Showing posts with label fraternities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraternities. Show all posts
Sunday, April 09, 2023
Monday, December 05, 2022
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Univ. of Iowa sued again over religious liberty
by David Roach, posted Wednesday, August 08, 2018 (3 days ago)
IOWA CITY, Iowa (BP) -- For the second time in less than a year, a Christian student group has sued the University of Iowa to protect its right to select leaders who hold traditional Christian beliefs.
InterVarsity Graduate Christian Fellowship has become the second student group in less than a year to sue the University of Iowa for religious discrimination.
University of Iowa photo University of Iowa photo The InterVarsity Graduate Christian Fellowship filed a lawsuit in federal court Aug. 6 after the university revoked the fellowship's status as an official student organization for requiring group leaders "to share the group's faith and exemplify its Christian values," according to the complaint filed by the nonprofit Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The university told InterVarsity Graduate via email it would not even be permitted to state in its constitution that leaders were "strongly encouraged" to hold the Christian faith.
In December 2017, the student organization Business Leaders in Christ (BLinC) filed a similar lawsuit against the university after it was kicked off campus for requiring leaders to hold biblical beliefs about human sexuality. A federal judge ruled in January that the university must temporarily restore BLinC's registered status while the case is pending.
InterVarsity Graduate was one of 38 student groups deregistered in July for allegedly failing to comply with the university's human rights policy, according to The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Twenty-two of those groups "are organized around religion, culture or ideology," The Gazette reported, including Christian, Muslim, Mormon and Sikh groups.
The university's human rights policy states, according to the lawsuit, "In no aspect of [the university's] program shall there be differences in the treatment of persons because of race, creed, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, pregnancy, disability, genetic information, status as a U.S. veteran, service in the U.S. military, sexual orientation, gender identity, associational preferences, or any other classification that deprives the person of consideration as an individual."
InterVarsity Graduate student president Katrina Schrock said, "We're grateful to have been part of the university community for 25 years, and we think that the university has been a richer place for having Sikh, Muslim, Mormon, Catholic, Jewish, atheist and Christian groups. Because we love our school, we hope it reconsiders and lets religious groups continue to authentically reflect their religious roots," according to a Becket news release.
Iowa City's Press-Citizen reported the university set out in January and February to enforce its human rights policy and reviewed the constitutions of 513 student organizations. The 356 groups that did not include a "full and correct" statement of the university's human rights policy in their constitutions were given deadlines to remedy the perceived problem -- June 15 for most types of organizations and Sept. 4 for sororities and fraternities.
Though InterVarsity Graduate placed the university-required nondiscrimination language in its constitution, its leadership requirements still landed the group among the 38 deregistered.
One argument in InterVarsity Graduate's lawsuit is that the university allows other student groups to discriminate based on gender and personal beliefs while not extending the same prerogative to religious groups. That type of discrimination violates the U.S. and Iowa Constitutions, the complaint claims.
"The university (rightly) allows fraternities to have only male leaders and members, and female athletic clubs to have only female leaders and members," the complaint states. "Republicans and Democrats can each choose to be led by those who share their political beliefs. Yet while it makes broad exceptions for political groups, fraternities, sororities, and sports clubs to select both their leadership and membership, it denies a narrower accommodation for religious groups to select their leaders."
The complaint also notes two other InterVarsity chapters at the University of Iowa -- Black Campus Ministries and International Neighbors -- were not deregistered even though they hold the same leadership requirements as InterVarsity Graduate.
Becket senior counsel Daniel Blomberg said in the news release, "If public universities really want to foster an intellectually diverse environment, this isn't how to do it. Universities should allow students the space to form their own groups that challenge and grow their sincere beliefs. Banning religious groups from having religious leaders just flattens diversity and impoverishes the campus."
A university spokesperson told BP "the university will not comment on the merits of the case per its policy on pending litigation."
Sunday, January 15, 2012
‘Fraternity’ explores how Holy Cross educated some of the most influential U.S. figures
BY KEVIN CANFIELD
Special to The Star
Like scores of other private universities, the College of the Holy Cross was slow to embrace diversity.
