Soothsayer: “Beware the Ides of March.”
Caesar: “He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass.”
I give to you this perspective, synthesized from my years at RPI, because my time as Grand Marshal is shortly coming to an end, and because we know this format of publishing is effective at transmitting knowledge to future generations of student leaders. The danger I am here to portent is not imminent nor fatal, as it was for Caesar, but slow-moving and a consequence of living in an ever-changing world. For this reason, this message is not only relevant to the student leaders to be elected during GM Week 2026, but for future generations of student leaders, be it five, 10, or 25 years into our future.
The key concept of this message is that RPI is in the middle of a century-long transition between a Greek-dominated campus and a Graduate-dominated campus. I am here to argue that the success of our Student Government can be measured in terms of how effectively we can simultaneously advocate for these two student groups, and how effectively we can counterbalance adverse incentive structures and lobbying campaigns impacting the politics of the Troy Building.
Fifty years ago, around 75% of RPI students were affiliated with Greek organizations. Decades of decline in RPI’s Greek Life was the result of various forces: societal pressure, stigmatization, cultural change, and punitive measures coming from within RPI. During my time at RPI, the reinstatement of deferred recruitment, the findings of the Greek Life Task Force, COVID-19, and shaky confidence in the Fraternity and Sorority Life Office’s ability to advocate for our Greek system have continued to push numbers down. Only now has the RPI Administration stepped in to put Greek Life on life support. Our current situation is complicated. Some fraternity chapters are quite healthy, while others are struggling to maintain smaller chapter sizes of less than 20 active students. Our three sororities, by contrast, are performing relatively well due to a well-practiced registered recruitment process, which keeps the three chapters around the same self-sustaining size. In the most optimistic scenario, everything else left unchanged, RPI’s Greek population will stabilize at its current numbers.
A countervailing thread to the decline of Greek Life is likely to be the growth of our graduate population. If we are to believe the messaging from RPI Administration conveyed through the Rensselaer Forward Plan, our graduate population is expected to increase to support the Institute’s renewed focus on sponsored research. A target model which RPI might aspire to, in terms of the graduate-undergraduate ratio, is that of President Schmidt’s previous institution, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Of course, we won’t get there overnight, and there will be bumps along the way due to unpredictable events and policies at the level of national–and international–politics, but overall, we should expect the trend over the next 25 years will be an increasing RPI Grad population.
Graduates and Greeks are two very unique constituency groups represented by our Student Government. Their needs, their experience as students, and their relationship with the Institute are distinct from one another. As alumni, Greeks are perhaps the most generous benefactors of the Institute, whereas Graduates typically do not build as close a connection to the Institute as they do with their lab or department. The stakes of our ability to advocate for these groups are no less than disaffiliation. This action has been considered before by the Interfraternity Council (IFC)–the creation of a Troy IFC unperturbed by RPI’s politics was something we discussed while I was president of Sigma Phi Epsilon.
Meanwhile, Graduate Unionization is in vogue across our nation, and graduate worker union representation organizations have been working to establish a chapter at RPI for at least as long as I have been a Ph.D. Student at RPI. The threat of disaffiliation of either of these groups would be a certifiable disaster for RPI and for the Rensselaer Union.
Balancing the desires of these two groups is no small task, and unfortunately, it requires that a red line be established and maintained by the students and student government. Chapters are not clubs. The Union has always maintained its neutrality towards Greek Organizations, which are, by nature, trust organizations with a financial stake in real estate property, and most are members of national organizations. For these reasons and others, club subsidies or other direct financial support for RPI Greek Life cannot be funded by dollars collected through the Union Activity Fee.
Currently, the Greek and graduate constituencies are both minorities, each comprising around 15% of the total membership of the Rensselaer Union. Please, do not forget to advocate for these two student groups. With the pleasure of having been a Greek, a graduate student, and the chair of the Student Senate during my time at RPI, I can confidently say that the Student Government can effectively advocate for these groups and serve as an unbiased mediator between competing incentive structures set in place at our Institute.
Friends, Greeks, Graduates, lend me your ears; our institutions can survive this time of transition. Do not forget where we came from, keep an optimistic eye toward the future, and work diligently–together–to see it come to fruition.
