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I was recently hosted by a very nice, very impressive sorority chapter. They were wonderful hosts. Prior to my presentation, I had dinner at their sorority house, and leaning against a living room wall was a fraternity composite.
The composite was from one of the local fraternities, dated 1993-1994. I got up to take a look at the old clothes and hairstyles. I noticed that the glass had a gigantic crack in it, and the frame was heavily scratched and banged up.
"What's this doing here," I asked?
"Oh, we steal theirs, they steal ours. They're all over the house," replied one woman. "I bet we have one from almost every fraternity on campus."
I noted that the sorority's current composite was enclosed in a very large, locked container lit by lights in their foyer. "Why is it that you take such great care of your current composite, but you could care less about the old ones?"
The woman looked at me strangely. "We need them for recruitment, I guess," was her best answer. "The guys don't care about their old composites, and we have so many of our own, we don't have anywhere to put them anyway."
For many students, they're a joke. Funny names, odd hair. Old. They break them, throw them in closets, steal them from other chapters. I am willing to bet that many find their way to the dumpster every year from damage caused by neglect.
Undergraduates at many campuses should be ashamed of the way they treat old composites.
First thing, these things are incredibly expensive. Thousands of dollars. Those who came before you paid a steep price for those, and they expected you to care for them. Second, they are incredibly sentimental to your alumni. I love walking into my fraternity house at Indiana and looking at the composites from my years, remembering the names, faces and bad haircuts. While they might seem ridiculous to you, they are awesome to me.
I was devastated a few years ago when I visited my own chapter and no one knew what had become of the composite my fellow founding fathers and I had made in 1987. That's right – the founding composite! Missing in action. Nothing but shrugged shoulders when I asked.
Councils across the country should immediately ban the desecration of composites, and the young men and women who are currently the stewards of their chapters should start acting with a bit more respect toward them. They are your history. Those faces mean something to those of us who made it possible for you to be in the chapter today.
I wish every alumni IFC or Panhellenic across the country would immediately rent a huge storage unit, confiscate all the old composites from the undergraduate chapters, and keep them under lock and key. Where alumni councils don't exist, the university should ask for them. There are services available for composite restoration, by the way. Then, when it was time for class reunions or significant anniversaries, we could pull them out and display them.
Perhaps then, undergraduates would respect them more.
