Gaps in Greek Lives: Group Cohesiveness and Congruence

This final group project was an interesting self discovery for me. I think this is because living in a Greek community that doesn't foster a sense of community can be pretty draining on one's enthusiastic outlook on change. When I went into this group project, most people will tell you that I was very pessimistic and negative while trying to brainstorm ideas for our "perfect" Greek community. I have discovered that this outlook arose out of the countless subliminal "paslov" reinforcements. A majority of fraternities and sororities are not looking for group cohesiveness.

This is where the first major gap in fictional Greek community and the real life one we currently are in. One of the major differences is that our project community highlighted collaboration heavily between fraternities and sororities. Each Greek house aimed at improving themselves while also improving others. This selfless commonality not only ensured individual chapters were refined into achieving their greatest potential, but the community at large accomplished this as well. The problem with the current fraternal situation is that it lacks heavily in the area of collaboration. In fact it borders on directly hindering collaboration. "Chapter Bashing" is notorious in our Greek Community. Even chapters that have similar values as ours are hated(i.e. called douches) because they don't "carry out" their ideals in a similar fashion. I know from having roommates and floormates in other chapters that this is a common community practice. Luckily, this change would be pretty simple to convert to our fraternal change model and would seriously help with the "resistance" so many of my brothers have brought up in their blogs.

The other major gap in our two groups is community congruence in individual chapter and Greek life values. In our project, each chapter individually had values special to them which fostered intrinsic motivation for maintaining these ideals, and improving their chapter. In a community setting our similar values combined into a unified front which created a communal sense of cultivating individualistic improvement and benefitting the ohio-state community as a whole. As of now, our community is more focused on "ragers" and selfish, inward looking mindset. Although there is the argument that this style benefits individual chapters, the Greek community's image as a whole is being negatively affected. When one chapter is "bashed" then the community as a whole gets grouped in this negative stigma.

Both of these differences really explain the rest of the differences in our final presentation and Greek life as it is now. This is because the rest of the differences are actually similarities once these two disparities are corrected. Active self improvement of character, community involvement/ betterment, and fostering lifelong social etiquette/ lifelong positive friendships are just a couple of similarities that would show if we fixed our group cohesiveness and congruence.

Any thoughts?
Coz