At its first meeting of the year, the Student Assembly dove headfirst into confronting the widespread changes to Greek life policy released Wednesday night.
President Martha E. Pollack and Ryan Lombardi, vice president for student and campus Life fielded concerns from members over the recent changes in Greek event regulations — among which include stricter caps on event attendance, restricting events to four days a week and requiring outside caterers to serve alcohol, the Sun previously reported.
“Most chapters cannot afford to pay for outside security and licensed bartenders,” said Indigo Palov ’22, women’s issues representative at-large. “Heightened costs will factor into dues for each chapter member, further stratifying Greek life only for the very wealthy.”
Julian Kroll ’20, Sun columnist and College of Arts and Sciences representative, also questioned how the university plans on regulating off-campus events, calling the potential restrictions “insane.”
“I, for one, do not understand how the University can justly come into privately-owned Collegetown apartments that students pay steep rents for and of which the University has no legal authority to disband or regulate parties,” Kroll said. “I live in a house with sorority women, and if I invite four friends from my fraternity, that literally could constitute as an unregistered event that our chapters could be punished for.”
While Pollack and Lombardi both acknowledged these concerns over the new regulations, they both stated that their goal was to foster social outlets that are safe, healthy and productive for students.
“We’re a small town so there are not a lot of outlets for social activity,” Pollack said.
Lombardi also addressed the new rule that every event — not just events of 150 attendees or more — must hire an independent monitoring service, such as Cayuga’s Watchers. The monitors, he explained, were more active during the recruitment period. But their presence going forward will likely be responding to events that look “unsafe.”
“[It is] not going to be a problem unless there is a problem,” he said.