This is an entry that really only applies to my brothers in Sigma Pi Fraternity and, more specifically, those members who have graduated and gone on to become alumni volunteers for the Fraternity. In this piece, I provide my two golden rules of alumni volunteering as well as some thoughts around each of those rules. The ideas below are not just applicable to Sigma Pi Fraternity, they are also applicable to any organization where there is a mentor/mentee relationship between individuals or groups.

This is my current group of undergraduates at Monmouth and they’re awesome!

In May 2003, I graduated from Monmouth University (MU) and became an officially recognized alumni member of Sigma Pi Fraternity (the Fraternity). Like most brand new alumni, I didn’t have much thought about involvement in the Fraternity’s actions after my graduation. I knew that I wanted to attend the upcoming leadership training school because it was being held in Vincennes, Indiana – the birthplace of the Fraternity. Other than that half-week trip, though, I had no plans to be involved in Sigma Pi in any future way.

During that visit to the leadership school, I talked with the Executive Director of the national organization and he encouraged me to immediately become my chapter’s local advisor, a position known as the Chapter Director. Back at MU, our Chapter Director was also our Faculty Advisor and he had held both positions since our colony was founded back in 1989. And while our Chapter Director was a phenomenal Faculty Advisor (he would go on to win Sigma Pi’s first-ever Dr. Robert Burns Most Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award and numerous #1 Faculty Advisor Awards on MU’s campus), he never played the role of Chapter Director. After a brief conversation with the Faculty Advisor and at the encouragement of the Executive Director along with the support of the undergraduates (especially the President of the Chapter), I became my local chapter’s new Chapter Director in August 2003.

The August 2003 decision to become an alumni volunteer for the Fraternity has lasted until the present-day and, God-willing, well into the future. Among other volunteer positions for the Fraternity, I’ve served as a Chapter Director at two different campuses (MU and, for a short while, I held the position at William Paterson University), an advisor to my chapter’s alumni club, the Province Archon for New Jersey, a Trustee for the Sigma Pi Educational Foundation, the Treasurer of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, and – perhaps most importantly – as a mentor for graduating seniors and young alumni from my chapter. Last February, I was asked to take the various experiences that I’ve gathered as an alumni volunteer and provide a half-day training on alumni volunteering at the Fraternity’s Mid-Year Leadership Conference in St. Louis, Missouri (an invitation which was extended again this year and which I’ve accepted again). I immediately agreed and then began combing through my various experiences, perspectives, and training materials to build the best program that I could for my fellow volunteers from around the nation.

Through that process, I discovered that I’ve operated off of two golden rules during my time as alumni volunteer. Those two rules are:

     1. It isn’t about YOU.

     2. It’s NOT story time.

The first rule that a good alumni volunteer needs to understand is that his position is not about him, his feelings, his wants, or his desires. At its core, this perspective may be counterintuitive to what alumni volunteers believe when they agree to take the position. Most alumni volunteers want to remain involved with the Fraternity because they remember the good times and great relationships that they built as undergraduates. Others want to stay involved because they believe that they can help the chapter improve upon its programs that were operated when he was an undergraduate. The majority of an alumnus’ good, happy experiences with the Fraternity are generated from people and events where they, individually, could be the focus.

That cannot be the case when you are an alumni volunteer. When you agree to become an alumni volunteer, you are agreeing that the focus of your fraternal actions will no longer be about you.

Instead, the focus of your fraternal actions as an alumni volunteer must always be about the undergraduates. Your role – your purpose – is no longer to view the issues that created your love of the Fraternity from a perspective of personal gain or even one of personal involvement. As an alumni volunteer, you have to ensure that those connections are made available and strengthened for the benefit of future generations. This is often a hard pill for new alumni volunteers to swallow, yet adhering to a perspective of providing the most good to the undergraduates is the best way to ensure that you are acting truly as an alumni volunteer and not as someone who wants to hang around campus to exert some personally-identified influence on or even control over the chapter.

