According to the Department of Education, statistics have typically shown that the cumulative grade point average (GPA) of women is significantly higher than that of men on college campuses no matter their race or socioeconomic group. The Interfraternity Council (IFC) hopes to change those statistics on Longwood's campus.
Currently, the average Greek female GPA is a 2.938 and the average Greek male GPA is a 2.672. Dane Summerell, IFC president and member of Theta Chi Fraternity, stated, "When I arrived [at Longwood] you were only required to have a 2.0 to get into a fraternity, and those are pretty low standards. Last year, the IFC executive board made the decision to increase the requirement again for the upcoming semester to a 2.4. We knew people were going to be upset about it, but oddly enough we had a record-breaking number of men joining fraternities that semester."
The GPA of the eight fraternities on campus has been slowly increasing from a 2.0 to a 2.5 for the past three years. Summerell said, "We recognized a problem and [we are attempting] to fix it."
The IFC is a governing body for all eight social fraternities at Longwood through the North-American Interfraternity Conference (NIC). IFC is dedicated to helping the fraternities on campus with the basic principles of the recruitment process while serving as an aid and acting as a collective communication board. They are also actively involved with their philanthropy dinner which raises money for the Friends of Barnabas.
One of the main ongoing focuses of the IFC is to push for all fraternities to choose academics before any extracurricular activities. Billy Boulden, assistant director of student activities, said, "I think our chapters haven't focused on academics as a top priority and focused on other things. Chapters have moved academics to the bottom, but we have lots of conversations on values and such and we have seen academics come back up to the top."
For the fraternities, the GPA has been increasing for the last three years and will continue to increase until fall 2012. Boulden felt that a drastic increase in the GPA requirement would cause a negative effect on the fraternity community. There would have been the possibility of missing lots of impressive new members and the potential of a fraternity dying out due to the radical increase of grades.
Kate Planow, associate director of fraternity and sorority life, felt there was no option other than to gradually increase the GPA. "I think that is the best way to do it, Planow said. "You're not going to go from a 2.0 to a 2.5 right away without losing [new members]."
Summerell said that the gradual increase of GPAs would become a competition among the IFC community. The domino effect of increasing a single fraternity's GPA is already in full effect. The newest fraternity to Longwood's campus, Phi Mu Delta Fraternity, has an entry requirement of a 2.8 cumulative GPA. A 2.8 is the highest GPA requirement on campus and fellow fraternities are already jealous they are not number one anymore. Scott Hull, president of Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity and IFC vice president of scholarship, said, "Adding Phi Mu Delta to our fraternal community is going to give [Sigma Phi Epsilon] an incentive to do that much better. It is a competition and we are shooting to be the best."
Before Phi Mu Delta, Sigma Phi Epsilon had the second highest cumulative GPA, 2.697. Summerell thinks of this as healthy competition, "Men are very competitive and we found that it is a great way to drive [the fraternities] and we use [this method] in IFC all the time."
The GPA has been increased for the fraternities for not only the benefit of the students, but to better the Greek community as a whole. "As a collective unit we are trying to improve our image by constantly raising our standards," said Summerell.
Over the course of the last few years, the IFC has found it to be a challenge to gradually move up to 2.5, but they feel the outcome of success will be worth the obstacles. Originally, not all of the fraternities agreed with the increase and most disliked the changes, but the fraternities slowly came around when they saw the positive effect the grades had on the community.
Summerell explained how he wants to see the IFC community years from now. "I tell my new guys in my fraternity this every year when they join, ‘I want to come back in five years and this be such a good chapter, or in this case IFC community, I would have no chance of joining it.' That being said doesn't mean I want to feel unimportant, but what I want is for them to have made so many improvements and so many strives forward that it would be unattainable at my time."
