http://www.statenews.com/op_article.phtml?pk=18299
Cleaning house
Fraternity members irresponsible to allow problem to escalate into community eyesore
The Theta Delta Chi fraternity house is being fixed up by current members and alumni after it was found in disrepair in early July by East Lansing housing inspectors.
It's good to see those associated with the fraternity start to clean up their act, but the repairs should have been done when things started to fall apart and before the inspectors showed up on their doorstep.
Unfortunately, being in college, we no longer have our parents to clean up after us. This is something Theta Delta Chi members don't seem to understand.
On July 10, The State News reported the inspectors' findings: Érotten food, empty 40-ounce beer bottles, exposed wires, punctured pipes, leaking gas, broken electrical appliances, bags of garbage, clogged toilets, pornography and the stench of urine.
While some of these items are harmless, the kind of disarray found by the inspectors is unacceptable even by a college student's standards. Although fraternity members claim that strangers had vandalized their home after their departure, the house was still in such a disarray that those members had to vacate.
The root cause of these problems is laziness on the part of fraternity members.
Since the mid-1990s, the house has been below capacity, causing it to lose money every year. It's no wonder they are having trouble filling the house's space.
In order to get the full 28 occupants the house is licensed for, the fraternity might pay for members to break their other leases.
This hopefully, this marks the light at the end of the tunnel. The Gamma Triton Building Association, the executive board of Theta Delta Chi alumni who own the house, have already spent more than $6,000 trying to fix up the house.
They hope to raise more than $30,000, which the association would use to fix the house by the time fall classes start.
In the end, though, it's the responsibility of current fraternity members to clean their own house. While alumni are tied to the fraternity, they shouldn't be obligated to help get the house back to a livable state, or even raise money to help clean up a mess they didn't create. In fact, the fraternity members shouldn't even have this opportunity and are very lucky.
Look at it this way. If a group of students living in a rental house neglected their house for a semester, left 6,000 cubic feet of garbage and broke appliances, they would be charged for all the damage. The landlord wouldn't offer to help clean up the mess and he or she certainly wouldn't help the tenants raise money to do so either.
At least something is being done. Abandoned houses, which Theta Delta Chi house was this past summer, are considered eyesores by members of the community. They attract animals and sometimes crimes. This house in its state of disrepair was no exception.
And not only was the house an eyesore for the city of East Lansing, it made the entire greek community look bad.
The actions of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity knocked the greek community a step backward from this goal.
In the end, the fraternity members should learn a lesson from all this: In order to prevent a situation such as this from happening again, clean your house as soon as you make a mess.
This is something learned in kindergarten.
