“Whose Deed Follows His Word”
The lions had always bothered Chris Hallam. Standing on either side of the entrance to the chapter house, they looked forlorn and neglected, their paint chipped, discolored, and faded, as if they were animals left behind in the cages of a traveling carnival. The sad cats lacked the right scale. Maybe half the size of the real thing, they were far too small for the white columns in front of the once-grand home. The statues sent a message about the state of the chapter—an accurate one, Hallam understood quite quickly.
The young men of Ohio State University’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter had turned to him for help. They needed a new volunteer adviser. They elected Hallam, though “elected” might have been too strong a word. After a few beers, they sent him an e-mail. Hallam, in his late twenties, had never even belonged to a fraternity. When he was an undergraduate at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, Theta Chi had blackballed him. Now, working as an Ohio State residence hall director, he had grown to like some of SAE’s members. With his master’s in higher education and student affairs, Hallam also appreciated a challenge, a way to use his newfound knowledge about adolescent development and social dynamics. Energetic, trim, and youthful, even if his hair hadn’t survived his post-collegiate life, Hallam had always wondered about the potential of fraternities to mold young men. Here was his chance to make a difference.
The lions were the least of his problems. The membership rolls had atrophied to several dozen, hardly enough to fill the dilapidated house. The boiler kept breaking, lead paint needed removal, and thousands of dollars appeared to be missing from the chapter treasury. Its few members were so disorganized that they had thrown a philanthropy event, a sorority powder-puff football game, that had actually managed to lose $50. They screamed at each other in chapter meetings. Some arrived drunk. The house even had a “slush fund” for alcohol. A pledge had nearly passed out after being told to drink a bottle of vodka. The “pledge educator” used to teach new members how to break beer bottles on their own heads. Although the lions were the chapter’s official mascot, another animal might have better embodied the state of the fraternity: its pet rabbit, which left droppings all over the house.
Yet SAE at Ohio State had a proud history. On the day of its installation in 1892, three other Ohio chapters came to mark the celebration in Columbus, Ohio, in a suite of rooms at the luxurious Chittenden Hotel, which then served as the residence of Governor William McKinley. To mark the occasion, SAE made McKinley an honorary member. Later, McKinley wore his SAE badge at his inauguration as the twenty-fifth US president in 1897 and, to this day, the only one to have belonged to the fraternity.
Ohio State remains fertile territory for fraternities. One of the largest public universities in America, with a football stadium bigger than those housing NFL teams, Ohio State has 60,000 students, and its size can make the bonds of Greek life seem especially attractive. But the twenty-first century had been unkind to SAE. In 2001, Ohio State administrators shut the chapter after 108 years on campus. The members had become best known for throwing beer bottles and frozen water balloons at pedestrians, cars, and other houses. One of the chapter’s own advisers had called its behavior “inexcusable.”
Now, to turn the chapter around, Hallam befriended the young men while setting boundaries. He met each member for a meal and joined the chapter’s Sunday dinners at a Japanese steak house. He visited before parties and sat with members as they watched professional wrestling on TV. He encouraged the men to require ties and jackets at chapter meetings, which he attended himself.
“You can choose to break the rules,” he would tell them. “But, if you are caught, no one gets to complain, and you admit it. My job comes first. I would never lie to the university or hide anything.”
Hallam urged the men to dream big. He said they should compete for national SAE honors and, one day, the John O. Moseley Zeal Award, which honors the chapter in the United States that best reflects the values of a True Gentleman.
The response from his charges was less than enthusiastic: “Do not be an idiot,” a member named Kevin Bowen told him. “You’re looking for greatness. We’re just not there.”
Hallam also insisted the chapter would get new lions. Bowen was skeptical. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “We’re never getting new lions.”
The adviser viewed the young men, like the house, as fixer-uppers. Hallam had to ask the university to make an exception for one prospective member with poor grades. “I didn’t know where I was going in life,” the member would recall later. “Hallam saw something in me and put his neck on the line.” To fulfill Hallam’s vision, the chapter changed the way it recruited new members. Officers ignored legacy preference and began judging prospects on their merits. The chapter welcomed more first-generation college students and members of minority groups. In 2009, the brothers initiated Hallam himself as a member of the fraternity. “It’s a privilege to be an SAE,” Hallam told me. “I waited thirteen years for that badge.”
