The current cause-celebre in the ongoing debate about the roles of fraternities and sororities on our campus is the eviction of Alpha Xi Delta from the physical plant it has rented from Beta Theta Pi for the last ten years.
As this incident includes many of the issues that are discussed whenever the pros and cons of the Greek system are debated, I feel that a fair amount of conflation is occurring.
I would like to speak directly to the AZD-Beta issue, however, instead of injecting it with many of the other issues surrounding the Greek system.
All talk of gendered spaces aside, at its heart, the AZD-Beta dispute is a legal contract matter: Beta leased its physical plant to AZD.
I have no personal knowledge of this lease, but I assume that in this lease there are conditions under which Beta can renew it or evict AZD from the house.
If Beta breached the contract, AZD should sue Beta. In the wake of the pending litigation, AZD should be able to get a court order allowing its members to stay in the house paying rent until a legal decision is rendered. (I honestly do not know the scope of renter's rights in New Hampshire, but I think this type of arrangement is pro forma.)
But if Beta is acting legally within the scope of the contract it has with AZD, it can do with its property as it pleases.
When I made this argument to a friend, his response was, "It is the College's responsibility to make it more economically viable for the Beta corporation to sell the house to the College than to hang on to it for ten years (and pay ten years of whopping property taxes)."
Regardless of whether you think this is the responsibility of the College or not, the only way the College could do that would have been to disallow Beta to rent the house to AZD in the first place.
Beta would have starved, but at the same time, AZD would have been homeless for the last ten years.
The only fault I can see in this situation lies either with the AZD leadership or the College. If AZD's officers thought that the lease of the house would have given them control of Beta's plant in perpetuity, they were dreadfully shortsighted.
A derecognized Zeta Psi's ability to continue to rush new members and exist as an underground organization should have been the handwriting on the wall to AZD executives to come up with a Plan B in case Beta decided to take their property back.
If AZD was in talks with the College about finding a new physical plant, and the College was talking to AZD out of one side of its mouth while laying out terms for rerecognition of Beta out of the other, the blame for this situation lies squarely on the steps of Parkhurst.
In either event, I think these are the correct terms and the context for discussing the AZD and Beta issue.
The problem is that whenever an issue involving a fraternity and a sorority comes to a head, it allows for all sorts of ancillary topics to be thrown around with little regard for the facts at hand.
I think debate about the role of fraternities on campus and the perceived marginalization of sororities should happen. I have many thoughts on that topic that I would like to express in another opinion piece, but this is not the place for them.