Though the Worcester, Mass., school’s first valedictorian — the class of 1849’s James Augustine Healy, who would later become a seminal figure in the Catholic Church — was the mixed-race son of a slave, there were only a few black undergrads on campus more than a century later.
“When it came to black students,” Diane Brady writes in “Fraternity,” her stirring new book, “there seemed to be an unspoken pattern emerging each year: One was admitted from the North, one from the South; one of those two would typically be on athletic scholarship, one on academic scholarship.”
During at least one academic year in the 1960s, according to the book, the 2,200-member student body included a single African-American. “For some in the administration,” Brady adds, “that was sufficient.”
The Rev. John E. Brooks, a theology professor who was about to be installed as the school’s dean, wanted to change this. Holy Cross, he thought, was too white.
Several years before he and his colleagues began to welcome female students, Brooks argued that black men deserved the chance to attend Holy Cross and that the university would benefit from more inclusive admissions and outreach policies.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Brooks decided it was time to accomplish these goals.
Brooks’ aggressive recruitment drive changed the face of Holy Cross and helped propel a group of talented African-Americans to greater heights later in life. Among them were Clarence Thomas, a future Supreme Court justice; Edward P. Jones, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; Eddie Jenkins, a member of the undefeated 1973 Super Bowl champion Miami Dolphins; Stanley Grayson, a deputy mayor of New York City; and Theodore Wells, a lawyer who has represented governors, Cabinet members and other politicians.
Brooks, of course, was wise and courageous to rethink his school’s racial mix, as were the black students who opted for Holy Cross when they could just as easily have attended any number of other colleges that were far more diverse. Together, they were on the right side of history. But that didn’t necessarily make the transition easier.
For Brady, the era’s biggest concerns — foremost among them being the struggle for racial equality and the Vietnam War — offer a means of exploring how Thomas, Jones and their fellow black classmates experienced life as part of a tiny minority at Holy Cross. And vice versa: the book’s characters also help the reader understand what it was like to be young, smart and oppressed in a land of supposedly limitless opportunity.
The book also serves as a minibiography of one of the most influential people in the United States. It’s intriguing, for example, to learn that Thomas, who almost never talks during Supreme Court proceedings, was “a … vocal presence in the (Black Student Union)” and that at least a few of his fellow black students “thought Thomas was incapable of shutting up at BSU meetings.”
Equally fascinating is the degree to which Thomas was driven by anger. He was resentful of his unyielding grandfather and wounded by his experience while studying in Missouri to be a priest. Thomas he would later recall that a white seminary student, upon learning that Martin Luther King Jr. had been wounded by gunfire, said, “That’s good; I hope the son of a bitch dies.”
Thomas was so prone to rage that, Brady writes, it could be “corrosive.” Armchair analysts will have to decide for themselves how this might have shaped Thomas’ career as a jurist.
The most interesting figure in the book, however, is Jones. The son of an illiterate single mother, he penned a social-issues column for the Holy Cross newspaper and resolved to chronicle the lives of his fellow Washington, D.C., residents in a set of fictional tales inspired by James Joyce’s “Dubliners.”
Jones published his Washington stories in 1992 in a book titled “Lost in the City,” but the intervening years often were trying. “Shortly after (his mother) Jeannette died in 1975,” Brady writes, “Jones sold his first story to Essence. He didn’t realize it until 15 months after the fact, as he was homeless at the time.”
Better times were ahead. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize and other awards for “The Known World,” his 2003 novel about life in pre-Civil War Virginia. It was a book, Brady writes, “that had been unfolding in his mind since he learned about black slave owners in a class at Holy Cross.”
Kevin Canfield is a freelance writer who lives in New York.
Posted on Thu, Jan. 05, 2012 04:00 PM
Special to The Star
More information
Fraternity, by Diane Brady (256 pages; Spiegel & Grau; $25)
Like scores of other private universities, the College of the Holy Cross was slow to embrace diversity.
Though the Worcester, Mass., school’s first valedictorian — the class of 1849’s James Augustine Healy, who would later become a seminal figure in the Catholic Church — was the mixed-race son of a slave, there were only a few black undergrads on campus more than a century later.
