In the Fall 2023 release of “The Lamplighter,” Epsilon Eta’s semesterly publication, editor Walter Gibbs (EH’89) hosted an interview with RPI President Marty Schmidt. The conversation touched on President Schmidt’s experience at RPI, his thoughts surrounding Greek life, and a discussion of the summer Arch. We would like to thank Marty for taking the time to sit down with us! We are also appreciative of all the work RPI and the FSC office dedicate to developing Fraternity and Sorority life on campus.
Read the full conversation below:
Conversation on Greek Life with RPI President Marty Schmidt '81 by Walt Gibbs '89
Thank you to President Schmidt, and Pamela Smith, VP Office of Community Engagement and Communications, for the opportunity to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing today's RPI Greek System.
Walt: Let’s start by discussing your experience as an undergraduate at RPI. What do you remember from that time?
Marty: It's funny, I was thinking about that. What I remember is working hard. Four years goes by fast. Many of the alumni that I speak to have the same experience, which is that it was an incredibly rigorous experience in terms of the education. For me personally, it really instilled in me a sense of confidence, but also a feeling of the ability to tackle hard problems, and that was good.
The other thing that I remember is Troy was in pretty rough shape when I was a student. And so the social life, apropos of this conversation we are going to have, a lot of it revolved around Greek Life. There wasn't much to do in the city other than go to Sutters and hockey games, which I certainly did my share of. But in any event, certainly a lot of great memories and it started a great appreciation for the sort of capabilities that RPI provided me.
I hope that today's undergraduates aren't saying quite the same thing because Troy is so much nicer than it was. What stands out to you with regard to similarities and differences between your experience and today's students experience?
It's still a very rigorous education. A lot of times people question me about grade inflation, and so forth, and that's not the case. The rigor is still there. So the differences are kind of what stick out, right? We talked about Troy, that's a really positive difference. I met with about 500 undergraduates and graduate students in the first year. What struck me about that was, more then I recall and maybe I just didn't have the same experience as others at the time, there's a real sense of collaboration and mutual support that I see amongst today’s student body. But also there's been a healthy investment in the staff and systems to help the students be successful. I think there are a lot more student clubs. In fact, someone told me there’s about 200. And so you see students, with that much more activity in clubs than when I was a student here, will gravitate to a particular club and that's kind of their community for their time at RPI. And obviously, when I was a student here, I think it was 10% female. And we're up to about 31 or 32% now. So that's a meaningful difference when you think about the community.
So let's talk Greek Life. The relationship needs to be a beneficial one for both parties. What do you think the Greek organizations are bringing to the RPI student experience today?
A well-run, healthy living group, whether it's a fraternity or sorority, can be not only supportive of a student at RPI, I think it can lead to transformative experiences. It also creates lifetime friends when you're connected to individuals in that way. All those things are positive for the university. I look at it from the perspective of “if we can establish healthy and supportive living environments for our students, why not?” You have this inventory of fraternities and sororities so, from my perspective as an administration, our responsibility should be to try and make sure that they're running great and producing that kind of a living experience for our students that we want to see. I'm completely on board with that.
I also think one of the things that's important, and not necessarily always recognized, yet is particularly true today, is the fraternities and sororities, and the athletes, really play an active role in our engagement with the community in terms of supporting some of the local institutions. That's terrific. Troy is our home. A healthy Troy is good for us. Having groups that have as part of their mission the sense of supporting the community is a really good thing for everybody.
We are proud of the work that our undergraduates do along those lines. They've got a very strong relationship with one of the local food pantries.
The other thing I would say, Walt, is that there's an element of school spirit that these kinds of healthy living groups can help promote. I certainly can remember in my days, when we thought about GM Week and things like that, for a lot of the activities it was very much the living groups that would form some of the various teams that would compete. I think that's all good. And I've said this to your current members of Lambda Chi Alpha, I'm really pleased to see that they pack the seats behind the bench at the hockey games; they're stalwarts in terms of showing that support for the hockey program. So that's wonderful.
In past years, we've heard a lot about liability and alcohol use. What is RPI primarily concerned about now with how Greek organizations operate?
