‘Constant Firefighting’: Greek-Life Staffs Are Underpaid and Overworked. Here’s What Some Colleges Are Doing About It.

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When Lori Reesor started in the summer of 2018 as the University of Wisconsin’s new vice chancellor for student affairs, she wasted no time re-evaluating the campus’s relationship with Greek Life.

The weekend before her first day, a video showing a television dropped from the Kappa Sigma house and barely missing a female student went viral. Not even one week in and Reesor had her first fraternity scandal.

Last spring Reesor commissioned an external review of Greek life on the campus. When the report was released on August 29, it included 49 recommendations divided among six areas. The top recommendation for the area titled “Institutional Relationship” was blunt: “More Fraternity and Sorority Life staff, or distributed contacts in other departments. The type of increased engagement, accountability and connection cannot happen in the current structure.”

The understaffed office of fraternity and sorority life, or FSL, was creating a “bottleneck” between upper-level administrators and Greek students and alumni, the report concluded. “Over 4,000 students and alumni are communicating up to FSL, and the entire campus administration is communicating down — there is not enough bandwidth to cover all the needs,” the report stated. “This reality forces FSL staff into a constant firefighting mode and only the items with the most immediate priority are addressed promptly.”

That phenomenon isn’t unique to Wisconsin’s flagship campus in Madison. Despite that Greek life has one of the highest risk potentials on campuses, it is often the lowest priority in terms of allocated resources. As colleges nationwide strive to curb abuses within the Greek system, some are recognizing that staff members working with chapters every day are often forced into a reactive mind-set, hindering progress.

Understaffed and Overlooked

Greek-life officers at universities are frequently the youngest and lowest-paid and experience the highest rates of turnover, said Gentry McCreary, chief executive officer of Dyad Strategies, a risk-management firm that works with colleges.

McCreary himself recalled working 80-hour weeks as director of Greek affairs for the University of Alabama while being paid “beans compared to other functional units in student affairs.” He soon took a different job as an associate dean of students where he was paid more, worked far fewer hours, and had fewer headaches.

“A lot of the good ones leave fraternity and sorority life for greener pastures,” McCreary said. “A lot of people do what I did and look around and realize: Hey, I’m killing myself for nothing. The university isn’t staffing this office the way it needs to be staffed.”

Making Fraternities Safer

Bringing problems out into the open and promoting confidential reporting have helped lift the veil of secrecy that perpetuates abusive behavior.

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The data support McCreary’s claims. Of 61 different heads of divisions and departments surveyed by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources in 2014, chief campus Greek-life administrators had the lowest median pay, at $56,045. The next-lowest median pay belonged to the chief campus bookstore administrator, at $63,000.

According to a survey conducted by the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisers in the spring of 2016, 57 percent of Greek-life staff had zero to five years of experience, compared with 15 to 20 percent for student-affairs professionals on the whole. The survey also found the average age of campus Greek-life staff members was 32, with the most common age being 27. Lynda Wiley, executive director of the association, said that while a new survey is planned for this year, she hasn’t noticed any trends that will make the results “dramatically different.”

Having so many small Greek-life staffs across the country, McCreary said, means “they have two dozen initiatives they’re working on but not enough resources to move the needle on any of those initiatives.” And when a Greek-life office is forced into the “firefighting mode” as the Wisconsin reviewers described, proactive safety measures often fall by the wayside.

Changes at Clemson

When Tucker Hipps, a 19-year-old Sigma Phi Epsilon pledge at Clemson University, died during a run with members of the chapter in 2014, the university quickly took action, suspending all 24 of its fraternities’ initiation programs and hiring a consulting firm to review the Greek system. At the time, the Clemson Fraternity and Sorority Life department consisted of two full-time staffers and three graduate assistants.

After the review, Clemson initiated a Fraternity and Sorority Life fee, $60 a semester, that was added to the tuition of all Greek students. The fee funds two additional full-time staff members, an administrative coordinator, and educational programming around hazing and alcohol to reduce risky behaviors.

While the additional fee was initially met with grumbling from students, Gary Wiser, director of fraternity and sorority life at Clemson, said it transformed how much programming and support his office could actually provide. “After the first semester it was implemented, after the students saw how much they were getting out of it, I think it just became part of the experience,” Wiser said.

But when universities don’t have the budget to expand staffs or offer more funding, using other departments is another option.

The Wisconsin Greek-life review observed: “Among many student affairs staff members there exists a sense that the fraternity/sorority students ‘belong’ to FSL alone. One staff member problematically referred to them as ‘their (FSL) students’ — specifically implying they were not hers.”

That mind-set permeates student-affairs offices across the country, McCreary said. Top administrators, he said, are “laying all the blame at the feet of the couple administrators in charge of thousands of students.”

John Mountz, director of Greek life at East Carolina University, has found success by leaning heavily on other departments to provide expertise on student health. He even called his office more of a “referral service” to make sure Greek students receive support. By approaching risk reduction for Greek life as a campuswide issue, Mountz said he’s seen a decreased sense among Greek members that the administration is singling them out for problems that exist throughout the university.

Better support for Fraternity and Sorority Life offices must come from the top, McCreary said: “The president of the university, the vice president of the university saying, ‘These are our students. These are everyone’s students.’”

That’s the message Reesor is hoping to send now that the Wisconsin report has been released. Already, she plans to heed its recommendation to re-evaluate the school’s Fraternity and Sorority Life staffing model.

“This is certainly an internal thing that I’ve asked our folks to look at. How do we compare to other institutions, what are the models that other universities are doing?” Reesor said. “We’re trying to get ahead of these things so we don’t face the same situations some of my colleagues are experiencing on other campuses.”

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.