“When it came to black students,” Diane Brady writes in “Fraternity,” her stirring new book, “there seemed to be an unspoken pattern emerging each year: One was admitted from the North, one from the South; one of those two would typically be on athletic scholarship, one on academic scholarship.”
During at least one academic year in the 1960s, according to the book, the 2,200-member student body included a single African-American. “For some in the administration,” Brady adds, “that was sufficient.”
The Rev. John E. Brooks, a theology professor who was about to be installed as the school’s dean, wanted to change this. Holy Cross, he thought, was too white.
Several years before he and his colleagues began to welcome female students, Brooks argued that black men deserved the chance to attend Holy Cross and that the university would benefit from more inclusive admissions and outreach policies.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Brooks decided it was time to accomplish these goals.
Brooks’ aggressive recruitment drive changed the face of Holy Cross and helped propel a group of talented African-Americans to greater heights later in life. Among them were Clarence Thomas, a future Supreme Court justice; Edward P. Jones, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; Eddie Jenkins, a member of the undefeated 1973 Super Bowl champion Miami Dolphins; Stanley Grayson, a deputy mayor of New York City; and Theodore Wells, a lawyer who has represented governors, Cabinet members and other politicians.
Brooks, of course, was wise and courageous to rethink his school’s racial mix, as were the black students who opted for Holy Cross when they could just as easily have attended any number of other colleges that were far more diverse. Together, they were on the right side of history. But that didn’t necessarily make the transition easier.
For Brady, the era’s biggest concerns — foremost among them being the struggle for racial equality and the Vietnam War — offer a means of exploring how Thomas, Jones and their fellow black classmates experienced life as part of a tiny minority at Holy Cross. And vice versa: the book’s characters also help the reader understand what it was like to be young, smart and oppressed in a land of supposedly limitless opportunity.
The book also serves as a minibiography of one of the most influential people in the United States. It’s intriguing, for example, to learn that Thomas, who almost never talks during Supreme Court proceedings, was “a … vocal presence in the (Black Student Union)” and that at least a few of his fellow black students “thought Thomas was incapable of shutting up at BSU meetings.”
Equally fascinating is the degree to which Thomas was driven by anger. He was resentful of his unyielding grandfather and wounded by his experience while studying in Missouri to be a priest. Thomas he would later recall that a white seminary student, upon learning that Martin Luther King Jr. had been wounded by gunfire, said, “That’s good; I hope the son of a bitch dies.”
Thomas was so prone to rage that, Brady writes, it could be “corrosive.” Armchair analysts will have to decide for themselves how this might have shaped Thomas’ career as a jurist.
The most interesting figure in the book, however, is Jones. The son of an illiterate single mother, he penned a social-issues column for the Holy Cross newspaper and resolved to chronicle the lives of his fellow Washington, D.C., residents in a set of fictional tales inspired by James Joyce’s “Dubliners.”
Jones published his Washington stories in 1992 in a book titled “Lost in the City,” but the intervening years often were trying. “Shortly after (his mother) Jeannette died in 1975,” Brady writes, “Jones sold his first story to Essence. He didn’t realize it until 15 months after the fact, as he was homeless at the time.”
Better times were ahead. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize and other awards for “The Known World,” his 2003 novel about life in pre-Civil War Virginia. It was a book, Brady writes, “that had been unfolding in his mind since he learned about black slave owners in a class at Holy Cross.”
Kevin Canfield is a freelance writer who lives in New York.
Posted on Thu, Jan. 05, 2012 04:00 PM
Monday, December 05, 2011
Steve Cokely exposes Boule Society - 1 of 3
Uploaded by TheWakeUpChannel2 on Jan 23, 2010
Sigma Pi Phi is generally considered to be the first African-American Greek- lettered organization.
Sigma Pi Phi was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 15, 1904. The fraternity quickly established chapters (referred to as "member boules") in Chicago, IL and then Baltimore, MD. [1] The founders included two doctors, a dentist and a physician [2]. When Sigma Pi Phi was founded, black professionals were not offered participation in the professional and cultural associations organized by the white community. [3] Sigma Pi Phi has over 5,000 members and 112 chapters throughout the United States and the West Indies.[1]
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