FRATERNITIES AND SORORITIES AT UNIVERSITY PARK HAVE EARNED A REPUTATION AS SOME OF THE MOST PROBLEM-PRONE CHAPTERS IN THE COUNTRY. NOW PENN STATE’S GREEKS ARE BANDING TOGETHER TO CHANGE THAT.
IT’S PUSHING MIDNIGHT ON A CHILLY NOVEMBER Saturday in State College’s fraternity district, and one of its man-sions, a stucco, hacienda-looking structure at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Locust Lane, is rife with activity. A line of undergrads snakes from the house’s arched front doorway, around the adjacent walkway, and down the block. Within 15 minutes, the line is gone, the only residual evidence being a few sweatshirted doormen huddled at the entrance and a faint thumping from within.
 Inside the vestibule, the first floor teems. Colored lights dart across soaring ceilings and aged wooden crossbeams as the 100-plus students packed into the house clutch beer cans and oscillate en masse to a chest-throbbing, low-end thump. It’s Saturday. Thump. It’s midnight. Thump. And it’s rapturous. Thump. 
The party’s nearly at full throttle, and soon the morning hours will begin blurring by. “We’re sort of known for the last party of the year,” one of the brothers of Sigma Phi Epsilon says with a shrug. 
Tonight, SigEp is making sure to put the appropriate year-end stamp on a semester in which they’ve recruited one of the largest new-member classes in the chapter’s history. But as the party grows more animated with each drink, and as a few students begin to show glazed eyes or slur their speech, SigEp’s risk-management team keeps an eye on them. 
The team—15 to 20 brothers who abstain for the duration of the party—works more like a military operation than a group of easygoing college guys. Five or six brothers are stationed at the front entrance, issuing wristbands to guests of legal drinking age (non-alcoholic beverages are provided for the underagers) and allowing entry only to those on the guest list. Five or six more float around inside, making sure that students who appear a little too spirited are cut off. And a handful of others patrol the house’s exterior to prevent unwanted guests from sneaking in a side or rear entrance and to keep outside noise to a mini-mum. 
The goal is to keep the party from barreling over the line and into fistfights, broken windows, and stu-dents hunched over trash cans. True, that line may be a blurry one, but the brothers of Sigma Phi Epsilon know it well. And they know the consequences of crossing it.
FRATERNATIES HAVE BEEN a part of American col-lege life since 1776. And while they’ve histor-ically been known for fostering lifelong brotherhood, they’ve also had a reputation for debauchery. In 1848, the president of Miami University of Ohio expelled members of Alpha Delta Phi and Beta Theta Pi for packing so much ice and snow around the school’s Old Main building that it was rendered unusable for three days. For a time in the late 1800s, a number of colleges—including Penn State—banned fraternities outright. But as Greeks returned to the ideals of scholarship and community involvement, many regained administrative favor; by 1920, Penn State’s Greek system was booming with nearly 40 chapters.
In the decades that followed, many students sought out Greek life as a way to make friends, develop leadership skills, and serve the community. Fraternities and sorori-ties have long touted their reputation for contributing to the greater good: According to the North-American Inter-fraternity Conference, Greeks have traditionally made up only a small fraction of the student population, yet 48 per-cent of all U.S. presidents have been fraternity members. Greeks today still comprise the largest volunteer network in the country, putting in 10 million hours of community service annually. At Penn State, fraternity and sorority members have proven to be among the most prominent and loyal alumni—nearly half of the members of the Board of Trustees came out of the Greek system, as did such Penn Staters as former Merrill Lynch CEO Bill Schreyer ’48 Lib (Sigma Phi Epsilon), Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Akron Baldwin ’66, ’74 MA Lib (Delta Sigma Theta), and U.S. Steel CEO John Surma ’76 Bus (Kappa Sigma).
But by the 1960s and ’70s, the bad was beginning to overshadow the good. The 1978 movie Animal House cari-catured what was happening in some chapters—and, some say, gave them a pop culture icon after which to model themselves. With the help of new liability laws in the 1980s, the number of alcohol- and hazing-related lawsuits soared so high that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners ranked fraternities and sororities as the sixth-worst insurance risk—right behind hazardous waste disposal companies and asbestos contractors.
