From the outside, it is very difficult to tell exactly what fraternities and sororities do or don’t do for their members. What an outsider can do, however, is give an honest opinion of his or her perception of fraternities and sororities, which I feel, is very valuable to the organizations. It can allow members to understand how their organizations are perceived, what are the misconceptions, and why they may or may not be attracting new members.

Having established my outside perspective, I believe that the general idea and philosophy of fraternities and sororities is to provide a positive community environment for their members, and that in their purest form, fraternities and sororities can do just that. Unfortunately, most fraternities and sororities are not in their “purest form,” and have been corrupted by wayward members so that now, they do not provide a positive community environment for their members.

It is important to understand the language of “positive community environment.” Were the question only concerned with providing a community environment for their members, my answer would have been an enthusiastic “yes.” Fraternities and sororities are perhaps the closest groups on college campuses. On many campuses, they live, study, and party together. The “rush” process alone is enough to bring several wannabe members together as one cohesive unit. Often, within fraternities and sororities, students make lifetime friends and professional contacts; they build a support system away from home that for many students is the ship that keeps them afloat in the vast ocean that is college.

The problem, however, lies in the fact that the question included the word “positive.” For all of the great things fraternities and sororities do for their members, much of it, though pleasurable, does not seem positive. We have all heard stories of fraternities and sororities placing their pledges in compromising and even dangerous situations all for the sake of brotherhood or sisterhood. Such stories are more frequent than these organizations would have the general public believe. The process that pledges have to endure to make it to the positive community environment can often humiliate them, bringing them down to the point that they feel that walking away from such a group would make the person less than the others. Admittedly, that brings into question the self-esteem of the pledge, but it also makes me question why an overwhelming number of students with self-esteem issues are drawn to fraternities and sororities. Instead of being uplifting societies focused on the growth and maturity of its members, the community environment can often become a crutch, which is anything but positive.

In essence, my argument is not that fraternities and sororities are bad, because without more specific definition of the terms analyzed, of course bad examples will run rampant. My argument, however, is that as a whole, it seems that fraternities and sororities have departed from their true purposes; they have lost touch with the principles and values upon which they were founded. Finding those principles again and rebuilding their lost legacies would be an amazing step toward becoming truly positive community environments, and it would take work from all such groups in order to fix the way outsiders perceive the groups as a whole.