In early December (2012), I attended the Association of Fraternity Advisors Annual Meeting. While there, I attended a session hosted by the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC). Ultimately, I wrote a blog post about that session, in which I was quite critical and suggested the end of NPHC. In response, I received a considerable number of supportive emails.

However, some were not so supportive. In one email, the author, after asking to be removed from my email list, noted:

If I may be candid with you … I think you need to learn when to pull back. It seems that your only goal is to hyper-complain and overly-critique the ills of Black-Greekdom and provide no substantive solutions. I see nothing wrong with you building your publication vita, but at the expense of denigrating Black Greeks? How does that help anyone but you? If I am wrong, I will stand corrected.

Additionally, I recently had a Greek Life Student Affairs Professional who attended the AFA conference and sat in on a panel that you were on. He … asked me if I knew you. I said I knew of your work … He then went on to report his “being turned off by your behavior on that panel.” His words were, “this guy doesn’t know when to quit.” I only nodded my head and suggested that you are quite passionate about Black Greeks. (internally I couldn’t help but agree with the brother, which is why I don’t want to receive any more emails from you)

My pushback to the email was simple. In my AFA session, much of my talk was about the grand ideals of BGLOs. In discussing the challenges facing BGLOs, my co-presenter and I recommended a range of solutions to those issues. In my work, more generally, I will admit that my collaborators and I are not writing how-to manuals for fixing BGLOs. We are producing scholarship, but that doesn’t mean that there are not solutions to be found in the work we do.

For some BGLO members, any critique of BGLOs is too much of a critique. And for BGLO members who aren’t reading the growing scholarship on BGLOs, and as such are not privy to the solutions that flow from that work, it seems like I (and my collaborators) are not presenting any solutions. Ironically, my frequent collaborator, Dr. Matthew Hughey, and I have been talking about writing a book loosely entitled Making BGLOs Better, where we would lay-out solutions to a range of issues confronting BGLOs. My fraternity brother, Dameon Proctor, once asked me who would read the book. I told him I thought few people would. His suggestion was to blog, tweet, or Facebook post the solutions. People have short attention spans, I suppose. So, what follows are some ideas:

In order to make clear to Greek Affairs Advisors the history, structure, and guidelines of NPHC, NPHC should mail information packets directly to Greek Affairs Advisors on campuses with NPHC organizations. To identify those campuses, individuals, and mailing addresses, NPHC can get the directory of such individuals and mailing labels for them from the National Interfraternity Conference. The cost will be less than $150.00.

To help Greek Affairs Advisors better grapple with the issues confronting them on their respective campuses vis-à-vis BGLOs, NPHC should develop a web-based chat-room. The chat-room should be moderated by BGLO members with graduate (and relevant professional) education in areas relevant to advising college student organizations, especially BGLOs. These moderators role should be to guide and aid Greek Affairs Advisors in better advising BGLO college chapter.

BGLOs should establish committees, probably comprised of members who work in education, to monitor college chapters that are in trouble academically (and maybe in other ways, e.g., low numbers). Those chapters that fall below a certain standard should be audited to determine what best-practices can be employed to bring those chapters up to standard.

To better ascertain the academic standing of BGLO college chapters, BGLOs need to be better about collecting data. While college chapters may be negligent in turning such information in to their national headquarters, BGLOs can quite easily get this information off of the websites of university Greek Affairs offices. If not available on the websites, I suspect that many universities keep such data which can be obtained by requesting such information.

As a general principle, BGLOs need to end their anxieties over or indifference to scholarship on BGLOs. The truth of the matter is that, contrary to popular thinking, folks producing scholarship on BGLOs are not in it for the money. If that weren’t the case, they/we would be publishing with Simon Shuster and not in academic journals or with scholarly book publishers. Even if such scholarship was simply for profit, a better question is whether the scholarship has some value to the organizations. I suggest that a better educated member about the history, culture, and contemporary issues facing BGLOs may be better informed and thus better poised to help the BGLOs best actualize their ideals.

Research suggests that while BGLO members may exhibit explicit race-consciousness, it also suggests that they—especially younger members—have automatic, subconscious pro-white/anti-black biases. These biases may impact BGLO members’ academic achievement, development and sustaining of fictive-kinship ties, and commitment to BGLOs, racial uplift activities. One way to alter such biases is via a reasonable education on issues of race. Accordingly, BGLOs might think to incorporate more black history into the Membership Intake Processes.

To get the best ideas on the table for moving BGLOs forward, BGLO leaders (including NPHC leaders) need to stop conferring only with individuals who they like or know well or are friends with. They should begin to seek the advice and counsel of those who are possessed of expertise in areas that are relevant to BGLOs’ growth. For example, the two primary leaders of NPHC are members of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity. They should reach out to Dr. Matthew Hughey—sociologist, leading scholar on BGLOs, and Phi beta Sigma member—to see what insights he has on how to move BGLOs forward. Other organizations might simply reach out to members with backgrounds in a range of disciplines—e.g., organizational behavior—to see what guidance they might provide.

Finally, with regard to the issue of hazing, one way to change behavior is to change people’s beliefs about the issue in question. One way to change BGLO members’ beliefs about the utility of hazing is to help them better understand the problematic history and trajectory of the phenomena. And that won’t happen with passing references to this or that hazing incident. And it won’t happen by telling college members that hazing has zero benefits, because a host of social scientific theories and new empirical research shatter that myth. However, BGLOs need to develop a detailed accounting of hazing incidents—dating back at least a few decades—and recount those incidents in detail during MIP, MIP training, and during sessions at regional and national conventions. The occasional, pass-through shaming and finger-wagging hasn’t and won’t cut it. Something much more robust is needed. But this will necessitate a thorough review of court opinion and other documents as well as news accounts.