Around the same time, uni-versities began distancing themselves from their Greek communities. Penn State, for example, issued an official “relationship statement” to define what its role was—or rather wasn’t—in off-campus student activities. Previously, fraternities had to register their parties with the University, and a school offi-cial would visit on a Friday or Saturday night to check up on them. But in 1986, Penn State made the Interfraternity and Panhellenic councils—the students themselves—responsi-ble for monitoring the chapters’ behavior.
The trend backfired: Courts still held universities accountable for their students’ behavior, and the Greeks continued to party equally hard—now without supervi-sion. According to a January 2000 story in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “A steady stream of headlines about fraternity antics gone awry suggests that Greek organiza-tions have not changed much since the 1980s, when rowdy keg parties and sophomoric pranks actually helped them recruit fun-loving freshmen….” Hazing continued unabated as well; Hank Nuwer reported in his 2002 book Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities, Sororities, Hazing, and Binge Drinking that at least one death from Greek hazing had occurred in the United States every year since 1970.
In short, colleges and universities were facing one big, fat Greek predicament.

WITH ROUGHLY 4,000 undergrads across 89 chapters, Penn State’s Greek system is one of the nation’s largest—so sprawling that multiple organizing councils have developed
over the years. The IFC and Panhellenic Council oversee most fraternities and sororities, respectively, while the National Pan-Hellenic Council governs the traditionally African-American chapters, and the Multicultural Greek Council serves the ethnically diverse chapters (Delta Sigma Iota, for example, is a South Asian-interest fraternity).
But despite being one of the biggest Greek systems in the country, “we most definitely did not have a reputation of being one of the best,” Vicky Triponey, the University’s vice president for student affairs, told the Trustees in January 2005. “In some circles in the student affairs profession, we were considered a renegade system, one that was disre-spectful of national standards and that had lost sight of their core values and greater purposes.” Triponey, who came to Penn State in 2003 from the University of Connecticut, has made it a priority to help the Greeks change that.
In April 2004, Triponey had gathered more than 100 students, alumni, State College residents and officials, advisers from Greek umbrella organizations, and others in the Division of Student Affairs for a series of “sum-mits.” Among those students who welcomed the idea of change was Rob Kameen ’04 Bus, an IFC vice presi-dent at the time. “We realized we weren’t being as effec-tive a Greek community as we could’ve been,” says Kameen, who now works in the University’s Fraternity and Sorority Life office. “We had seen problems coming in the past, but we just hoped they would take care of themselves. We finally realized that we needed to take some proactive measures.”
What grew out of the summits was Greek Pride: A Return to Glory, a comprehensive set of ideas for strength-ening Penn State’s Greek system. The following February, Triponey and University President Graham Spanier took the ideas to Indianapolis, where many fraternities and sororities have national headquarters, to get feedback from national leaders in the Greek community. The response was enthusiastic, and Greek Pride was under way.
Greek Pride has a bold goal: to mold Penn State’s fra-ternities and sororities into the premier Greek commu-nity in the nation by 2014. That’s no small task, consid-ering the problems that have flourished within fraternities and sororities: House trashing. Brawls. Sex-ual assault. Newspaper headlines offer just a few exam-ples. A member of Kappa Alpha, for instance, is facing charges of raping an intoxicated female student after one of the fraternity’s parties in October 2005. In December 2005, Penn State found Delta Sigma guilty of hazing in an incident that landed one of its pledges in Mount Nittany Medical Center for several days. In Jan-uary 2006, Kappa Sigma’s charter was revoked by its national organization; the previous November, a young woman was seriously injured in a fall after a party at that fraternity. And, while fraternities may receive most of the spotlight, sororities aren’t immune to problems. Last March, Penn State’s Pi Beta Phi chapter was put on probation by its national headquarters for unspeci-fied “risky behavior.”
