Thursday, March 16, 2017

Burning Sands, Dean Richardson, and Making Meaning of NPHC's Intake Position As An NPHC Collegiate Advisor

Like every other NPHC greek member by now (or at least a strong contingency), I have sat and watched Gerald McMurray's Netflix movie, The Burning Sands.  As soon as it was released, students from at least three of the five schools for which I have worked began emailing, calling and texting to get my position on the film.  And in some of those conversations, students compared me to both Dean Richardson and Professor Hughes.  Students saw my love and passion for NPHC as being equivalent to Dean Richardson's passion for his beloved fraternity, and at the same time students laughed about having set in my classes much like Zurich, where students confided about their processes and their inability to get work done because of the strenuous nature and time constraints of both the established Intake process that is mapped over the more beloved (and yet "heinous") pledge process.  But, if I'm honest, neither Professor Hughes, but especially not Dean Richardson's character actually describes the complexity of what its like to be an NPHC member working in a collegiate setting, helping to usher in BGLO members year after year.   For me, this makes 15 years of working with collegiate NPHCs (if I'm counting my Grad school years too).

If we are being honest about McMurray's tale of violence and "rogue" pledging, we see him pointing a lot of fingers at why NPHC organization's culture of violence exists.  It's the pledgees fault because they won't tell.  It's the brothers in the chapter because they are perpetuating the violence heaped upon them.  It's the professional university staff and faculty because they know and are either complicit in the hazing or sitting somewhere waiting for students to be the change agents.  It's the chapter alumni who come back to "haze up" new initiates.  But eerily and quietly, there seems to be no mention of the graduate chapters or the national headquarters or the regional leadership, who by the time an initiate gets to "hell week" would have been also knee-deep in national intake requirements.  Why is there no mention of that?  I submit that the silence of graduate chapter/regional/national leadership is intentional in the movie.  It is simply too difficult to imagine that a national intake process and a underground pledge process might be unconsciously working together to create this conundrum.  It would be too much like right to interrogate that our national leadership, since ending chapter pledging, is complicit in the creation of a dangerous underground culture.  It is too complicated to paint both the polemic of graduate/alumni/alumnae chapters as the hazing police, who are comprised of memberships who both despise and uphold the membership intake processes of 2017, but for the most part made through a "pledge" process.  So it is much easier to scapegoat the university by creating tropological antagonists in the characters - the "derelict" Dean Richardson or the "complicit by-stander" Professor Hughes.

However, being on the ground, working directly with NPHC HQs, local grad/undergrad chapters, university administrators (both greek and non-Greek), active/inactive NPHC alum (who significantly give back to their Alma Maters), and a number of community leaders give many NPHC advisors a unique vantage point that is necessary if we really want to tackle NPHCs woes around brutal hazing.  Over my 15 years of working with NPHC greeks as an NPHC greek, I believe that there are at least 5 things that are worth our consideration in these trying and complicated times.

1. NPHC REGIONAL & HQ LEADERSHIP MUST CHANGE THEIR THINKING
I have met some amazing NPHC leaders from HQs and Regional/District/Local levels, who are woefully under-informed about what it takes to manage and develop both local alumni and undergraduate chapters, on a day-to-day basis.  They are well meaning folk who have spent a lifetime going to Boule's and National Conventions, but most of them seem to live somewhere between the binary of their national policy and their own intake experience.  Simply put, that is not enough to make the critical changes needed in our organizations.  And what is worst is that all of the organizations have legal scholars, university leaders, organizational and cultural leaders who are not tapped on enough to train, advise, and develop each of the nine organizations' memberships particularly during the on-boarding of executive transitions.  Just recently at the Annual Conference for the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors, NPHC Advisors around the country asked our national/regional leadership to respond to a set of questions around affordability, LGBT inclusion, policing of undergrad members, hazing, moratoriums and rebuilding chapters.  Those questions not only went unanswered by leaders of each of our organizations, but University officials from around the country were told that they could leave the session if they didn't like what NPHC HQs were presenting, which amounted to the equivalent of Greek 101, which we all put on at each of our campuses because of our University roles  (How dumb are we, if you think that we don't know what NPHC is even as we are charged to work with NPHC on a daily basis as a part of our paid duties?). The "sit down and shut-up approach because you are NPHC" by NPHC leadership resulted in no less than 40-60 advisors executing a mass walk-out at the conference, and dare I say the fraying of relationships between national/regional leadership and university officials.  Be clear, it is not that University officials don't want change, support, or better relationships.  Many in leadership throughout NPHC think they shouldn't be questioned because of their role, and thus model an above-the-law approach that they despise and punish when it comes to both undergrads and alums who don't follow the intake process.

