By Makenna Hall, News Editor
Susquehanna’s Panhellenic and Interfraternity Councils efforts in hazing prevention on campus earned them the Hank Nuwer Hazing Prevention Award at the Northeast Greek Leadership Association (NGLA) Conference from Feb. 28 to March 1.
This is the first year that the Hank Nuwer Prevention Award was presented at the annual conference and was created in honor of Hank Nuwer, a member of Sigma Tau Rho.
The NGLA board of directors chose to honor Nuwer for his passion and work in hazing prevention, according to NGLA Executive Director Emily Perlow.
Thus, the award aims to recognize organizations or individuals that have contributed to hazing prevention in the northeast.
“I believe the conference saw us as a school that worked incredibly hard in to prevent hazing on campus,” President of the Panhellenic Council Julia Gagnon said. “Our previous Panhellenic President, Nicki Hagarty, has put an extensive amount of time into creating an innovative event to raise awareness against hazing.”
This event allowed the Greek life community to come together and honor Timothy Piazza, a Penn State student that died two years ago in a hazing incident. The event also honored all the lives that were lost due to hazing in the last 40 years.
Perlow noted the event showed an emotional connection in the community and the desire to educate faculty and administration along with the students.
The walk also raised $1,000 for the Timothy J. Piazza Memorial Foundation.
“They were recognized because we felt the entire community was engaged in both education and advocacy, which we believe are important steps to ending hazing across college campuses,” Perlow continued.
The NGLA holds the conference in order to bring together Greek life members from more than 100 campuses.
Perlow explained that members work “to engage in dialogue about how to make fraternity and sorority communities stronger, to develop skills to create change, and to enhance personal and professional learning.”
The conference facilitates these conversations through over 90 different educational sessions that the students attend.
One of the events was the Order of the Omega Case Study competition. Four executive members of Susquehanna’s Greek councils placed both first and second in the competition.
In their track, juniors Garrett Deyle and Chip Cruz won first place, and sophomores Haley Butina and Holly Jones placed second in another track.
“The purpose of [the case study] is to provide a foundation for Greek life students to have conversations about topics that tend to be a troublesome topics, such as people drinking at a dry event,” Deyle said.
The participants signed up in pairs and were given a scenario regarding an issue in Greek life. The pairs then had to come up with a response, considering what went wrong, who should be held responsible and what actions should be taken, according to Butina.
“[The topics are] very specific to events that are actually a possibility, it’s something that could actually happen but obviously you hope it doesn’t happen in your own greek community,” Deyle said.
“It required you to look up the panhellenic national rules that applied to everyone. We even went back and looked at Susquehanna panhellenic’s rules and also our code of conduct,” Butina explained. “We basically just prepared if something like this happened at Susquehanna University this is what we would do, this is how our school would react.”
Outside of the competition, the winners learned information they plan on bringing back to their council positions.
Deyle discussed how being IFC’s vice president of membership development means he deals with creating events for Greek men, including ones that discuss hypermasculinity, diversity and inclusion and how to be a productive person in fraternity life.
“What I learned was how to facilitate those types of conversations,” Deyle said. “I also learned about how to organize those events in a way that really can engage Greek men with those types of conversations.”