Alcohol drives some of the problems—and Penn State’s Greek students imbibe at a “noticeably higher rate than the national average,” according to Andrea Dowhower ’89 MEd Edu, director of research and analysis in Student Affairs. A 2005 survey she conducted found that 67 percent of Penn State’s Greek students drink two to three times a week, ver-sus the national average of 45 percent. More-over, three-quarters of Penn State fraternity and sorority members engage in “high-risk” drinking behavior at least every other week, meaning they consume five or more drinks—for women, the benchmark is four or more—in one sitting. (In fairness, Penn State students as a whole also out-drink their national counter-parts: Since 2001, the average high-risk drink-ing rate of Penn State’s undergrads is 56 per-cent; the national average is about 44 percent.)
Many fraternities also wrestle with housing issues—century-old mansions that can’t weather the wear and tear of 40 college guys the way they used to. Last October, the Phi Kappa Tau and Tau Kappa Epsilon houses racked up enough code violations that the State College Borough revoked their housing per-mits (at press time, both were in appeal processes). For sororities, as well as the traditionally African-American and multicultural chapters, low membership numbers are another concern. And throughout the entire Greek system, there’s not as much community service as the University and the chapters’ national headquarters would like to see. The annual Dance Marathon—the largest student-run philanthropy in the world, raising$4 million to fight pediatric cancer last year alone—can’t be ignored. But because of THON, many chapters neglect to engage in other service projects.
At Sigma Phi Epsilon, home to that semester-ending party last November, the problems—heavy drinking, a chapter house in disrepair, and allegations of hazing—had spun so far out of control that in 2005 the fraterni-ty’s alumni board petitioned their national headquarters to step in. The national reps conducted a member-by-member interview process, then kicked out all but 12 of the 75 brothers.
One of those to be expelled was Daniel Hadas, an eco-nomics and political science major from Oceanside, N.Y. Hadas was a freshman at the time. It wasn’t that he was one of the heavy partiers. It was his contrarian spunk: During his interview with the national reps, who were decades his senior, he demanded answers about their new direction for the chapter and how it would ensure success—which wasn’t received with the warmest of feelings. “The day after I was kicked out,” Hadas says, “I told the national reps, ‘I’m going to be the next chapter president. You made a big mistake.’”
Three-quarters of Penn State fraternity and sorority members engage in “high-risk” drinking behavior at least every other week. 
ON THE SECOND floor of the HUB, Kevin Kerr’s office is the center of a steady flurry of activity. Undergrads sporting hoodies with Greek lettering tap away on laptops in the adjacent lounge, while others dart between Kerr’s office and the next. Kerr, the University’s director of fraternity and sorority life and one of Triponey’s aces in the Greek Pride Initiative, seems suited to his job. He’s affable, judicious, and impossibly polite—traits that prove handy in establish-ing a rapport with the students he serves.
Kerr helps coordinate the Greek Pride Initiative, which includes a set of eight “minimum and reasonable expectations” for all fraternities and sororities. Among those expectations:
—Chapters must agree to eliminate hazing.
—Chapters should maintain an average GPA of 2.5 or higher. —Each chapter is expected to have an adviser, trained by Student Affairs and actively involved in the chapter. —Chapters should be in good financial standing. 
—Every chapter should be in good standing with its national or international organization; a national or inter-national rep must visit campus annually to verify this.
Chapters that meet the minimum expectations receive basic support from the University, such as advising from Student Affairs staff and meeting space for chapter func-tions. Those that don’t will receive a specific plan for improvement and must show progress in improving, or face probation or separation from the Greek community.
Greek Pride also encourages chapters to exceed these expectations, providing a set of five “standards of excel-lence”: participation in community service projects beyond THON; chapter GPAs equal to or higher than the University average; reduced size and frequency of parties and less underage and binge drinking; adhering to a clear recruitment plan; and the development of strategic plans.
Many other universities nationwide have undertaken “reengagement” efforts with their Greeks, but, says Kerr, “where I think we go beyond the average program is our standards of excellence. We’re pushing groups to do strategic planning, which is key to moving them forward.” That planning can include changing the nature of recruit-ment so that chapters don’t blindly accept all signups just to beef up membership; practicing risk management at parties; and implementing more educational programs, such as having guest lecturers at chapter events, attend-ing leadership conferences, or visiting art galleries.
