Rush week focused on brotherhood and bonding

By Douglas Sulenta
The Collegian

For the fraternity system, Rush Week is as time honored a tradition as the Super Bowl is for football fans.

An event that takes place early in each semester, Rush Week is an opportunity for the fraternities to display their finest points to prospective members. For prospective members, Rush Week provides a chance for them to meet with their potential brothers.

According to the Greek membership, the common misconception of Rush Week is that it is a week full of booze and parties. Though there are parties, the purpose of the events are to promote brotherhood and get to know prospective members. Many of the fraternities attempted to do with a series of events that included poker games, basketball games, soccer games, bar-b-cue’s, and in one instance a closely monitored and judged series of boxing matches.

Each prospective fraternity brother interviewed said their main reason for “rushing” their fraternity was the sense of brotherhood they felt from their prospective brothers. Many of the prospectives, as they are called, are from other areas and don’t know people around Fresno. Fraternities, thus, provide them the easiest route to meeting people and making friends.

“These guys here are the most welcoming people I’ve ever met in my life,” said Marc Jamieson, a junior who transferred from King State College in Massachusetts and is rushing at Delta Sigma Phi. “I’ve only been in California for three weeks and in the first week these guys welcomed me with open arm. I’m in a whole new environment and everybody is nice to me.”

A student identified only as James, an undeclared first year freshman is rushing Sigma Alpha Epsilon in part at the behest of his brother. “My brother was in a fraternity and told me that you meet a lot of life long friends. He said that it makes the college experience better.” On his decision to pledge at SAE he said, “I checked out all the other ones (fraternities). When I came over here I liked hanging out with all the guys and they reminded me of my friends back home.”

This year, though, there has been a shadow cast on the events of Rush Week. With the recent incident at FIJI, there was a much tighter lid put on the activities that the fraternities held. No new rules were put into place, but the existing rules governing the events were enforced much more stringently.

Kevin Roche, president of the Interfraternity Council (IFC) said that the events this year were being kept pretty low key. “One of the biggest differences this year is that everybody is kind of on thin ice right now,” he said. “Everyone is on their toes. Rush week is typically when a lot of the problems occur. There is so much competition and rivalry between the houses and they throw parties and have big events.” He says these events are the ones most likely to get out of hand simply because they are higher profile and tend to attract more people from outside the Greek system.

He said to combat this problem, a series of rules governing Rush Week that have been highly ignored in the past were to be strictly enforced this week. “We have certain restrictions we put in place that were kind of lax before and now they’re really ratcheted down.”

The rules in effect during Rush Week this year, which ran from last Tuesday through Thursday, included a ban of anybody in the house other than brothers and prospectives. Also, there was no alcohol allowed in the house. The rules governing Rush Week are only in effect between the hours of 6 and 10pm. After this the rules become slightly more relaxed.

The enforcement of these rules falls into the hands of the IFC. Each night during Rush Week, IFC members traveled to all of the fraternities to monitor activities and make sure no rules were being violated.

In another attempt to curb future problems, all fraternity parties are now to be Greek and guest list only.

Roche said that this is because it is much easier to control a person that is among friends than a person who is there and knows hardly anybody. “When you have some guy nobody knows coming in trying to pick a fight, it’s a lot harder to talk him out of it than a person everybody knows.”

During the semester there are also other regulations in place that the fraternities must adhere to, in order to insure a trouble free environment. One of these is that any party with over 100 guests has to be officially filed with the university. At these events campus security will show up regularly to check in and make sure everything is progressing safely. Also at these parties there must be a third party security company present at all times.

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