IFC and Panhellenic Council Elect Officers
Steven J. Levine
The IFC’s newly elected executive board will be take office on Wednesday November 11, led by President T. Ryan Schoen ’11. The board has modified its positions, combining the former programming and recruitment chairs into one position and creating a new publicity chair.
Schoen, a brother in Kappa Sigma, has not previously held a position on the IFC’s Executive Board, though as president of Kappa Sigma he sat on President’s Council, which meets every other week with the IFC president, allowing him to see how the IFC Executive Board functioned, he said.
Schoen says he has focused his leadership on the IFC in an effort to continue bettering the Greek community at MIT.
Schoen sees the IFC President as “trying to guide the IFC, guid[ing]the entire fraternity community, …[and] making sure the voice of the fraternity community is heard accurately.” Schoen hopes to makes the Executive Board more transparent, making everything a two-way communication between the IFC and the individual fraternities.
The vice president is Clark D. Minor, a sophomore in Phi Kappa Sigma, commonly known as Skullhouse. Minor previously served as Executive Assistant, a position which he describes as “taking care of day to day affairs of IFC, [giving] a good insight into how the process works.”
Minor ran because of his positive experience last year, he said. Building off of his experiences, Minor is concerned about the IFC’s budget. Minor says that since over half of the funding for fraternities comes from member dues, “it is very important to run a streamlined budget.”
Minor plans to improve the Delegate’s Council, which consists mainly of freshmen and sophomores, with two delegates from each fraternity, aimed at allowing interfraternal communication. Many fraternities are “somewhat isolated from other chapters,” says Minor, who hopes that Delegates Council can be better used to foster communication between fraternities, allowing other fraternities to see how things are run differently throughout the Greek system.
Minor wants to use Delegate’s Council as a way to educate new members about the IFC: “I feel like a lot of new members could benefit enormously from more education about IFC’s purposes and programs,” such as funding opportunities, events run by the IFC, and the IFC’s campus wide impact.
Further education about the role of the IFC in the fraternity is a goal shared by both Schoen and Minor, they said. In the fraternity system at this time, both say there are many misconceptions about the role of the IFC on campus. Though the IFC is commonly seen as a policing force, both emphasize that it is in fact much more of a governing body. Minor says “there is a big difference between governing and policing.” He sees the role of the IFC as “advocacy for the fraternity system … maintaining good public image and relations.”
Schoen and Minor both want to present the IFC not a group that is concerned with policing all the activities of the fraternities, but rather as an advocacy group. The IFC advocates for the fraternities to Cambridge, Boston, and the MIT community, seeking to maintain a positive public image for the Greek system at MIT. Minor says one of the goals of the coming year is “to eliminate unfounded distrust and fear that some people have of IFC,” based off of the misconception of the IFC as a police force.
The newly elected Executive Board consists of members from Kappa Sigma, Phi Kappa Sigma, Sigma Nu, and Phi Kappa Theta, with the first three each being represented twice. Schoen says that though the membership of the Board is “not exactly evenly distributed,” the affiliation of the members of the board should not affect the proceedings of the board.
“When you walk through that door, you leave your affiliation behind,” says Schoen. Both Schoen and Minor are optimistic about the group assembled for Executive Board.
The positions on the IFC’s executive have shifted with this election. The board now includes a Publicity Chair, with the former Recruitment Chair and Programming Chair being combined into a single Recruitment and Programming Chair. In the past, the Recruitment Chair had been in charge of all aspects of rush, from logistics of events to advertising.
Similarly, the Programming Chair organized large interfraternal events that occurred during the year, the largest being Greek Week, sometime in the spring. It was found that the positions led to an uneven distribution of work, with an extremely high workload while their respective events were going on, with little responsibility through the rest of the year.
The new Recruitment and Programming Chair will be in charge of all logistics and organization of the large events, such as Rush and Greek Week, while the Public Relations chair will be in charge of publicity for these events.
The Executive Board will meet for the first time in its new form on Tuesday, Nov. 10, a day before being officially instated on Nov. 11.