The Syracuse University Interfraternity Council needs to be disbanded immediately. And I’m not talking about the guys who serve on its executive board or represent their chapters; I mean as a whole, it needs to be stopped as fast as humanly possible.

As a governing body of social Greek fraternities, it fails to serve a myriad of purposes.

The conception of the IFC comes from a little-known official document called the Statement of Relationship between Syracuse University and Social or Service Fraternities and Sororities. This wordy document is canonized by the board of trustees.

In a nutshell, it outlines common sense measures that each fraternity or sorority must abide by in order to get permission to operate on campus. Compliance with national risk management policy, municipal, state and federal laws, and the creation of self-governing, self-disciplining councils as appropriate are among the required policies it describes.

The Statement of Relationship explains why the IFC was created. It doesn’t explain, however, why the IFC fails to serve both the university by enforcing rules as well as its chapters.

Its de facto policy of secrecy applied to recruitment violations are by far the silliest part of IFC business. Consider that individual chapters alone control recruitment. Even if a student is ‘dirty-rushed’ before the formal process, the IFC cannot remove brothers from chapters. Instead it levies a fine against the offending fraternity and the matter is kept hush-hush.

This practice is asinine. Fraternities depend most of all on maintaining necessary numbers of brothers, and since the IFC cannot affect membership directly, the best they can do is bar the house from formal rush and discourage students from pledging. But not a word is spoken when a chapter is caught, and a closed-lipped IFC fails to apply any real pressure and lets even more students blindly pledge sketchy houses.

The ability to participate in formal rush is the only thing that the IFC offers its member chapters, but the IFC flunks this too. Every year the process is radically changed, and each of those changes manages to cripple the chapters that agree to play by the rules.

This year they relied heavily on an online system directing interested students to open houses, but the Web site did not perform, and off-campus houses were by-and-large left off all official IFC recruitment literature.

Between bungling rush and foolishly conducting secret business in opposition to public interest, the IFC needs to be disbanded. Leaching income from fraternities through fines and bullying its member chapters is unacceptable. The fraternities deserve a body that pays back its dues through actually representing the interests of it members. As it stands now, the words apathy and despondence are given new meaning to anyone watching an IFC meeting. Fraternities need, nay, deserve an IFC to be proud of, one that defends and inspires and holds perennial never-do-well chapters accountable. Starting from scratch and applying some common sense will make this possible.

Ben Peskin is a featured columnist whose columns appear Thursdays in The Daily Orange. Email him at [email protected].

Published on February 14, 2007 at 12:00 pm