2. GRAD/ALUMNI CHAPTERS SHOULD NOT BE THE POLICE
NPHCs universal model is to have Alumni(ae)/Graduate chapter advisors who serve in a voluntary role to support undergrad chapters.  In the main, and you don't need a ton of research to know this, the model simply doesn't work.  And, it doesn't work for a variety of reasons.  There can be no brotherhood or sisterhood between graduate chapter and undergraduate chapters if the following are true:
- Intake processes between the two groups don't match up
- Grad chapters are dumping grounds for rejects of undergrad chapters
- Grad advisors are no less than two generations removed from the current undergraduate experience
- Grad advisors are only trained to administer protocol/compliance in regards to undergrad chapters
- Do not want younger Sorors/Fraters trained and serving on a undergrad chapter committee
- The legal liability of the undergrad chapter rests with the advisor
Ultimately, this results in grad chapters policing undergrad chapters, rather than mentoring undergraduate members.  I would stake my career that most undergraduate advisors around the country can't name most members of the undergraduate chapter that they advise.  Most undergraduate advisors (and therefore chapters) only see their role in the life of undergrad brothers/sisters as doing compliance work, while most undergrad brothers/sisters come into the organizations thinking that the advisor is going to serve as a mentor.  Most advisors and grad chapters do not know how to mentor...and while we have amazing mentorship programs led by dope NPHC members across the country who work in Public Education, Higher Education, and Non-Profits, not nary an organization has tapped those individuals to train the organizations' advisors.  And, the best advisors in most of our organizations go primarily unnoticed because they usually aren't looking for accolades or exposure.  How you can tell those chapters with great advisorship? Well, most likely the undergrad members talk about that brother/sister a lot...and the chapter is more or less in compliance and most likely flourishing in ways that make others go, "how did they do that there?"  It's true, mentorship matters...NPHC orgs just don't do it well in our own houses.

3. UNDERGRAD AS PLEDGED - GRAD AS UNPLEDGED IS AN IMAGINARY BINARY
So let's talk about the elephant in the room.  There is an imagined binary that undergrads pledge and grad chapters do not, even though they are technically being led by former undergrads who in fact did pledge.  So when brothers and sisters say they were "made" through grad chapters, they are often perceived as not being as thorough around their understanding of history, culture, and even the brothers/sisters in the organization.  Moreover, this binary puts in motion from the start interactions between brothers and sisters in the same organization, creating levels of distrust that have long-term outcomes for relationships.  However, its a bit more complicated than that, and it always has been.  There are grad chapters who don't follow intake guidelines, there are undergrad chapters that do.  There are lines in chapters both undergrad and grad that make it clear that they want (or do not want) a "process"...and sometimes these requests are obliged.  There is no real uniformity in processes from region or state or chapter or area.  Each time is a little different...and most processes, whether we are talking membership intake and underground, or just membership intake have tons of variables that are dependent upon chapter make-up, leadership, current trends, political will, line personality, etc.  What seems to be the constant is the learning of NPHC org information, the discourse around anti-hazing, and the lexicon of NPHC sorority-fraternity life.   Everything else is truly up in the air.  In my time as advisor, I have watched lines that have had a rigorous underground process, but the local leadership was incompetent so the membership intake process was poor.  I have seen a rigorous membership intake process and a weak underground process.  I have seen no underground process, and an average membership intake process.  And all of this has occurred for both undergrads and grads.  That said, we must interrogate the binary of undergrad as pledged and membership intake, and grad only as membership intake in order to have a better sense of the complexity of hazing culture in a 2017 context.