From my perspective, it's about resiliency. What I observed in my 40 years or so at MIT is that interest in fraternity and sorority life does somewhat ebb and flow and can be generational. So if you have a fixed asset which is the house, and if interest overall in Greek Life is waning, that can be financially existential for the system and for the individual houses. At least my observation in Cambridge is that those are some of the times when the wheels come off. I'm familiar with circumstances at MIT where, to make things work, the fraternity brings in non-members to fill beds. Those people aren't invested in that community and may not stick to the standards and norms. I put it all under the general umbrella of how do we create a resilient fraternity and sorority system that can deal with oscillations in interest and enrollment. Part of it is making sure that we're above critical mass in certain areas.
So one of the very keen focuses of the staff that we have that support the fraternity and sorority system is coaching and supporting the fraternities and sororities in the recruitment process to give them the best shot at attracting people. I think it all starts there, Walt, in that if we have a resilient system, then when things go wrong, we can work our way through them. And then the other challenge, but I wouldn't say it's secondary but I think of the resilience as primary, but obviously we live in a world where we're concerned about sexual assault, we're concerned about alcohol and drug abuse, we’re in a world where everyone is carrying a device that can broadcast around the world things that are happening in real time. And that creates a dynamic and a challenge when things go wrong.
RPI has strengthened its Greek Life team in the last few years. We really appreciate that commitment. Is there a framework that the team is using to proactively understand the strengths and weaknesses of the different fraternities?
In particular, I would single out Greek Dean Ethan Stubbs and his team. They approach this with the view of being biased to making the fraternities and sororities individually and collectively successful. I think everything that they do, all the drive they have, is really about how do we do that. And I've watched them in action. We've got some newer living groups, fraternities, some multicultural fraternities and sororities, that are forming. They're at a very nascent stage, and it's really encouraging to see how much Ethan and his team are working with them on a regular basis to coach them along, help them figure out how they're going to drive participation. I think the team enters with that bias, and then what they do in detail depends very much on the fraternity or sorority that's in front of them.
Good to hear that. LXA has benefited from a strong relationship with RPI. Our house on Sunset Terrace is built on RPI land. It was quite a collaborative effort in the 1990s to make that happen.
I have been in the house. The first semester I was here, I visited every fraternity and sorority that would let me in. I really wanted to get a sense of it. What I found is a very heterogeneous community in terms of the questions I would ask when I visited: why did you join and what do you tell others when they're considering joining? And it's really interesting to get the response. So I'm familiar with Lambda Chi, in fact I can see them out in my backyard. And they seem to be very well behaved. So that's good.
We're proud of what we consider to be a continuous culture of excellence for 30 years now. Part of that culture is our alumni support.
I think the involvement of the alumni is really important. Alumni that are disengaged, not necessarily with fraternities and sororities exclusively, but with the institution, a lot of times their sense of the university is frozen in time from when they left. And things change, things evolve, and having the alumni understand the current state and the current environment is really important. That only happens if you're involved. That kind of engaged alumni is good for all of us.
The overall number of students engaged in Greek Life has dropped quite a bit since about six years ago. I'm sure there's a lot of reasons for that, but the drop really did begin right around 2017 when Rush was changed from the fall to the spring. What are your thoughts on when freshmen should be considered ready to join Greek organizations?
I would say that I really don't feel like I have enough knowledge to have a strong view on that. What I can share with you is that I meet once a month with student leadership, basically the presidents of every class, the Grand Marshal, PU, the head of the Fraternity Sorority Council, the head of the student athletics. I meet with them and the Provost and the Dean for Student Life, and we spend about an hour together just trying to talk about whatever is top of mind for them. This topic did come up last semester. There was a diversity of views on this amongst the students. There was one individual who said they were concerned about this. A woman who had joined a sorority shared that she felt she wouldn't have been ready early in the first semester of her freshman year, and she appreciated an opportunity to look carefully and then make that decision in the spring. So there are pros and cons.
I understand the decline. I have a hard time knowing that's causal with the change in policy, and I would want to understand what the nationwide trends look like. So it's a little bit a question in my mind as to how much causality you can assign to that. I know that Ethan and the team are open to having conversations and trying to get as much as possible quantitative about the role this is playing, but it's hard for me to draw a hard conclusion one way or the other.
An issue that we're finding is that the Arch program, by sending juniors away for a semester, hits us with regard to fraternity leadership. The Greek Alumni Council was discussing the idea of integrating Greek and other structured leadership experiences more formally into Arch, perhaps fulfilling Arch’s objectives for the semester off campus. Would that mesh with your thinking about what the Arch is trying to accomplish?
