Martin, G. L., Hevel, M. S., Asel, A. M., & Pascarella, E. T. (2011). New evidence on the effects of fraternity and sorority affiliation during the first year of college. Journal of College Student Development, 52(5), 543 - 559. doi: 10.1353/csd.2011.0062


Pascarella, E. T., & Terenzini, P. T. (2005) How college affects students: A third decade of research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Steinberg, L. (March, 2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. National Institute of Health, 28(1): 78-106. doi: 10.1016/j.dr.2007.08.002 http://www.acui.org/publications/bulletin/article.aspx?issue=22642&id=12585fff

Liu, W. M. (2010). Exploring the lives of asian american men: Racial identity, male role norms, gender role conflict, and prejudicial attitudes. In S. R. Harper & F. Harris (Eds.), College men and masculinities: Theory, research, and implications for practice (pp. 415 - 433). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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.

Potent Imagery and Symbolism for 100 Please

"Great evil does not require great words to be vanquished, rather it requires everyday people doing regular acts of love and kindness." So said Gandalf, one of the greatest wizards ever to grace the silver screen. Which got me thinking, in both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, mountains are a nearly insurmountable destination, hobbits as heroes, sunlight as the harbringer of good, and a ring that corrupts whoever uses it to remain invisible.

For those of you who are ardent J.R.R. Tolkien fans or literature scholars, I'm sure these symbols came as no surprise to you. In Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro's "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" the symbolism comes particularly fast and furious.

But as I left the midnight screening (why yes, I am a nerd and will make no apologies for it) of The Hobbit, it made me think about the symbolism in my own life. After two years travelling as a consultant for my fraternity, and going on my final semester of graduate school, surely there were lessons that I could reflect upon and apply right?

There are, and in hindsight, they were both simple but fundamental to who I want to be as a person that I kick myself for not internalizing them earlier.

1) Inaction Corrupts - Like the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, it is very tempting to want to withdraw, hide from the world, and live life observing from the shadows. Like Gollum, I was very content to live fixated on the immediate (such as my video games and other electronics) rather than embrace hard choices and difficulties. At its height, my fears became so bad that I would literally avoid checking email, voice mail, or even leaving the house for fear of being required to do something. Maybe this is why bystander intervention training resonates so deeply with me. I understand the temptations and initial gains of avoidance. At the end of the day, whether we are talking personally, professionally, or systematically, inaction only leads to more problems than the initial impulse to hide.

I will admit, life has been (relatively) difficult of late, but that is no excuse to be mean, withdraw, or otherwise run from making the most of my time.

2) Active agency and control is important to me - When I say control, I don't mean micro-managing but rather influence, engagement, and self-authorship.

It is why I like driving so much. Why I would rather give up a week of my time to drive across country to see family rather than board a plane and be where I would like to be within hours.

It made me reflect more specifically about what made me happiest when I was a travelling consultant. Specifically, many people wondered how I could stand the long distances between chapters. I realized that like Tolkien's mountains, the road became a symbol of my own agency.

I always had a starting point and there was always a required ending point, but how I got there was up to me. It was my foot on the pedal, my music on the radio, my hands on the wheel. But most importantly, there were no expectations while I was on the road. I could just as easily be dressed in a suit as gym shorts and a ratty t-shirt. I could be singing (terribly) to bad pop music or jumping from point to point thinking about a presentation I had to give.

Most importantly, I could be present and embrace the small quirks. I might not be changing the world driving around (in fact, you could argue I am just contributing to climate change, but that is an ethical question for another time), but I could work on changing myself.

And if we can't help ourselves, then we cannot help others.