OUR VIEWS Consensus Opinion

Speaker Support

Unfortunately for the Tech community, the bill to partially fund Maya Angelou's keynote speech for Finding Common Ground has been met with some resistance from the Graduate Student Senate. Their timing seems inappropriate, since Angelou has already been invited and the Box Office has begun to issue tickets to the event.

Although it is true that such a prolific speaker requires extensive funding, the Senate should keep in mind that the event has the potential to benefit a large number of both graduate and undergraduate students ; students elect their SGA representatives because they expect them to allocate their mandatory Student Activity Fees in ways that will most benefit them.

While the keynote address may be the most costly portion of Finding Common Ground, a majority of the cost is covered by private donors, for which the Tech community should be thankful-SGA does not have to take on the entire cost alone.

Tech could possibly find a way to cover the expense this time if SGA were not to fund the event, but that choice would hurt future chances of administrators supporting student life activities without 100 percent of the funding being secured in advance.

Tough Lesson

A recent incident of underage drinking at a Delta Sigma Phi party resulted in the fraternity being placed on social probation. This event and its consequence serve as reminders that underage drinking and substance abuse are problems that Greek organizations need to be prepared to face. Determined individuals can find ways to avoid security measures, but fraternities should do all they can to prevent alcohol abuse. Still, the fraternity reacted quickly to the incident, notifying the proper authorities and going dry before sanctions were handed down making their decision mandatory.

Delta Sigma Phi made responsible choices in the aftermath of the event, such as rewriting their bylaws and deciding to pay for their risk manager to attend Training for Intervention ProcesdureS (TIPS), a program designed to prevent intoxication, underage drinking and drunk driving. With most fraternity parties being open to all of campus, the incident could have easily happened at any house. While fraternities may want to withold information about incidents to protect their image, they should realize that it is important to disclose problems quickly so that other groups can learn from events like this and protect themselves from having the same thing happen to them.