The second rule is that being an alumni volunteer is not story time. Again, this is a bitter pill for many alumni volunteers to swallow. At the core of this rule is the interactions that you have as a volunteer with your undergraduates. This can be something as simple as an undergraduate asking, “Hey, what should I do about Bob? He hasn’t paid his dues and he won’t return my text messages.” The incorrect answer would start off this way: “Well, when I was the chapter’s Treasurer…” or, “When I was an undergraduate we used to…”

What happened in that response? Not only does the alumni volunteer attempt to “answer” the question by providing a story, but they immediately make their interaction with the undergraduate about themselves and their experiences versus the undergraduate and his current experience. The undergraduate did NOT ask the alumni volunteer about what he did when he was in charge – he asked what he, as the current chapter leader, should do to resolve this situation. The proper response from the alumni volunteer would include different options that are available to the undergraduate given the structure of the national organization and the rules of the local chapter. If an example is a best way to answer the question, then the alumni volunteer might consider providing an example of how another chapter handles this problem – if he is aware of any examples.

There is an important point in the last sentence of the previous paragraph – that is, the alumni volunteer exists to provide answers and guidance. The alumni volunteer doesn’t exist to tell stories about his glory days. The most immediate and lasting way to become irrelevant to an undergraduate is to answer their questions by telling them your own experiences. Not only do you violate both of the golden rules noted above, but the undergraduates no longer see you as a source of relevant information. Rather, they will begin to see interactions with you as a chore that they have to endure every once in a while.

I’m confident that some alumni volunteers are out there reading this and are aware enough to recognize that they engage in story time when they answer their undergraduates’ questions. Most of those folks will think to themselves, “Well, Joe is full of it. My undergraduates enjoy my stories and it helps them build a better chapter.” To those few with that mindset, let me assure you – your undergraduates don’t enjoy your stories. As a national Fraternity, we bring in such a high caliber of young man that they’re too nice and too reverent of our alumni base that most of them won’t be honest with you and tell you that you’re boring the life out of them. Remember, if you’re advising through telling stories, then you’re already irrelevant to your undergraduates so you shouldn’t expect them to be truthful with you about how much your stories bore them.

If you make the focus of your interactions with the undergraduates about them and you provide answers to their questions, a funny (yet logical) thing may happen: the undergraduates will seek your advice more often. You’ll be viewed as a source of solutions. You’ll become the literal answer to their problems. Becoming that source of solutions, the answer to their problems, is what builds the bond between you and your undergraduates over not just a year or two, but over generations. Your current chapter leaders will tell your newly-elected chapter leaders that they should rely on you for guidance. You’ll receive the type of word-of-mouth recommendations that money can’t buy for an alumni volunteer.

And all it takes is to make the undergraduates the focus of your work as a volunteer.

Earlier this month, I received a great opinion piece entitled, “What’s Right With Fraternities” which talks about the real-world benefits of joining Greek Life. This piece was penned by a recent fraternity alumnus named Ben O’Donnell. Inspired by this young man’s words, I put together an e-mail and forwarded it to a bunch of the fraternity alumni and undergraduates that I know. I re-read my e-mail to them the other day and thought that it would be the perfect entry to add to this blog. So below for your reading pleasure is an e-mail that I sent to my fraternity brothers both young and old talking about what is right with fraternity life. Enjoy.

All,

It is all too often that commentaries are released which take pride in lambasting fraternities. Groups like Sigma Pi are called archaic institutions with no real place in contemporary society. These commentaries are usually written by individuals with a personal agenda against Greek life.

Yet, once in a very long while a positive commentary is released about fraternity life. On Sunday, the Chronicle of Higher Education released a commentary written by a recent graduate of Dartmouth College praising the virtues of fraternities. The entire commentary is forwarded below and I encourage you to read it in its entirety at your leisure. However, I would suggest that the commentary hits on topics relevant to everyone BCC’ed on this e-mail.

On career networking and alumni involvement:

“Such exercises in responsibility foster a better version of the type of career networking that so many universities advertise. Sometimes fraternity graduates will go to work for older alumni. But that preferential hiring does not take place at the same remove as typical alma mater favoritism, in which the employer and employee know little about each other, other than that they both cheer for the same college football team. Rather, working alumni still involved with a fraternity (as corporation president, alumni adviser, or a similar position) witness firsthand the capabilities of undergraduate brothers. To do an important in-house job well while still a student is to prove to established alumni that you probably have what it takes to be a valuable employee.”

On real benefits of fraternity living:

“Fraternities bolster collegiate friendships more than any other social organization I can imagine. Much, if not all, of a brotherhood lives under one roof, and nearly all the day-to-day activities of college life are often shared: Brothers study together, watch TV or shoot pool together, eat together, and hang out doing nothing together. That type of immersion-usually not at the expense of extrafraternal friendships-does create a special type of camaraderie. At my fraternity that is evident from the groups of recently graduated brothers living together in New York and Boston, and from the dozens of alumni who return to visit the house every year-some of whom graduated 50 or more years ago.”