Hallam was proudest of how the chapter’s members shifted their attitudes. The brothers looked out for each other. Over the years, three members had been hospitalized for depression; one had tried to kill himself by drinking Drano. The members rallied around the men and visited them in the hospital, which eased the transition back onto the campus and through graduation. “I’m here for you,” individual members would tell the returning brothers. After the racist Oklahoma video surfaced in 2015, the chapter hosted a campus-wide diversity presentation and helped minority fraternities raise money for their philanthropy events.
Hallam, who is openly gay, worked from the beginning to make the chapter more welcoming to brothers who didn’t fit the traditional vision of fraternity masculinity. When he started out as an adviser, Hallam heard a member lash out at a chapter meeting by calling another member “a pansy faggot.”
“You know I’m gay, right?” he said, pulling the member aside.
A couple of years later, he witnessed the same student admonish a housemate who said “faggot”: “We don’t use that word here.” In 2012, Donovan Golich, a freshman member, stood up in front of thirty-nine pledges and let them know he was gay. “It was really a nonissue with them,” said Golich, who said he would bring his boyfriend to chapter events. “You come as you are. We are going to accept you that way.”
The Ohio State chapter’s greatest test came in February 2015, when Mike Moore, the president, began hearing reports of a member’s aggressive treatment of women. The culminating incident occurred during spring break in Panama City Beach, Florida, when the member brought a woman to his hotel room, then allegedly performed a sex act on her after she told him to stop. “He eventually stopped and apologized profusely, but she still felt incredibly uncomfortable and was not OK with what happened,” a member told Moore in a text. Moore, who had not been on the trip, interviewed members and the woman, who was also an Ohio State University student. She confirmed what had happened. “That was pretty much it for me,” Moore told me. “I didn’t feel comfortable with this anymore.”
Moore called Hallam, who had since taken a position as associate director of housing at the University of Cincinnati but was still overseeing SAE volunteer advisers. SAE expelled the fraternity member accused of the sexual assault. Moore shared his report with the university and also testified before a disciplinary proceeding. It was difficult for him to turn on a brother, but he felt he needed to protect the fraternity. “I knew this was not the chapter I joined,” Moore said.
Soon after, the chapter applied for the Zeal Award. Its application noted that members won many university-wide Greek awards such as Man of the Year, Outstanding Chapter President, and Volunteer of the Year. The chapter raised $14,000 for Children’s Miracle Network, SAE’s favored charity, which provides for pediatric care, and that was a 50 percent increase from the previous year. Over four years, chapter membership had tripled, to 115.
In August 2015, on the national fraternity’s annual leadership cruise, members filed across a stage. At long last, they had won the Zeal Award. Hallam had so inspired the chapter that its members fulfilled their dream, which many had considered unattainable. Several weeks later, this achievement would become even more pivotal in Hallam’s life in a way no one could have anticipated. One day at work, he collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. There, at thirty-six years old, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The doctor gave him a year to live. After he told his parents, he called Moore. Over the course of their time at the fraternity, they had become like family—like brothers.
On a Monday evening several months later, Hallam asked to make a guest appearance via Skype at the Ohio State chapter house. Moore put a laptop on a high table so that Hallam could see the signs of his handiwork. Through the computer screen, he addressed seventy-five men in ties and jackets. Hallam knew the formality was the result of a $5 fine the fraternity had instituted for showing up to chapter meetings in jeans, sweatshirts, and flip-flops. Hallam looked pale but otherwise spoke clearly and with purpose.
“Before I pass, I’m going to get the chapter some new lions,” he said. “It’s the one goal I have left to achieve.”
The men shouted and cheered: “Phi Alpha!”
Hallam wanted the lions to be special. They would be tall, fierce, and hewn from marble. They would rival the sentinels standing before the grandest old chapters of the South. They wouldn’t come cheap, but Hallam had a plan.
He had life insurance. He wasn’t married and didn’t have children. It would be his final gift to the fraternity he loved.