I'm not clear on that one. Let me give you my take on Arch. Pretty much immediately upon arrival that bunch of questions was put to me. Are you going to kill Arch? I wasn't prepared to make a decision like that on Day One. But what I've learned is that part of the challenge was implementation, the way in which Arch was introduced and rolled out, things like mandatory don't really necessarily land well with people. Arch has been a bit of a push early on. So the question that I was trying to wrap my arms around is “when it works for an individual student, is this really a valuable thing?” And my conclusion is that it can be. I've been really heartened by the number of students and parents, and employers, who have shared with me their significant appreciation of the Arch Away experience. What I conclude is, when it's working, it's transformative.
The challenge comes when it's not working. We have a team working hard to move the needle in a meaningful way so that for everyone (A) we know who's going to succeed in Arch, and we have an ability to sort that and (B) we make sure that the Arch Away and the Arch summer experience are really transformative. I have a lot of hope, and my hope and our goal are really to make Arch a pull rather than a push. So that a student comes to RPI saying I know that if I do Arch, it's going to have these positive outcomes.
We've managed the Arch Away issues because we're of a size that we have enough leaders and the beds equal about half the number of people in the chapter. We've talked about the drop in Greek numbers, and weak finances make weak organizations. We've talked about making the chapters more resilient. Is there anything else that RPI is looking at to help with regard to the low Greek house occupancy issue?
I think there's a sizing question. If we really look ourselves in the mirror and say it's never going to be the size it was 30 years ago, then we might find ourselves feeling like maybe this living setting, maybe this House, is too big for the future. And can we downsize in a way in which we build in the resiliency. Your point about the number of beds versus the number of members of Lambda Chi is an interesting example. That gives you a cushion in some respects, and a lot of the fraternities have zero cushion. One of the things we need to think about as part of the administration is how do we move maybe the fraternity or sorority into a setting that gives them some of that kind of resiliency. I think we also try and work with them. So how do you want to market this fraternity or sorority? As these groups develop more unique identities it makes it easier for students to say, “oh, I want to go there because that's a community of artists or that's a community I can relate to.”
A policy change of allowing students to live in the Greek housing during the Arch summer would help the occupancy issue. Do you feel that lessens the goals of the Arch summer?
That came up as you might imagine in my first year of listening, and I just decided I wasn't going to make that decision until I had a new Provost. Our Provost, Rebecca, started in August, and one of the things she's doing is working with the whole team to do a complete assessment of where we're at with Arch and where we need to go next. Certainly how we think about summer housing related to Arch is a topic on the table. I don't know where they're going to land on that one, but I know it's under discussion.
Let's talk a bit about judicial process. It seems to have gotten a bit better with regard to how fraternity infractions are being addressed. Is there an ongoing effort within the Greek Life Dean's office looking at how the current judicial process is defined and implemented?
One of the things that I was really just thrilled to see was the Alumni Fraternity and Sorority Council; I just thought that was brilliant. Roger Grice 'G87 is the Lambda Chi representative. I tend to think of the fraternity and sorority alumni and the administration as having a co-parenting relationship. What I see as the value of that fraternity and sorority council is that it ensures that when something goes wrong that's not the first conversation the administration is having with the alumni. It becomes a forum with Ethan and Travis to sit with the alumni and say, if this happens, this is our process and these are the possible outcomes. Do you disagree or agree? If you disagree, let's have a conversation about it. Having that kind of a forum is important so, that when the wheels come off, I'm not surprising you with what we're going to have to do. And then you've got the relationship so there's also an opportunity, within respecting people's privacy, to have a conversation about the specifics. And you and I have a trusted relationship, and we're not screaming at each other. I just think that Council is such a critical thing because if we can have adult conversations when we're not under the gun, we're going to reach solutions that make sense to both of us, so that when we are under the gun, we're aligned.
That's exactly what we're looking for, a clear and transparent process.
The price the alumni pay is engagement with the administration. If it's Roger, that's great, and then he needs to make sure that message is shared with the alumni community. Deepening those ties between the administration and alumni is a really important thing.
We would like to yet again thank President Schmidt for his time and for the work he puts in to develop student life at RPI. We are looking forward to see what the future holds!