Being a fraternity leader is a difficult position. You are often put in the position to make difficult decisions that directly impact your best friends – your fraternity brothers. When these situations occur, and they will, you need to have the courage to follow your convictions.
My fraternity had one particularly memorable and stressful incident that put our courage to the test.
We had one of our brothers quit the fraternity a few weeks prior to becoming a serious problem. He became heavily involved in drugs, and decided that was more important than the fraternity. However, we had not made the arraignments yet to move him out of the house because we needed his rent to make ends meet (poor decision).
One day several of us returned to the house to see that the ex-brother was smoking pot in his room along with several of his friends. Our house had a strict no-drug policy, and this situation would prove to become challenging.
We confronted him, and forced him to get take the drugs off the property. We had the discussion with him that he needed to move out.
While that was an easy call from a fraternity perspective, we really weren’t doing anything to get our friend help. Even though this ex-brother had his issues, he was still someone we cared about.
So we went to the university and reported the incident. This forced him to confront the decisions he was making, and get him help. It also put on display for the rest of the fraternity the strong stance we were going to take against drugs. This proved to be a powerful deterrent.
This was a very difficult decision for us to make, but in the long run proved to be the right one. The fraternity overcame this problem and became stronger because of it because our fraternity leaders were not afraid to do what they believed was right.