FRATERNITY LOYALTY RUNS deep. Many SAE brothers told me a version of a story that ended with, “The fraternity changed my life,” or even “The fraternity saved my life.” One student had suffered a devastating rejection from a first love; another lost his sense of mission after an injury kept him sidelined from varsity sports. A third worried he couldn’t cut it academically. Each time, they said their brothers helped them survive and even thrive. Sometimes, this loyalty can be writ large. In 2012, Bob Dax, the longtime alumni adviser of the Carnegie Mellon University SAE chapter, was diagnosed with ALS, the degenerative illness often called Lou Gehrig’s disease. In his honor, his brothers dedicated their goofy, annual fund-raiser to Dax. It was called the Donut Dash. Members run a mile, eat half a dozen donuts, then run another mile. In 2016, the event raised a record $175,000. Other efforts remain private. At California State University at Northridge, Alexi Sciutto found out his mother had been diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. His SAE brothers helped him raise money to fight the disease; then, on his mother’s deathbed, they made her an honorary member. “I’ll do whatever needs to be done to keep SAE alive,” Sciutto told me. “And I’ll do it until I die.”
These bonds can’t be dismissed lightly in a world where scattered families and social media make genuine human connection increasingly precious. But can they be saved from the pathologies of Greek life? Fraternities have all kinds of power: financial, political, and historical. Do they also have the power to change? Despite their love of dubious traditions, fraternities have, in fact, evolved during their two-century history in higher education. Often, it has been from necessity. Outside pressure forced reform. Fraternity men have reimagined their values to welcome other religions and races. They have even led campaigns to abolish their own organization when they became convinced it served the greater good.
Consider the evolution of the first fraternity, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded in 1776. In 1831, it abandoned secrecy, a core feature of the brotherhood. Setting itself apart from the newer social fraternities, Phi Beta Kappa would focus on scholarship. Whereas early fraternities worked in opposition to faculties, professors became key members of Phi Beta Kappa. The organization, perhaps because of its focus on academic merit, dispensed with discrimination long before social fraternities did. In the 1870s, chapters at the University of Vermont and Wesleyan inducted the first women. Yale and the University of Vermont elected African Americans. Today, the organization has 286 chapters and half a million members. Since its founding, its inductees have gone on to have illustrious careers, among them seventeen presidents, thirty-nine Supreme Court justices, and more than 130 Nobel laureates. Many social fraternities have sought to improve their standing by incorporating students’ grade-point average and other achievements into their selection criteria. They have also publicized their members’ GPAs.
Other fraternities focused on community service. A latecomer to the movement, Alpha Phi Omega, was created in 1925 at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Its founder was a returning World War I sailor named Frank Reed Horton who wanted to found a service organization open to men of all religions. At the time, Horton was also a member of SAE, with its Aryan-only policy. President Bill Clinton joined Alpha Phi Omega as an undergraduate at Georgetown University in the 1960s. In 1976, inspired by the women’s liberation movement, the organization voted to become co-ed. “Why discriminate because of sex?” Joseph Scanlon, the fraternity’s executive director wrote in 1970. “Forty-five years ago, Alpha Phi Omega dared to differ with the times. It set out to prove an organization committed to service, opposed to membership discrimination because of race, creed, color, economic status or national origin, could exist on college campuses.” As a “service fraternity,” the organization had no houses, and members of single-sex social fraternities could become members. It offered many of the same features as traditional fraternities: pledgeship and other rituals, friendship and parties. Today, the group has 375 chapters and 400,000 members. Alpha Phi Omega proved that a fraternity could reject discrimination while flourishing on a modern campus.
Some members of traditional fraternities found they had to separate from their national organizations if they wanted to embrace more egalitarian principles. At Dartmouth, for example, Phi Tau broke away from Phi Sigma Kappa over racial segregation in the 1950s and, in 1972, admitted women. Similarly, at Brown, members of Zeta Psi withdrew from that organization to form Xeta Delta Xi in the 1980s so they could include female members. Unlike the more recent efforts to promote co-ed fraternities at Trinity, Harvard, and Wesleyan, change came from within chapters. Members, interpreting fraternal values for themselves, rebelled against older restrictions.
