It has recently come to many students’ attention that another one of our Greek affiliates, Phi Kappa Psi, has been kicked off campus at Indiana University. Hearing that news was very upsetting for many students around campus, and here’s why:

I am speaking on behalf of myself, and on behalf of many fellow students who are struggling to find a voice on IU Bloomington’s campus as its Greek life is slowly getting stripped away. The members of Phi Kappa Psi, who I will call “Phi Psi” from this point on, are some of the most respectable men on this campus. Sure, they’re college students just like everybody else, but these members have enhanced my college experience more than any other group of men on this campus. Call me biased, but these are the guys that would look out for me if they ever thought I might be in an uncomfortable position, and I know this for a fact, because they have done it for me before. I’ve introduced my friends in Phi Psi to my parents, and I know my dad rests more easily at night knowing I have girl friends and guy friends who consistently keep each other’s well-being in mind.

It seems that there have been many assumptions made about IU’s Greek life, but these are nothing but overgeneralized opinions that pinpoint very specific problems without looking at the entire picture. IU thinks Greek life lives to party and be reckless, and while a lot of that does happen, they forget about the fact that we are real people. Earlier in the year, Alpha Tau Omega was kicked off campus as well, and while there is discussion about whether or not that was the right decision, that is not what I am going to discuss. What I am going to discuss is the displacement of the students of Alpha Tau Omega. The decision to remove “ATO” from campus was unanimous between the ATO nationals, their housing corporation, and the school, and members had to find a new place to live in the middle of the semester. Bloomington is a small town, and many of these students struggled to find a place to live and, as a result, have been scattered across the university in various places they could find.

Phi Psi is now being faced with the same thing, but it doesn’t seem that they really deserve this. If the members of Phi Psi received “Alumni Status,” their nationals could not have really thought that what they did was horrible enough for them to have lost their memberships. The University ultimately decided that they should lose their house on campus, and now, all these members are being forced to find a place to live within the next couple weeks. If it wasn’t already difficult enough for the members of ATO to find housing, there are even fewer places for all of the Phi Psi members to live now.

The “action” that IU keeps taking against “ethical misconduct” is not improving anything, and the University is shrugging off problems onto someone else. By kicking fraternities off campus, the University is allowing them to continue to live their college lives with less supervision in off-campus houses that can’t be “kicked off.” This is not “dealing” with any of the issues our campus has been trying to focus on, and the members who were just kicked out of their house are not the guys that need to be punished right now.

There are much bigger problems happening in other organizations or in other areas of the school, and the University is focusing way too much on the wrong things. For example, sexual assault at IU has become an extremely hot topic, as we have been under investigation of violations against Title IX. Phi Psi has not had known issues with sexual assault, while many other organizations have (who remain on campus). At a sexual assault panel during the fall, a SACS (Sexual Assault Crisis Center) psychologist who works for the University Health Center said that it is actually much easier to reach out to the Greek community about things like sexual assault and other rampant issues within Universities than to students who reside off campus. Kicking off fraternities is just involving less men in things like “MARS” (Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault), and it makes it harder for campus staff to reach them and educate them about problems on campus.

While it is arguable that the party scene in Greek life induces more instances of overdrinking and other grey areas like sexual assault, Indiana students are assaulted off-campus over 75 percent of the time, according to the IU Climate Survey, so to assume that the Greek community is the worst of it is a very wrong assumption. Ultimately, it seems that since Greek life is the only thing the University can actually control, they are overexerting their power in order to make it look like they’re “doing something” to “take action.” I would believe this is I felt that the organizations who were being kicked out of their houses were doing things that actually affected anyone, but in Phi Psi’s case, their “offense” wasn’t even bad enough for anyone to give any specifics as to what they did that ultimately made them lose their house.

There are much bigger problems on the campus to be focused on, and our Dean of Students, Harold ‘Pete’ Goldsmith, has taken apart Greek life before. I would like to see some school statistics from Universities he previously worked at and see if instances of things like hospital visits due to alcohol, violence, and sexual assault occurrences have actually gone down. He is described as “profoundly responsive to students needs, and he is clearly driven by a desire to help students succeed,” (IU News Room). If this were true, I doubt he would have taken as serious measures against members of a fraternity who are now going to suffer as a result of the decision to kick them off campus. Their housing deposits are gone, they are now required to pay rent in another home, and they have to uproot their lives at the start of a new semester. I don’t believe that will help them “succeed,” and these aren’t even the guys that deserve this. IU needs to take a look at the bigger picture and stop harassing the Greek community because, besides campus housing, it’s the only thing the University has the ability to control, unlike off-campus houses.

The Greek community does a lot for the campus and for national organizations, and the University needs to realize that by kicking houses off, they are not improving anything. They are disconnecting students from philanthropic opportunities, they are shutting down a community that feels close with one another, and they are allowing the downfalls of Greek life to happen unsupervised. Once the problem isn’t theirs, they don’t seem to care, and kicking houses off campus is just the easy way out. If the University took a different kind of action, like monitoring the party scenes or implementing rules that canmore easily be supervised on-campus than off-campus, there would probably be a much more effective outcome. This pattern that is happening now at IU is making it harder for me to tell younger students to attend the University because I don’t feel respected as a student. The University needs to re-think their “action,” because I predict that fewer high school students will feel inclined to come to a University that doesn’t treat students like people.