On undergraduate leadership responsibilities:

“Fraternities also demand responsibility in order to keep a house running. Undergraduate fraternity officers keep a house afloat by managing its finances, overseeing building maintenance, and acting as liaisons to university and national fraternity officials. There are other responsibilities too, like monitoring parties, coordinating charity events, and, of course, keeping a watchful eye on the beer supply.”

The ultra-liberalization of many college campuses has forced some of our very own Sigma Pi chapters to constantly play defense against outrageous attacks. I would suggest that now more than ever those of us who believe in the benefits of fraternity life should extol these virtues loud and clear.

The haters will keep on hating…but they should not silence us.

IST,
Joe

P.S. – Feel free to forward this message to others – especially if you are an alumni volunteer and you’d like your undergraduates to hear something positive for a change.

And so as the haters keep on hating, I wanted to send out this message to all of the readers of my blog. Thank you, Ben O’Donnell, for a well-written piece on the benefits of fraternity life. If anyone wants to read the entire opinion piece, you can go the Chronicle of Higher Education and sign up for their website (it’s free, I think) or you can let me know and I’ll see if I can get you a copy via e-mail.

However, there is a lot of rhetoric out in the political sphere right now about the possibility of raising taxes on the very population that President Obama promised not to raise taxes on. Let’s listen to our friends at CNN…

I don’t buy the clarification offered by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. I think that both Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers aren’t skilled in the growing level of doublespeak in this administration. In other words, the further they get from being at President Obama’s side, the more we can expect them to tell us what’s really going on.

It’s scary. President Obama needs to tread lightly on this subject because if he raises taxes – even temporarily – on the middle class, he can kiss the majority in the House and Senate goodbye. Americans don’t like to be lied to. Let’s all hope that President Obama keeps this promise.

My purpose for going to Nashville was to attend the Board meeting of the Sigma Pi Educational Foundation. As I reported on this blog last year, I was elected to the Board of Trustees of my fraternity’s foundation; I’m also the Chairman of our Alumni Communications Committee. Since then I’ve attended a few different meetings and they’ve each been rewarding both personally and fraternally. Plus, we have a bunch of really great (and incredibly smart) guys on our Board of Trustees and hanging out with them is a lot of fun.

For lodging, I spent Wednesday through Saturday nights in the freshmen dorms at Vanderbilt University. I should note – while the Foundation has its Board meetings, the Fraternity itself holds its biennial leadership school on Vanderbilt’s campus. It’s one of the “features” of the leadership school that you live on the campus of the university for the weekend. And I’m all for the whole fraternizing with the different generations of the fraternity thing, but my back and body disagrees. In other words, if I have to go down there again I’m going to have to stay in a hotel!

Before I go on, I should also state that the campus is beautiful. The folks who manage Vanderbilt University have done a wonderful job in making that campus appear in tip-top shape at all times. Definitely a job well done.

Tracy Lawrence – a member of our fraternity – was in attendance at the leadership school. He gave a great speech on overcoming adversity. The undergraduates had some questions for him and I thought that his entire presentation was very well done. For a huge country music star, he’s a down to earth kind of guy.

I’ve been down to Nashville twice before and the downtown scene is always great. It was no different this time. Of course, we generally wound up at Lonnie’s Karaoke Bar in Printer’s Alley, but that’s because we’re a bunch of northerners who are fascinated by that whole scene. On Thursday night I may have had a few drinks which led me to get on the stage and sing Don McLean’s American Pie…but that’s another story.

I enjoy going down to Nashville. I can get a bit hot down there, but the people are really nice and the scene is wonderful. It’s definitely a place I would consider living outside of New Jersey. Anyway, I’m back now!

Without naming the fraternity (because since this is now a national story I’m sure those kids are dealing with enough crap), a Greek chapter based out of the University of Utah did a pretty unintelligent thing last fall. As The Salt Lake Tribune states:

Chapter leadership wanted [the pledges] to do something fun together to build lasting bonds of brotherhood. Instead, according to neighbors, they marched naked across Butler Avenue and up an alley to the Chi Omega sorority, where they serenaded the sisters with loud hoots and taunts.

