I should really make it a point not to go to IFC elections. To maintain impartiality, I will not use the names of any candidates or any fraternities directly in this blog. That won’t stop the curious from going and looking them up, but that’s no concern of mine.
One of the positions I thought could be easier to determine if ones’ vote was the more appropriate choice is for the IFC’s recruitment position. The logic here is that looking at a fraternity’s membership intake over the past four semesters is a strong indicator of their abilities to recruit, what brought these individuals in and what they’ve been doing since then (in this case, one candidate is a junior, and although I can’t find anything on the other candidate’s fraternity website or on facebook, I would at least hope that he’s a junior. Otherwise, we all just made a terrible mistake, because a sophomore is in no way qualified for such a position).
So of course, the new OFSA report has been released [1] (yay!). As for the candidates, well say the first is from fraternity X, and the second from fraternity Y. Here’s their membership numbers:
Fall ’06, Spr ’07, Fall ’07, Spr ’08
X: 18, 37, 32, 45
Y: 40, 63, 44, 59
I’m inclined to think that fraternity X must have tried something new that was successful. I’m inclined to think Fraternity Y did roughly the same program both years, and it didn’t pay off as well last year. (Please don’t bother posting the “smaller number, better quality pledge” argument. We’ve all been around the block enough times to know that with the number of bids fraternities “bestow”, it becomes a game of chance with other houses and therefore that argument is a load of bullshit). We elected Y. Granted, you can’t exactly pull this information up in the middle of the meeting, and you don’t find out the candidates until the meeting in many cases. I s’pose what helped me make my choice is that Y wants to retry the failed “Meet for Greeks” program that I criticized in a previous entry. In a sense, this is looking back on the decision to see if it was a good one. For the system, it’s increasingly apparent that it wasn’t.
But hey, what do I know? I’m just letting statistics play a role in my judgment.
[1]http://www.lgbtrc.cornell.edu/dos/cms/greek/upload/OFSA-AR08-final.pdf
Ithacating in Cornell Heights 