After we got up, and down to the area for our morning keynote speaker, Nick Boyle and I realized we matched, and then we decided to do the Cha Cha Slide, in our chairs. Later in the day, I had people come up to me and say "I love how you guys did the Cha Cha Slide this morning, it brightened up our day". At the speaker though, David Stollman introduced me to a new term: Sororitutes, as well as the concept of Pilgrims and NavaHoes. That said, in addition to many funny anectdotal things he also provided a lot of insight into the way that the FSL community is portrayed within society, by pulling up a video by CollegeHumor, which often parodies Greek Life. The video he pulled up was that of Frat Dad. Other examples include the Brohemian Rhapsody, and many other examples. He, near the end, did pull up a great powerpoint of positive things that greeks have done. There were two in particular that stood out to me, though I don't rememeber their names nor school/chapter, the two examples were how one chapter helped raise $30,000 toward a brothers medical bills for his cancer treatments, and he is now cancer free, and the chapter where a brother donated a kidney to help save one of his brothers lives. I'm hoping to be hearing the name David Stollman much more in the future, be it through Bridgewater State, or just on Twitter, which we are both following each other now.
The recurring theme of seeing people today who I would like to see come to campus was strong today. However before we could get into sessions, we met in our small groups. I found a lot out during our session. Mostly the apparent disconnect between many schools and their greek organizations. We split into groups of 5, and we drew what an accurate representation of our chapter was, where we wanted it to be, and what is standing in the way of that. I was very concerned to see alcohol and drugs as a hinderance and a reality in many organizations, as well as house issues. One chapter I was talking to told of how his chapter just regained status on their campus, and were handed the keys to a multi-million dollar mansion, without having to do work, so the motivation wasn't really there for them to do much to earn it. I liked how he was genuinely concerned by that. On top of that, an issue I saw was grades. One chapter I was talking to flat out didn't have a gpa policy in place. The member flat out said that their organization had 2 members of under a 1.0 gpa, and 15 under a 2.0, the only regulation they have is they need a 2.5 to be on their executive board. It really puts any problem BSU greek life has (for the most part) into perspective. We may have some shortcomings, but on the larger whole, we have less issues than other organizations. Once that exchange ended, we began discussing the tri-circle mentality: things you have absolute control over, some control over, and no control over. The amount of people who said that they had no control over a lot of school-rendered decisions shows how closeminded many schools are toward greek life. A direct quote I took was "A fraternity or sorority could raise $5 million dollars for the philanthropic events we do, and we wouldn't even be recognized, we did more community service than the community service club, and we didn't get any recognition and the community service club did". Granted, greek life is not about the 'thank you's' it's about the 'you're welcomes', but it's still nice to get a pat on the back now and then.
After that ended, and we had our lunch, we were off to sessions. The first session that I went to was one that I looked in the book at, and thought; well, I have interest in the title of it, and after reading it, felt it would be an interesting thing to learn about, titled: Diversity According to 'South Park' and 'Family Guy', by Matt Glowacki.
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| Matt Glowacki and I after the session ended |
He rolled into the packed room and introduced himself with the passion that I thought was very telling of what he would be telling about later. He opened up with a few laughs, and then transitioned into the first clipshow, of the episode of Family Guy that Chris and Peter experiment with liposuction, and Peter goes for it and he changes his entire personality due to the changes in his physical appearance, and defined the concept of Lookism. He transitioned that into the style of runway models being endangered due to the perception of needing to be skinny, and cited the death of a runway model in Madrid, though Madrid was the only place to institute a policy to have a minimum BMI (Body Mass Index) which he also explained as being an out of date system to begin with, and then talked about the Dove Self Esteem Fund, the fact that male eating disorders went up from 2% to 10% in a year, and said one of the truest quotes I've heard in "The most attractive part of someone is self confidence".
After that, we began talking about race issues, by watching the infamous episode of South Park when Randy Marsh is on an episode of Wheel of Fortune and has the letters N_GGERS and the prompt is 'people who annoy you'. The answer was NAGGERS, however that was not what he said, which raises the question: When is it okay to use the N word. We learned the history behind some of the terms which we have somewhat tabooed. Colored was invented by the NAACP in 1909, Black was invented during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and in the 1970s, the more accepted African American came to be. We also spoke on the topic of why Reverend Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson are able to 'accept the apology for the race' when something that is not politically correct happens, as the two have been known bigots of the Jewish community.
What is really telling, is that the fact that Matt made over $200 dollars over the last two Christmas seasons...just by shopping at the mall and people giving him charity. He told the story of a girl from Eastern Kentucky who came up to him after a performance and flat out told him "I'd rather be you than me, people see you at the mall and give you money, when they see me, they just think I'm going to shoplift", and it's quotes like that that make me saddened by the country we live in.
Flat out, this speech was going to be hard to top.
After the session ended, I grabbed another business card and took the picture above, and was off to my next session, titled: The Power of WE: Building Stronger Teams through Social Styles, by Justin Jones-Fasu. It started out as a giant room, and he warned us about the difference between classifying a speech by enthusiasm and by practicality. A speech could be the most enthusiastic thing ever but if you get no pertinent information out of it, then it's not a good speech.
We then got split into groups based off our personality squares. There are four types of personality: analytical, driver, expressive and amiable. I was an amiable. What we had to do, was in our groups, we had to determine what qualities we saw as what our trait was; then choose words to describe our opposite (negatively). Expressive vs Analyitical, and Driver vs Amiable. After saying what we hated (or as the Amiables 'strongly disliked') we had to compile 5 things we liked about the other personality. What I took out of that is that sometimes you have to be able to multitask and be multiple different things, and certain personality types work better for some things better than others.
After that session ended, I was off again, one more time moving one room down, and I was at the Elephants and Onions seminar. It was the only program I went to that was not very well attended, though I feel that made this more of a strong program. It definitely was easier to talk in this one than the other two due to there being fewer people around. We started off by identifying what the term of social justice means.
We then played a game called Airport, in which we, as a group, were wandering around as if we had our heads cut off like chickens would until we were told to stop and pair up, and were given a way to portray the person we were looking at (ie. a person who just passed gas, an ex that the situation ended less than amicably, best friends who haven't seen each other in years, etc.) After that ended we jumped into a game of Strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, and talked about a myriad of topics such as PDA's, religion, welfare, the pledge of allegience, and a few others. We kind of jumped ahead, and did the 'Yeah but'/'But why' part of the exercise while it was going on, which was incredible. Having done this before in high school about topics and having to discuss, I had only received the opinion of students my age then, when at this we had advisors as well as students giving input, as well as students of different backgrounds and cultures. We ended with one of my favorite songs as well, which is the youtube video below.
Once back from sessions, we as a delegation, keeping true to our mentality that Everyday is a great day to be a Bear went to the Black Bear Saloon, and we had a delicious dinner, and came back to the hotel and played some Catchphrase, and now, at 12:30am, Nick is asleep, and Matt, Swiddy, and myself are finishing up our blogs, and I believe it's time I go to bed as well. My alarm is set, and I'll be updating you again in less than 36 hours.
Enjoy the videos and pictures. More will be coming tomorrow.
Thanks for reading!
-Dan Eveline
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