At Williams College, a fraternity man named John Edward Sawyer led one of the earliest and highest-profile campaigns against the excesses of Greek life. As an undergraduate, Sawyer had been president of Zeta Psi, as had his brother and father. As an insider, he understood the negative influence of Williams’s fraternities, which had become bastions of debauchery and intolerance. After World War II and through much of the 1960s, the Williams trustees worked to eliminate fraternities. They gradually reduced their power while offering attractive alternatives for living and dining. In the 1950s, for example, Williams, then all male, banned freshman rushing. It also built a new dining hall for first-year students. In the 1960s, Sawyer became president of Williams and created an alternative to fraternities. The school established its own residences for students and converted fraternity houses into dorms. By 1968, only 10 percent of upper-class students belonged to fraternities. The school then ordered the end of all fraternity activity by 1970. Sawyer’s timing was excellent. Fraternities had become less popular during the anti-establishment 1960s, and national organizations’ opposition to racial integration undermined their support, especially on Northern campuses. Abolishing fraternities “would be a lot more difficult to pull off today,” his successor as president, John W. Chandler, told me. “We thought the line behind us would be long. It really wasn’t.” Williams stuck with the policy even amid the more recent Greek revival. To this day, Williams prohibits fraternity membership and promises to suspend or expel students who join.
Williams paid no price for confronting its fraternities and, in fact, prospered because of it. In his history of Williams and fraternities, Chandler argued that the death of fraternities made it easier for the college to start admitting women in 1970. Williams may have bucked wealthy fraternity alumni, but its academic standing improved as it drew students with top grades and standardized test scores. In fact, Williams became the richest US liberal arts college, with a $2.3 billion endowment. Chandler called Sawyer “the most transformative leader in Williams’ history” and the abolition of fraternities “the key to his accomplishments and his crowning achievement.”
The success of Williams College put pressure on its New England peers, sometimes referred to as the “Little Ivies.” In the 1980s and 1990s, other colleges—Amherst in Massachusetts, Colby and Bowdoin in Maine, and Middlebury in Vermont—banned their fraternities. Williams and its rivals demonstrate that colleges can eliminate Greek organizations, even when they are a powerful part of a school’s tradition. All these schools say they benefited academically and socially from eliminating fraternities. Of course, they have continued to struggle with drinking and sexual assault; but, unlike colleges with Greek life, they don’t find themselves on lists of top party schools or those with the most alcohol-related arrests. In 1996, a year before Bowdoin began eliminating fraternities, 29 percent of graduating seniors were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the “sense of community on campus.” Ten years later, that figure had risen to almost 70 percent. These schools needed alumni support for prioritizing academics over social life and the wherewithal to invest heavily in housing and dining.
Private colleges have more freedom to promote bans. Small, wealthy liberal arts colleges can more easily afford new residence halls. Private institutions also face fewer legal constraints. As Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer and campus free-speech advocate, has explained, the First Amendment and its freedom of assembly provision don’t directly bind private universities, though many have their own policies that protect expression; as government agencies, public universities are fully subject to constitutional limits.
Yet short of banning fraternities, public colleges can still institute tougher regulation. In the 1990s, one president, Robert Carothers, decided to attack the culture of drinking at the University of Rhode Island. The Princeton Review had named the college the country’s number one party school for three consecutive years. The university, whose initials are URI, had earned a nickname: “You are high.” At homecoming, students would regularly be hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and students had been known to bring kegs to commencement. Henry Wechsler, then director of the Harvard School of Public Health, found that an astonishing 70 percent of students there were binge drinking. Carothers was horrified, and he understood the challenge.
As Williams had done decades before, Carothers sought to improve his university’s academic standing and its image by attacking the fraternity culture. Like Sawyer, he was a fraternity member. In the 1960s, he had been president of Delta Sigma Phi at Pennsylvania’s Edinboro University. Still, at the University of Rhode Island, Carothers led the charge to ban alcohol at any social function on campus sponsored by the school—and that included fraternities. Students who violated policies three times were suspended for two semesters—a three-strikes policy. Seven fraternities that resisted were kicked off campus; the university bought their houses and either razed them or used them for dorms or administrative offices. The change all but eliminated the kind of tragic alcohol-related deaths that had been a regular occurrence. A 2009 study found a decrease in the number of drinking-related police reports, as students became more aware of the consequences of flouting the law. When he took on fraternities, Carothers heard warnings about a backlash from alumni. But he said older graduates understood the seriousness of the problem, and he found himself getting congratulatory notes, with $1,000 donations. The college attracted students with higher grades and test scores and had more success shepherding them through graduation. After the crackdown, “People would say, ‘I hate to see my fraternity come to this,’” Carothers told me. “But they would also say, ‘You have to do what you have to do.’”
