Planning for alumni events

On November 13, I will have been an initiated member of my fraternity for 20 years. Damn, I'm old. But, I hadn't received any sort of invitation from my Pi Kappa Phi chapter at Indiana University for any sort of gathering to acknowledge the event. Homecoming came and went, and I was feeling a little disappointed that they totally missed the chance to celebrate a cool anniversary.

Well, today, an invitation arrived in the mail for a celebration on the weekend of November 17. I took back every nasty thought that had entered my brain. Those little bastards did care, after all, bless them! I hadn't thought that they'd do an event closer to the actual anniversary... I just assumed that they would do something at Homecoming. At Indiana, that's when all the alumni events are held.

ANYWAY, the point of this post is that I got this invitation with 17 days notice. Frankly, when you want alumni to attend something, particularly something that's not already on their radar screen, you need to give a hell of a lot more notice than 17 days. I know that in the student world, two weeks is an eternity. Seventeen days is like an entire pay period or one really hot and heavy quickie college romance.

Frankly, I would have liked to have known about this event in early September. Two months would have still been a challenge for me, given family events, work, conferences, and more.

How early should you invite alumni to an event? I say 60 days, minimum, unless you only want the usual suspects who can drive to your campus in an hour or less to attend. If you expect people to buy airline tickets and plan time away from business and family, you have to plan far in advance. If you can give more notice, give more. The ideal thing is to get the word out via email blasts several months in advance, then send out your printed invites 45-60 days ahead of time.

Fortunately, the things I had on my calendar that weekend were not terribly important. I really want to see my brothers from 20 years ago, so I freed myself up. I snatched one of the last seats on a Frontier Airlines flight to Indianapolis for under $400. Hotel was a nightmare. I can't get a hotel within 20 miles of Bloomington, Indiana. I finally found a place about a half hour's drive away. If I had been given more notice, I could have landed a nice room minutes from campus.

Now, I can't drink because I have to get in a damn rental car and drive a half hour back to my hotel room. Damn it!

So, dear student planner, give your alumni some notice. We plan our life events much further in advance than students do – it prolongs our death, you see. I know it's annoying and it doesn't sync well with the spontaneity of the college student lifestyle, but if you want us "old folks" to come around, support you, and pass along all that cool tradition stuff, you have to play the game our way from time to time.

South Carolina mourning

It's been a rough week to watch the news. First the California wildfires, and now the Ocean Isle, NC, house fire that claimed the lives of seven students from the University of South Carolina and Clemson University.

The students who died in the beach house fire were: Justin Anderson, Travis Cale, Lauren Mahon, Cassidy Pendley, William Rhea, Allison Walden, and Emily Yelton. Mahon, Pendley and Walden were members of Delta Delta Delta sorority, and Anderson and Cale were members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Yelton was a Delta Zeta sorority member from Clemson University. No fraternity affiliation has been listed for Rhea, a USC freshman.

One of the survivors, Tripp Wylie, was on the Today Show this morning talking about his friends (and girlfriend) who perished in the fire, and it was so hard to watch. Even Matt Lauer looked choked up during the interview.



You can find very comprehensive coverage on the website of the student newspaper The State here.

If you would like to send condolences to the USC Greek community, here's the address:

The University of South Carolina Office of Greek Life 1400 Greene Street Columbia SC 29208

Alcohol: Just another ploy by the white man!

It's National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week, and alcohol is on my mind. So, I thought I'd share this amusing story I found on the CNN website about the origins of New York City. Seems our nation's largest city might not even exist if the "white man" hadn't been handing out drinks.

In 1609, the Dutch sent English explorer Henry Hudson westward for a third attempt at finding the fabled Northeast Passage. A near mutiny forced him southward, and upon reaching land, he encountered members of the Delaware Indian tribe.

To foster good relations, Hudson shared his brandy with the tribal chief, who soon passed out. But upon waking up the next day, he asked Hudson to pour some more for the rest of his tribe. From then on, the Indians referred to the island as Manahachtanienk -- literally, "The High Island."

And not "high" as in "tall;" high as in "the place where we got drunk." That island is what's now known as Manhattan.

Have we gotten a bit too casual about our t-shirts?

I've pretty much grown immune to Greek t-shirts that reference drugs, alcohol, and/or sex. After a couple of decades, I'm used to it, and it takes something pretty raunchy to even catch my notice.

The t-shirt in the picture is a pretty harmless example of the average Greek t-shirt I see out there. This one was for a fraternity philanthropy to raise money to fight ALS that involved swingsets. "Go High or Go Home" was the theme, and there you see a young man and woman in their swings. Of course, once you realize the date of the event is 4/20, going "high" takes on a special meaning. Clever fraternity men!

This shirt is very tame, as far as Greek t-shirts go. But since it's National Alcohol Awareness Week, the shirt reminded me how casual we've become about associating our letters with drugs and alcohol. We think it's cute and harmless. We chuckle. I bet the designers of this shirt didn't think that anyone over age 25 would get the "4-20" reference.

Swing high for ALS, my friends, but then I'm assuming that your chapter enjoys the weed. Use an alcohol reference for your recruitment t-shirt, and I assume your brotherhood is full of drunks.

Your t-shirts are the basis of your community reputation. When I see a sorority woman wearing a t-shirt that demeans women, fairly or unfairly, I make assumptions about that woman's self esteem.

Is there something we can do – short of enacting yet another policy – that discourages this sort of thing? It seems to me to be one of the simplest steps we can take to clean up our image in our campus communities.