At a meeting with the Student Life Committee (SLC) last Thursday, University administrators admitted that using the words “private societies” in the new residency policy was too broad. The phrase has since been replaced with “Greek organizations.” This decision comes in the aftermath of student uproar and protests over the new policy that prohibited students from using or residing in properties owned by private societies, a policy that was aimed at making the Beta Theta Pi (Beta) house rejoin campus housing.

After the University incorporated suggestions from Beta and other fraternities into the Fraternity Standards Agreement, Beta is expected to sign it within the coming weeks in order to become an on-campus program house beginning in the fall 2011 semester.

Beta President Jeff Tanenbaum ’12 said that although many fraternity members were still not happy with the standards agreement, they have accepted it.

“Yeah, we are [planning on signing it],” he said.  “We just had to sign it because of the new policy or else we wouldn’t have been allowed to live there.  Everyone’s come to terms with it.”

The SLC approved the reworded residency policy at a meeting last Thursday, though it still has to be reviewed by the University’s legal counsel and other administrators before it becomes official.

“We tightened the wording and went from using society language to using fraternity language, because that’s specifically what its supposed to apply to,” said Vice President for Student Affairs Michael Whaley, who met with the committee. “People were in general agreement with that language change.”

Student Affairs Committee (SAC) Chair Joe O’Donnell ’13 said he thought the meeting went well.

“I made clear at the beginning of the [SLC] meeting that many students were still deeply upset by and concerned with the administration’s top-down approach and the fact that student assembly members were not involved in the decision making process, but that we still appreciate their amendments and the more specific language does address the issue at hand,” he said.

After the revised policy was decided upon, the SAC spent the rest of the meeting discussing the potential creation of an Inter Greek Council (IGC) to better facilitate communication among the fraternities and the University in the future.

“We discussed the creation of an Inter Greek Council to hopefully avert problems like this in the future,” O’Donnell said. “The IGC should be institutionalized on campus.”

O’Donnell said he hoped that the IGC would become an autonomous institution.

“The WSA plans on taking a facilitative approach to this process,” he said. “This is something that fraternities and societies have wanted for some time now and we really want it to come from them, they have the ideas and we’re not going to dictate what we think should come from them.”

The Fraternity Standards Agreement was also revised after administrators received suggestions from the fraternities and it was presented to them to review over spring break.

“In conversations primarily with Beta over the past year, they’ve made a number of suggestions as to how the agreement could be stronger,” said Dean of Students Richard Culliton. “We took those into consideration and made a number of those changes. The response we’ve gotten so far has been favorable, and we haven’t had any substantive recommendations or questions that have come up.”

Whaley noted that the new version of the Agreement is clearer about the interaction between Public Safety (PSafe) and the fraternities, which is an issue that members of Beta had expressed concerns about.

“I think that the version that we have now is actually better from a fraternity perspective than what we had before because we incorporated several of the changes that Beta and others have suggested to us,” he said. “In particular, we are trying to be clearer about the role that PSafe would play. We tried to be really clear about the way that Public Safety would interact with houses when they discover a safety/security issue or a potential policy violation.”

At a WSA meeting on Sunday, President Michael Roth addressed the residency policy, and defended his administration against student allegations that the University has been cracking down on students’ social lives.

“[The initial policy] was badly done, it shouldn’t have been done from above,” Roth acknowledged when WSA representatives asked why they were not involved in the creation of the policy.

“The administration has not tried to crack down on social life,” Roth said. “I have not issued some order that things should get stricter. The strongest part of the Wesleyan experience is the social life for students.”

When asked about expanding the Greek system on campus, Roth said that the administration would allow fraternities and sororities to form but would not approve any new Greek affiliated houses.

“I think that the fraternities and societies are great traditions at Wesleyan and that they have an important role on campus, which can be maintained,” Roth said. “We have no intention of approving any new Greek societies with residential components.”

Students also pressed Roth to explain his reasons for not attending a WSA meeting that was moved to the Beta house as a sign of solidarity with the fraternity last month.

“I wanted to go to Beta because I don’t like shying away from things,” Roth said. “The expression of solidarity with the fraternity was so much stronger than it was with the victims [of sexual harassment] in the fall, that I felt it was inappropriate to go there and have a conversation.”