More recently, Philip Hanlon, Dartmouth’s president, took on his school’s famed fraternity culture. Half of Dartmouth students belong to Greek organizations, among the largest proportion of any US college. Previous presidents had tried and failed to rein in fraternities. In 2015, the school banned hard liquor. Hanlon also urged professors to curb grade inflation, and to stop canceling classes the morning after party nights. As at Williams, Dartmouth created a new residential system, which would assign first-year students to “houses” based around a cluster of dormitories. Again, it apparently took a fraternity man to make some inroads. Hanlon, a 1977 Dartmouth alumnus, had belonged to Alpha Delta, whose Dartmouth chapter had inspired the movie Animal House. When Hanlon announced the measures to curb the party culture in 2015, he wouldn’t rule out banning fraternities: “If in the next three to five years, the Greek system does not engage in meaningful, lasting reform, and we are unsuccessful in sharply curbing harmful behaviors, we will need to revisit its continuation on our campus.”
Dartmouth and the University of Rhode Island turned to what Wechsler has called a “comprehensive community intervention.” Rather than focus on discipline and individual compliance, the schools employed the same kinds of tools that succeeded in public-health campaigns against drunk driving and smoking. This approach combines a variety of measures aimed at reducing the behavior that society wants to discourage: heightened enforcement, higher penalties and financial costs, and consistent, clear public messaging. The goal wasn’t prohibition, but a reduction in drinking. Wechsler recommended enlisting local authorities to make sure bars and stores insist on proof-of-age; pushing to raise state and local taxes on liquor; and passing ordinances forbidding the serving of cheap shots and huge bowls of alcohol. Wechsler also praised colleges that have offered inexpensive, attractive alcohol-free housing. These methods have more impact than the alcohol-education programs offered on most campuses. “You can’t just tell students how dangerous it is,” Wechsler told me. “You have to change the environment.”
Any discussion of college drinking inevitably leads to what sounds like a logical approach: lower the drinking age to eighteen. Proponents argue that this approach will bring alcohol into the open, eliminating the secrecy and associated luster, thus leading to more moderate and responsible drinking. Its adherents hold up Europe as a model.
In 2008, a group of more than one hundred college presidents, led by John McCardell, the former leader of Middlebury College, suggested just that. But public-health authorities have come to an overwhelming consensus supporting the higher drinking age. Since the increase in the 1980s, alcohol consumption has declined among high school students and adults aged eighteen to twenty, with most of the drop occurring in the 1990s. Countering the college presidents in 2008, public-health experts noted that the number of sixteen-to-twenty-year-old drunken drivers killed annually had fallen by half. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has estimated the law saved more than 26,000 lives since the 1970s. Still, college students drink more than their peers who aren’t enrolled. Wechsler blamed lax enforcement and an environment awash in cheap alcohol. It’s worth repeating that studies show that white men in general—and fraternity members in particular—drink more heavily than anyone else on campus.
Judson Horras, who became president of the North-American Interfraternity Conference in 2016, has embraced the public-health approach. Horras was a longtime executive at Beta Theta Pi, which has shut down many chapters since the 1990s, then reopened them as alcohol free. Horras proposed working with fraternity councils and building a campus consensus on stricter alcohol rules. It would be a gradual approach, tailored to the current state of behavior. At an out-of-control campus, he would advocate starting with a ban on hard liquor; such a ban would lower the risk of alcohol poisoning. Then, the conference might push for restricting the number of parties with alcohol. The next step would be “damp” fraternity houses. Members could have no alcohol in common spaces—in other words, no social events with alcohol. Members who were twenty-one and older could have alcohol in their own rooms. The final step could be dry houses. Any event with alcohol would have to be held at a restaurant with professional bartenders. Or, as Bob Biggs, the chief executive of Phi Delta Theta, likes to say: the fraternities would finally get out of the bar business.
Horras has also pledged to help fraternities replace an aggressive vision of masculinity with another ideal, a man who acts with “humble confidence.” In his experience, new chapters tend to be idealistic, open to adult guidance and members who show leadership on campus. As they grow more successful, they often shift away from those qualities and seek members who are “cool.” They start lying to their advisers and prizing a brand of outlaw culture that is celebrated on social media and websites such as Total Frat Move, ostensibly a satire that often functions as a how-to guide for young men’s darkest impulses. Horras said he viewed increasing diversity as both a moral and a business imperative. Catering primarily to white males will relegate organizations to irrelevance. “Diversity is the next big wave of growth for our organizations,” Horras told me. “We are going to embrace it. We are embracing it.”