4. POLICY DOES NOT BY ITSELF CREATE CULTURE
In 1990, when NPHC, from a top-down approach, decided to get rid of above ground pledging because  of the severity of the processes and the death/harm of young people, they did so without mass buy-in.  And sense that time, we have sought to create policy and protocol after policy and protocol in order to change the course of the culture of the community.  We continue to miss the mark here because NPHC organizations are unique: they are lifetime, but they are also volunteer.  Thus, you can't mandate behavior if members don't opt in or don't want to comply.  And, getting up telling them to shut up, or that their opinions don't matter only works in a monarchy.  NPHC organizations are not monarchies...even though they sometimes lead with that kind of authoritarian perspective, supported by their own protocol police and policy patrol.  Even though NPHC members should follow policies and protocols set via the national perspective as elected leadership, there has been a strong sense of mistrust between HQ leadership and the local members (active or inactive).  For buy-in to actually occur, NPHCs are going to need to have a forward thinking campaign unveiled at conventions, modeled by leadership, supported by local leadership, and inviting all members to the table.  Treating brothers and sisters as though they are brothers and sisters would go a long way.  This is where NPHC is dramatically different from IFC/NPC, even when wrong-doing has occurred by a chapter, IFC/NPC usually seeks to protect its members. I'm not so sure that NPHC feels the same way about its membership.

5. COMPLIANCE MODELS ARE INCOMPLETE
Lastly, let's just be real clear, most of the NPHC membership intake training modules are woefully incomplete for making good greeks.  Here's how I know, I and every NPHC advisor has to conduct additional training beyond NPHCs intake models to ensure that NPHC chapters can conduct business meetings, hold events, forecast, and create brotherhood and sisterhood in their chapters.  What makes them so inadequate in this day and age is that most of the models only seek compliance.  They teach history, but not the context of history...which is why students can recite the history of their orgs, but don't know what it means in context.  They teach respect for "some" brothers and sisters, but not all brothers and sisters, which is why members cross with such arrogance not recognizing the many hands that made it possible for them to cross including inactive members who may have given money/time/talent, other NPHC greeks who signed off on dates and kept their members in line, University NPHC members who cleared dates, and all of the many non-greek brothers and sisters who are present at Neophyte presentations with gifts in hands (and who may have contributed to the intake fees that are at this point cost prohibitive).  We can tell that this is a compliance model, because you actually don't understand that brotherhood and sisterhood are beyond the bounds of our chosen organization.  The model is incomplete when chapters cannot run effectively, even when its just 1 line in a chapter.  Further, we know that the model is incomplete, because both alumni members and undergrad members have additional time to create (layer on) additional processes that do seem to do "work" that the official processes can't.  From learning the organizations information, to a stronger sense of protocol, to a stronger commitment to completing tasks assigned, to better relationships with others in the organizations...from my vantage point, it seems as though both processes actually feed off of each other...and yet are still incomplete.  Intake seems to teach value in the organization universal and offer some values expected of new members, while the underground process seems to teach information with a rigor to get through a New Member Presentation and to bond lines/people together.  Even still, I'd be lying if I hadn't set through a number of meetings and fix-my-life sessions, with NPHC greeks who still doubted their abilities to flourish.  The processes are both woefully inept at building new members up beyond the superficial exterior of being able to do Invictus with effortless speed and knowing minimally the founders of chapters and national organizations.  And I, for one, am over processes that actually don't support new members' development and wellness.

So, what I'm trying to say, if you've gotten this far, is that HigherEd professionals are well aware of the problems, but the trite simplification of whose at fault is actually more harmful, as we seek "to keep it real" about hazing, pledging, and membership intake.  Most professionals are worried about the state of NPHC and the many students that join.  We want for our students, what some of us didn't get, but what many of us model: meaningful relationships with mentors, brothers/sisters, and new members, an appreciation of brotherhood and sisterhood that shows up in our personal values, a pride about the unique cultural idioms and histories of our organizations, and a lifelong experience that equips us for working in a world that is racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, and eurocentric.