Neighbors were not amused. Todd Jenson was inside his Butler Avenue home when the sound of hollering drew him out.

“I saw a group of fully nude young men who had surrounded a young woman sorority member who had the unfortunate luck of being outside when they marched,” Jenson says.

Come on, guys. How much alcohol did it take for someone to think that this was a good idea? First of all, does that type of shit really fly out there in the far west? I couldn’t imagine a group of guys sauntering around any college neighborhood in New Jersey in nothing but their bare asses for “fun,” much less to build lasting bonds of brotherhood. Frankly, it sounds like a five minute scene in one of those direct-to-DVD movies more than anything else.

The rest of the article goes on and on with some interesting discussion on how Greek Life is progressing at the University of Utah. You can click the link to read it, but I only wanted to point out this act because it’s so stupid. There are any number of things that a group of pledges or the larger chapter can do to “build brotherhood” (which is really nothing more than bonding with your buddies). Go camping, go fishing, build something, go to the bar, go to an NFL game, go the racetrack (favorite of mine) – basically you can do any of the traditional “guy” things and get a better outcome than hooting and hollering around the neighborhood with your ass hanging out.

As an alumni advisor to my fraternity, whenever I hear about something like this I always wonder what the deal is in terms of the advisors for these groups. Is there a chapter-based advisor who has been out of school for a little bit and thus can provide some perspective? What about a regional volunteer and traveling consultants for the national office? Those are the questions that pop into my mind.

I should point out though, that while this story is annoying I’ve had much worse stories pop into my inbox. Something about this one just rubbed me the wrong way. This fraternity – and the fraternity movement as a whole – has to do better than this…

But for everyone else, this year’s giving season is an exercise in a different sort of asset allocation than the one we’re used to for our retirement accounts. It’s about competing demands, the rising need to pay for basic human services in our communities versus the emotional pull from the educational institutions that helped shape us.

I used this quote from the article to highlight the last sentence regarding how we are shaped by our educational institutions. I hear this line from my undergraduate institution, my graduate institution, and my fraternity time and time again and frankly, it’s insulting. I’m sure that there are some people in the population who go to college as chunks of clay and who are then shaped into whatever artwork their professors can manage, but how prevalent is this type of person in society? I know many more alumni from my undergraduate institution who can’t stand the college than who adore it and thank it for making them who they are today.

In fact, the comment that I hear most often from my fellow alumni is that the school was too expensive to attend and that one or two overbearing professors really left a negative mark on some students. In fact, it gets a little humorous to hear how one or two of the English professors are out of line (and out of the times) with their stance towards educating college students and how their methods are not replicated in the working world at all. Stupid professors…

Plus, what ever happened to the idea of students being their own people and bringing something new to the university? Why is it that some people think these universities and organizations shape individuals? Isn’t it the opposite? Don’t the individuals shape the climate and the culture of the organization? Anyway, the following text is also from the article:

The Amherst endowment, which stood at $1.7 billion at the end of June, lost about a quarter of its value over the next four months. The families of its students suddenly need more financial aid because of the economic downturn. And now the college is turning to its alumni for help, at the very moment that many of them are experiencing their own catastrophic financial losses.

Again, I focus on that last sentence with respect to my experiences with my undergraduate alma mater. At some point in November I received the annual phone call from a Freshman at my old college asking me to donate. The new strategy for these solicitations is to have you talk a little bit about your time as an undergrad and give your suggestions to the student on the phone about how he or she can make the best of their time on campus. It’s all an effort to get you to donate to the university – nothing more, nothing less. Well, after about thirty seconds of my babbling about undergraduate life to a Freshman who wasn’t listening anyway, the girl made the “ask.”

If you haven’t been solicited by the telephone before, the “ask” is when the person on the other end of the phone gets to the point in the script where they need to ask you for a donation. They usually start out high and are willing to go as low as they need to go in order for you to say “yes” to their request. This girl asked me to donate $1,000. I almost fell on the floor! Go back and read the last sentence quoted above – alumni are feeling the financial crunch, too! How dare my undergraduate institution (where I paid nearly $100,000 in tuition) ask me to donate $1,000 in this economic climate!? I told the girl that I was offended by the number and that if the university knew about my current status (which they SHOULD know about – I teach there), then they’d know that the number was out of my range. So she asked me for $500 and I told her that I wasn’t going to donate anything and thanked her for her time.