HALLAM’S LIONS WERE stuck in customs. They had been crafted out of marble in the mountains of Southeast Asia. A Vietnamese SAE member had found craftsmen who would carve a pair for about $4,000. It was a bargain, and it meant the brothers could raise thousands more for landscaping at their new home. Hallam could even keep his life-insurance money to help his parents with end-of-life expenses. With all the delays, the men worried that Hallam might not live to see his lions. Finally, on a Friday in April 2016, a flatbed truck pulled up in front of the chapter house. A Bobcat crane hoisted the two giant wooden crates and carried them up the hilly lawn. The lions each stood five-foot-eight-inches tall and weighed 5,000 pounds, as much as a midsize SUV. They were gold, their manes flecked with red. Each had a giant paw resting on an SAE badge, as if protecting the fraternity’s legacy. A plaque dedicated them to Hallam. “The epitome of a True Gentleman,” it read.
The next day, Saturday, was rainy and overcast. Men from across the country descended upon the Ohio State chapter. Hallam arrived late, his wingtips sinking into the mud around the new lions. He wore a pink Oxford shirt and an SAE pin on the lapel of his black blazer. He had dark circles around his blue eyes and a red rash on his throat from chemotherapy. On this afternoon, though, he had plenty of energy. He had taken a break from his medication, so he wouldn’t feel so tired for the day’s events. “They’re a lot bigger than I thought,” Hallam said as members gathered around the lions. “It means so much that I can be here to see this.”
Inside, the chapter overflowed with fraternity brothers. They spilled out of the basement meeting hall and up into the stairs to the first floor. In his tribute, Kevin Bowen, the undergraduate who had recruited Hallam, remembered the sorry chapter his adviser had adopted.
“People were paying dues only because they forgot they were members,” Bowen said sarcastically. “It speaks volumes to the lives you’ve impacted and the changes you’ve made here that this many people are here on a Saturday when Ohio State students could be drinking. The improvements you’ve made to this house will live on far beyond the time you’ve spent here. I couldn’t be happier that you’re a brother of mine.”
Mike Moore, the chapter president who had investigated the sexual-assault allegation, told the crowd how Hallam changed his life. He never would have dreamed he could be speaking without notes in front of this crowd of two hundred. He struggled to check his emotions.
“You see him living his values every day,” Moore said. “I was lucky to be as close to Chris Hallam as I was. He was truly dedicated to improving every single person in this room. He had his own career, his own life. He didn’t have to dedicate this much time to us, to making sure all of us developed and grew into the men we are today. That’s admirable. You don’t find a lot of people like that. Over this past year, I’ve started to consider him a friend. I know he feels the same way. I can’t tell you how much it means to me. Phi Alpha, brother.”
Moore stepped down and gave Hallam a hug.
Hallam sat in the front row with his mother, Debbie, a retired medical secretary, and his brother, Scott, and a cousin, Rebecca, and her fiancé. His father, Paul, a retired special-education teacher and administrator, stood several rows behind, videotaping the proceedings.
Hallam usually favored notecards but he hadn’t prepared for this address—one of the most meaningful of his life. He spoke from the heart, his voice strong, breaking at times with raw emotion.
“Thank you for bringing SAE into my life,” he said. “When people talk about the negative side of fraternities, it hurts. They don’t understand us. We grow men. We educate men. We develop men. Yes, they make mistakes. But there’s a culture of growth and development and advancement. We can be better men.”
Hallam said he would never have imagined the bonds he had to the members of the chapter.
“I’ve asked three members to be pallbearers at my funeral,” he said. “That’s what this has meant to me.”
Hallam spoke of the power of symbol.
“Thank you for knowing what the lions meant to me. That is the culmination of my dedication to this chapter. Know there are always people before you. That is the legacy you are leaving. It is a brotherhood that does not end. The choices you make build on the choices made before you. The fraternity will continue after me. The lions will live on after me.”
Before the dedication ended, before the men scattered across the campus, they stood with arms around each other. They recited the words of their creed.
“The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety.…”
Its words were etched on the walls of the chapter room. But the brothers didn’t need to read them. They knew them by heart. They shouted them until the walls vibrated with the sounds of their voices.