Any fraternity or sorority that meets these higher stan-dards is rewarded with the title of “Chapter of Excel-lence,” which comes with other perks, like money to par-ticipate in leadership training and advice on fund-raising from the University’s Office of Development. President Spanier also hosts events for those chapters and talks about their successes when he meets with student and alumni groups. “I use every opportunity I can to give them public support,” he says.
Each fraternity and sorority now submits an annual report, so that review teams made up of students, staff, and alumni can gauge where progress has occurred and where there’s room for improvement. And, of course, there’s always room for improvement.
DANIEL HADAS KNOWS that. Just as he knew back in 2005 that Sigma Phi Epsilon’s national reps had made a mistake when they ousted him. After Hadas was kicked out, his former brothers appealed to their then-regional director, Matt Ontell, to bring Hadas back into the brotherhood. Ontell met with Hadas, and again Hadas’ mettle came out. “The first conversation I had with Matt was a big argument,” Hadas remembers with a grin. “I wanted to know what the new direction of the chapter was about, and the other national reps hadn’t told me. As we talked, Matt came to realize that I’m a reasonable guy.”
Hadas, Ontell, and the chapter’s alumni board president, Bob Horwhat ’89 Eng, worked for months devel-oping a plan to revive the chapter. Their first order was to adopt the national organization’s Balanced Man Pro-gram, under which chapters follow a new template for recruiting. Instead of waiting for recruits to come to them, Balanced Man chapters actively seek out recruits based on academic achievement, participation in extracurriculars, and community involvement. “If we recruit smart guys who are in it for a different purpose, and we focus on academics and staying healthy,” says Craig Templeton, SigEp’s national director, “we find they have a lot less interest in doing stupid things.”
The revamping of SigEp’s recruitment process mirrored the efforts of several other Penn State chapters at the time. In early 2005, for example, Sigma Nu, Theta Chi, and Theta Delta Chi adopted approaches based on recruits’ sense of values—not their desire to party—and extended recruitment beyond the usual week-long rush to a year-round process. Last year, for the first time, sororities pushed back their recruitment period from early September until after Homecoming, allowing prospective members more time to get acclimated to campus and find the sorority that suits them most.
SigEp also eliminated the pledge process altogether, deeming new recruits full members with all the rights and privileges of elder brothers from Day One. Instead of recruits having to, say, clean the chapter house, SigEp’s “initiation” serves only as an educational period in which each new brother studies the fraternity’s ideals and history, attends lectures to learn his responsibilities as a student and a community member, and develops an individualized fitness program (Balanced Man chapters require participation in sports or other exercise regimens). The Balanced Man Program also makes use of “resident scholars”—mentors who live in private quarters in the chapter house, offer academic tutoring, and guide members in other life areas. Rachel Rollo, a grad student majoring in college student affairs, serves as the local chapter’s resident scholar. “My job,” she says, “is to be around, setting a good example, and showing these guys that you can be in col-lege and still live a responsible, mature lifestyle.”
To address the excessive partying, many fraternities are also adopting tighter practices—such as the risk-management team patrolling the SigEp party last November. Since sorority members live in dorms rather than chapter houses, many are adopting “third-party vendor” approaches for their social functions, moving away from holding parties at fraternity houses and instead reserving a night at a local restaurant or bar.
Hadas—who, just as he predicted, was reinstated in SigEp and then elected president—has continued his chapter’s momentum by embracing the Greek Pride Ini-tiative. During the spring 2006 semester, the SigEp house buzzed with lectures by faculty members; discussions with groups like Penn State’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and allies student organization; and fund-raisers, like the Twister Challenge to benefit YouthAIDS, among others.
The real sign of success for SigEp, however, came during rush last fall, as recruits came out in record numbers. On average, the chapter attracts about 15 to 20 new members a year; last fall nearly 40 new members joined. Bill Schrey-er, the retired Merrill Lynch CEO, paid a visit to his old chapter house last September—his first in many years. “I’d heard of the problems you had in the past,” Schreyer told the brothers, “and I’m proud that you took action to solve them. My experience in this house was great, and it didn’t take long after I came here today to get that same feeling.”
