Building community and cultivating leaders are often seen as two advantages of fraternities and sororities on college campuses. Eric Rowland ’86 and Patrick Rezek ’15 bring intention to their work to build structures that support both in the changing Greek Life landscape.
Take 30, 40, 50 young adults, put them in a fraternity or sorority house, and a community is bound to form. Thinking deliberately about the literal and figurative structures in place is critical to the success and growth of the group. With the constant change in the student population on campuses and in houses, the work is never-ending.
“Where you live is a strong element of your sense of community,” says Eric Rowland ’86, architect at Luminaut and Rowland Design Inc. “Greek housing defines a community. There are social dynamics in the planning of a Greek house. You need to be deliberate about how you go about doing that.”
Culture and expectations of what Greek Life should look like change over time across campuses and across the country. Recognizing and adapting to change is necessary to keeping Greek Life relevant.
“If they don’t change, we’re not going to see an increase in students because students get leadership experience elsewhere,” says Patrick Rezek ’15, assistant director of fraternity and sorority life and civic engagement in the Office of Student Involvement at DePaul University in Chicago. “There has to be knowledge of the purpose you are trying to serve. It’s not something that’s passive; you have to consistently do it.”
Rowland first began thinking about the function of the building structure when he was house manager at Beta Theta Pi—a role he held for two of his four years in the house.
“I enjoyed doing it,” he says. “A lot of my fond memories from college were hanging out in the house.”
As a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Rowland learned about social scientist William Whyte in an urban planning class.
“Whyte studied public spaces, observing in New York and other cities how people interact,” he says. “What made them comfortable? Given the voluntary nature of a big public space, where did they choose to sit? If there were chairs and things you could move around, where did they move them?”
In Rowland’s last year at Illinois, the faculty awarded him a Ryerson Traveling Fellowship. He opted to do a study similar to Whyte’s.
“I went to East Berlin, 168体育平台下载_足球即时比分-注册|官网st Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Paris, and Vienna, and observed some of the larger and more successful public spaces in those cities,” Rowland says. “Then I compared those with spaces in San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle.”
One of Rowland’s first projects as an architect was renovating the Beta house at Wabash.
“A lot of my really good friendships are the ones that I developed when I was in the fraternity,” he says. “As an architect, I asked, ‘What influenced that? How do you encourage that kind of thing to happen?’ I was starting to apply some of Whyte’s principles to how we renovated the house, to try to open it up more.
“Pretty much everybody comes in the back door,” he continues. “How do you make the back door feel more like a front door? How do you make it feel more welcoming? How do we design for social activities and to control access to parties?”
That gave Rowland the courage to look for more of those types of projects. Now, he’s completed renovations and new builds for more than 100 Greek houses across the country.
“The concept of a Greek house and community are so intertwined,” Rowland says. “I’m passionate about and trying to be as intentional as we can to develop the kind of community that a particular house wants. What kind of furniture do you put in the living room? How comfortable is that going to be? What kind of chairs do you have in the dining room? Are they going to allow people to study for a while and be comfortable while they’re doing it? You want the houses to offer something students might not be able to get somewhere else.
“And now, technology is layered into that too,” he continues. “A lot more study spaces are isolated for quiet study or as a professional-looking space for a Zoom interview. A lot of the national organizations now offer online counseling for their members, so they want a designated private space for that as well.”
With increases in property values and changing policies in houses by individual campuses as well as national organizations, many chapters are looking for ways to keep their houses financially sound and responsive to the wants and needs of their members.
Rowland has worked with several groups to create innovative solutions that address these issues.
“It gets expensive to maintain the taxes and the ownership of the houses. One idea is that the fraternity would be a tenant in a facility that they control,” Rowland explains. “They could have first-floor retail space. They could even operate it, and maybe generate some revenue or leadership opportunities by how they manage and run the space. Then the second floor would be their main living areas and social space. As you move up, there might be another floor of student rooms, and a couple floors of apartments that could be rented by their upperclassmen or even non-chapter members for additional income.”
While the wants and needs of students change over time, Rowland believes that, overall, the guiding principles of fraternities and sororities remain effective.
“The principles that Greek organizations have are all very positive,” Rowland says. “But we’ve got young adults that are developing, and part of being at a college or university is to learn how to grow up and transition from being a kid to being an adult. People will make mistakes in that process.
“Keep the emphasis on the positive side of what they’re doing right,” he continues. “Try to create an environment where it’s easy to do the right thing, and more, you’ll be an outsider if you don’t do the right thing.”
While rowland’s work focuses on the physical structures, Rezek focuses on the support systems in place for building community and leadership among fraternity and sorority members.
“On the door of our office, there’s our mission,” Rezek says. “It says, ‘Our job is to create communities where everyone belongs.’”
Communities, not community.
“A lot of times we think about community as this singular aspect of one, which is great, but think of the othering aspect that comes with it as well,” Rezek says. “As a Wabash student 10 years ago, I would have said, ‘Everybody together, all is one.’ When we look at just one community, it’s this mentality that everybody fits nicely in a wrapped bow. But years in higher education have made me challenge what community and belonging mean.”
Rezek says what we need are ways to bring communities into conversation with each other.
“How do we find ways to exist together while also finding those spaces where every person can be in a community and not feel separated or othered?” he asks. “168体育平台下载_足球即时比分-注册|官网’re going to remain in silos if we don’t intentionally create the spaces for these communities to come together and to know and be able to recognize the different identities and lived experiences that create each community. Intentionality takes time and effort.”
His focus is on leadership development theories and socially responsible leadership, particularly in regard to fraternity and sorority members.
“I tell people, for example, you can join the chess club or you can join a sorority—but if the sorority can’t justify and tell prospectives what they’re going to get out of the organization, prospectives are going to join the chess club,” Rezek says. “And they’re going to do it for free, and potentially get some leadership opportunity out of it.”
In 2020, Rezek saw a move toward greater appreciation of the importance of community.
“Not just with COVID, but with Black Lives Matter, a real spark and focus was placed on the ‘tell me why you’re here’ aspect of fraternity and sorority life that caused a lot of people to shift and adjust from what they had always done,” he says. “If the chapters stay small, people know why they’re there and can articulate the values and can embody and actively practice the values. I’ll take a chapter of 30 any day over 100 people who don’t know why or what they believe in within their organization.”
Most first-year experiences within the Greek system include structured programming about the organization. Rezek recognizes a need for more emphasis on leadership beyond year one to give students a greater understanding of the next steps involved in the governing of a chapter.
“When I do one-on-one meetings with chapter presidents, I say, ‘Bring somebody new every time we meet that you think has potential to be in your role,’” Rezek continues. “‘Let them hear the conversations we’re having. Let them think and hear about the 30,000-foot perspective that they as a general member may only see at a 5,000- or 10,000-foot perspective. Give them an understanding of what these different elements of leadership could look like.’”
Most important, understand that change is inevitable.
“Tradition is great, but the students who show up at our doors are different year to year, month to month, day to day,” Rezek says. “Tradition has to tweak and change. 168体育平台下载_足球即时比分-注册|官网 need to support, advocate for, and fight for the students we currently have on our campuses.”