Up until now, I haven’t asked to be taken off of the solicitation list from my alma mater because I wanted to get the phone call and to consider an annual donation to a cause of my choosing (as stated in the article). However, after the ridiculous ask by the college this year I think I’m going to request to be taken off of their annual solicitation list. I donate my money to the Sigma Pi Educational Foundation not because the fraternity “shaped me” in anyway (it did not), but because I know where the money goes and I see the end result with my own two eyes. I would encourage all of you to do the same in terms of researching and understanding where your scarce donation dollars are being spent.

Monmouth University is offering a course that falls directly in line with what I do for a living (it’s about various approaches to fundraising). My company and I felt that it would be good for my “professional development” and that since it was so close to home, I should pursue the course. I agreed and this ultimately led to a huge hassle with the Monmouth University administration (who managed to not only get a $35 application fee out of me, but also to double-charge me for a parking ticket that I apparently received as an undergraduate and would have to have paid already in order to graduate). For those out there in the working world, I can sum up my experiences trying to take this course very simply – Monmouth University is not prepared or ready to offer professional development courses.

Not only was I treated like an 18 year-old kid who was just starting college, but even after establishing that I was an alumnus of the university, a part-time employee of the university, and that I had a Masters Degree and thus was not interested in applying for a Masters Degree program – the folks on the phone still couldn’t fathom what I was trying to do. What was I trying to do? Audit a course for professional development. Simple. Unfortunately, until their professional development admittance procedure is more “professional,” I will not be able to recommend to any of my professional colleagues that they attend MU to learn more about their trades.

Class started this past Monday night and I immediately remembered why I left Monmouth’s Masters Program after one semester a few years ago. The atmosphere in the classroom was uniquely Monmouth. The teacher treated the students as though they were incoming Freshmen and the requirements for the course look almost exactly like what one would expect out of a Freshman Seminar class. There are four 3-page papers, three 3-minute presentations, and a group project all due in the semester. We were lectured for about 20 minutes on the importance of not having a cell phone ring during class time. We were reprimanded in advance for missing any scheduled classes and scolded about how our final grade would be effected. I’m auditing the course, so I’m getting an “AU” as a grade no matter what I do.

But what shocked me the most on the first night was how the course description was changed before our eyes. It’s a little bit hard to explain, but the course description that sold me on the course was changed to include this course as a subsection of a larger study, which wasn’t what I was sold. The thing is, I’ve been through the Monmouth system before I and I realize there is no use in complaining because it gets no where; the system is specifically set up to be hard to navigate and tedious. This is why I loved going to Rutgers so much (in my view, Rutgers handled problems before they even popped up).

But I’m smart enough to realize that the pre-class administrative nightmare should have no bearing on my perception of the course and the first night of class should have little influence on my overall recommendation of the course itself, so I will reserve a final judgment until the course ends. I will say, however, that so far I’ve gotten exactly what I expected out of Monmouth…

There are so many issues here that it’s not even easy to discuss all of them in one sitting. Why was this creepy old bastard allowed to join the gym at Monmouth University if he wasn’t an alumnus and wasn’t local to the university? For those of you that don’t know, he wasn’t from the local area.

Further, why was he allowed on campus in the first place if he had an old access card? If the guy’s sole purpose is to go to the gym because he’s a “member” and his card indicating that membership is expired…then shouldn’t he NOT be on campus?!

And what really pisses me off is the reaction that one of the students had to the entire thing:

“Doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I really don’t care.”

That pretty much sums up 99% of the students that I’ve ever met while at Monmouth University or that I’ve met since I’ve become an alumni advisor to my fraternity at Monmouth University. I deal with kids who go to school all over this state and virtually none of them would have had that completely uncaring reaction. And good Lord, if I had my way I’d take this pervert and give him a few minutes with some of those guys that he so desperately wanted to see naked.

I have no problem with the fact that this weirdo likes dudes, but I have a HUGE problem with him invading the privacy of these unsuspecting students to get off. That’s just disgusting and I hope he get what he deserves.

And remember that we have a Jersey Shore Alumni Club meeting at 1:00pm at the Big House. Topics for the meeting include revising the dues policy to make it more friendly to recent graduates and graduate students as well as planning a summer event at the Monmouth Park Racetrack for both undergraduates and alumni.

Oh, and the undergraduates have this thing being catered by QUIZNO’S! And they also have some Dominoes pizza, too! Why didn’t we ever get free pizza?

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