But SigEp’s progress hasn’t been without setbacks. Along the way, the intense personal demands neces-sary to push the brotherhood forward have left Hadas and other chapter leaders feeling burned out. Much of the programming they implemented in spring 2006 fell through the cracks in the fall. Because of that, about 10 or 15 new members decided to leave the fra-ternity. “We sold these kids on something and we never gave it to them,” Hadas says with noticeable disappointment. “We lost a lot of good kids because of it.”
“So much of the student leadership on campus, the student philanthropy, the social life, is tied to the success of the Greek system.”
What’s more, neither the Balanced Man Program nor Greek Pride have been an easy sell for all SigEp members. Some of the older brothers remember when the leash wasn’t so tight—and when the chapter president was more friend than dictator. A few see the new ini-tiatives as a drain on the fun of chapter life and prefer the old days of uninhibited partying.
“If they don’t buy into what we’re doing, and they don’t want to be here for the right reasons,” Hadas says, “the only thing I can do is create new programs that weed them out.” In essence, that’s exactly what the Greek Pride Initiative does on a larger scale: It creates programs to focus on the positives, rewards chapters for working toward being their best, and will eventually weed out those that refuse to meet the minimum expec-tations. But, contrary to what some in the Greek com-munity may fear, there’s no intent to do away with chapters at Penn State altogether. “I’ve heard back-ground noise from time to time that I’m personally not supportive of the Greek system,” says President Spanier. “It’s exactly the opposite: A strong, well-functioning Greek system is important. Even though it’s only about 15 percent of our students, so much of the leadership on campus, the student philanthropy, the social life, is tied to the success of the Greek system.”

THE INITIAL SUCCESS of Greek Pride is encouraging. Last year, 95 percent of all chapters completed annual reports to the University, and 87 percent either met or showed progress toward meeting the minimum expectations. More than two dozen applied for Chapter of Excellence status, and nine—including SigEp—were chosen. The others were fraternities Aca-cia and Beta Sigma Beta; sororities Alpha Chi Omega, Alpha Omicron Pi, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and Zeta Tau Alpha; and National Pan-Hellenic Council organizations Kappa Alpha Psi and Zeta Phi Beta.
But the numbers tell only part of the story.
“We’ve seen members going to leadership conferences,” says Vicky Triponey, the vice president. “We’ve seen students holding themselves accountable, because they know more is expected of them.” In addition, more alumni are getting involved in their chapters: Dave Kline ’64 Edu, for example, has helped pay for Sigma Chi members to attend leadership conferences, while David Jones ’54 Com has worked with Tau Kappa Epsilon to help resolve code problems with the borough. Other alumni have funded scholarships or given presentations to chapter members about their careers.
Penn State’s sororities also are seeing a resurgence. After membership had dropped by nearly half between 1990 and 2005, “we finally had an upswing in numbers over the last year,” says Kerr.
There’s been more community service, ranging from cleaning up pollution at Whipple Dam State Park to fund-raisers for organizations like the Red Cross and Make-A-Wish Foundation. The first annual “We Are …Curing Autism Now,” a 5K run organized by the Beta Sigma Beta fraternity and Pi Beta Phi sorority last April, raised an impressive $85,000 for autism research.
Fraternities both on campus and downtown are reno-vating their run-down chapter houses. Beta Theta Pi, on North Burrowes Road on campus, received a $3.5 mil-lion donation from Don Abbey ’70 Lib and is undergo-ing a massive restoration project. Sigma Chi, on Prospect Avenue downtown, began its $2.4 million renovation in January led by Jim Keith ’58 Bus, Cal Stuckeman ’37 A&A, and Ted Junker ’59 H&HD. (See “Extreme Makeover: Greek Edition,” opposite page.)
Meanwhile, SigEp held its annual elections last November, and in January the leaders turned over their duties to a fresh batch of brothers. Hadas relin-quished control to a new president, Nick Umosella, an architectural engineering major from Olney, Md. Hadas says he’s happy to be relieved of the stress. But it’s hard to believe him. While he’s optimistic about his chapter’s new leadership, he confides that the future is by no means certain. Getting 80-some college guys stepping in one direction, let alone the right one, poses its share of challenges—the same challenges Penn State faces with its 80-some chapters. Hadas, like many of Penn State’s Greek leaders, knows there’s still work to be done.