I recently looked at the letter shared by the NIC 2.0 commission and the promises made in that document. You can find the letter
here.
Very few of the promises made in that letter have come to fruition 6 years later. Furthermore, the stated purpose of the re-organization, to "restore trust and confidence in the conference," seems to have failed. 73 inter/national fraternities were members of the NIC at the time that the 2.0 commission unveiled its recommendations. That number is down to 57 today, with more than 10 fraternities severing ties in the past 2 years alone.
I wrote an article on the topic - which I won't share directly as it is self-promotion - but wanted to hear from folks in this forum what your fraternity's relationship is with the NIC. Are there any organizations openly debating their membership?
One thing I did was write an email to my fraternity's Executive Director asking for a cost-benefit analysis to be conducted by an independent committee. I also shared that I'd work with members to form a petition, resolution, or constitutional amendment requiring such a process be put in place for large budget items.
Here are some notes I took from the letter:
- The NIC promised to move away from "minimum policy-based standards" toward "performance-based standards." 2 of its most recent initiatives, however, are entirely "minimum policy-based" (The alcohol/drug guidelines and health & safety programming guidelines).
- On that point, the NIC promised to use technology to publicly display its member fraternities' performance according to its guidelines. After 6 years, no such public display of fraternity performance has been made available. This is even as the NIC's "Anti-Hazing Coalition" seeks to impose this expectation on colleges and universities across the United States with its proposed REACH Act and End ALL Hazing Act.
- The letter states that member fraternities will suffer from fewer IFC-wide penalties, will experience increased growth opportunities, and will have to deal with fewer local-level issues related to recognition and the aforementioned issues. This has not been the case. If anything, the number of system-wide bans and restrictions has maintained, if not increased, its pace. Both the University of Missouri and Virginia Commonwealth University instituted system-wide penalties in the first half of Fall 2021.
- The NIC promised greater synergy with higher education, even as (as a result of recruitment restrictions and other anti-FSL actions) it has endorsed the establishment of more Independent IFCs. I also have knowledge that many of these were not established by the NIC, but by individual staff of member fraternities, further negating the point that individual fraternities would deal less with campus-based recognition issues.
- In its FY20, for the first time in recent history, direct payments from IFCs through the NIC's Campus Support Model exceeded the revenue generated from inter/national fraternity member dues. The NIC still does not afford undergraduate IFC leaders with a vote (even a ceremonial straw poll-style vote) and claims to be a trade association only for inter/national fraternity organizations.
- Despite an overall decline in revenue of 30% in its FY20, and a decrease in staff salaries of 33% in that same year, the CEO of the NIC was paid $421,000, a 38% raise from its FY19. To put that into perspective, the American Red Cross paid its CEO $738,000 on revenue of $2.8 BILLION (compared to the NIC's $2.4 MILLION), in its FY19
All of this is to say that NIC 2.0 does not seem to be what it was promised to be. This is not necessarily new, but I am unaware of any sort of public review of the NIC's actions vs. its promises until now.
Some questions:
- Does your fraternity share business items from NIC meetings with members prior to an NIC meeting?
- Does your fraternity publish the amount it pays in dues to the NIC? (Governing Council members were expected to pay at least $100,000 in FY21, which ended August 2021)
- If you work with an IFC, is it a part of the NIC's Campus Support Model? Is there a mechanism to share feedback on NIC practices/policies that I am missing?
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