Dan Cushing, Oregon State '13

In high school leadership, we continually battled something called the “four year memory.” This means that every four years there is a completely new group of officers, a phenomenon that makes it difficult to hold on to good traditions and remember best practices.

Our remedy for this was careful mentorship and accurate record keeping. It became apparent that the most important role in student government was the role of the senior officers. As the most experienced student leaders, they were charged with the task of imparting stories from years past to younger students and mentoring them so they could carry the torch once the seniors left.

Fraternities are also faced with the four year memory. Although alumni remain mentors for undergraduates (especially the chapter counselor and the AVC president), their lack of full-time presence in the chapter house greatly limits their daily influence. In everything from programming to the Ritual, seniors are needed to ensure that the fraternity continues to build on the successes and learn from the failures of the past, in order to move forward, not backward. With disinterested or uninvolved seniors, this task falls upon juniors, who have only two years of fraternity experience at the start of their junior year.

To reinforce the importance of Virtue, Diligence, and Brotherly Love, to legitimize traditions like my chapter’s Sound Body assessment, and to protect the sanctity of the Ritual, seniors must remain active, influential members. It’s the only way Sigma Phi Epsilon will evolve. The four year memory should be no cause to reinvent the wheel.

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