A Public Safety officer drives by a fraternity house at 11:58 on a Tuesday night during Winter Term and hears loud noise coming from inside the house. Most people know what happens next.
Those who were on campus for Winter Term this year probably saw a lot of situations such as these. While breaking up unregistered parties is Public Safety's job, many students who experienced these shutdowns were, and still are, frustrated with the frequency of Public Safety's visits to these events.
Much of this frustration stems from the rule that DePauw created stating that no registered events are allowed to take place over Winter Term.
Junior Nick Freund, President of Delta Tau Delta, claims that banning registered parties over Winter Term gives the fraternities no choice but to break the rules.
"It's pretty much a Catch-22," Freund said. "You can't have any unregistered events, so you should probably register them, but you're not allowed to register any events over Winter Term, so there's no real middle-ground there."
Even though the school held nightly activities to try to deter students from drinking over Winter Term, Freund does not think that such activities are realistically going to keep people from going to fraternity parties.
"I just feel like if they really want to combat parties at fraternities there needs to be things offered to draw them away from the parties," Freund said. "I just think they need to find things more appealing to the crowd that they're kind of competing with."
Director of Public Safety Angie Nally explains that the school does not allow registered parties over Winter Term because most of the members of each chapter are not on campus, so it is not reasonable for the University to expect a small handful of people to be able to manage something that big.
"During a semester, fraternities may host events, but they also have extensive risk management requirements to host events," Nally said. "During Winter Term, the majority of the fraternities do not have a number of members on campus to manage a large event like that."
With just two hospital visits over Winter Term this year as compared to seven last year, many would argue that Public Safety's actions have kept the campus safe. However, the number of arrests over Winter Term this year was much higher than the ones last year as well. There is some debate over whether the two correlate.
Coordinator of Fraternity Life PJ Mitchell argues that the fraternities were well aware of the expectations set for them prior to the beginning of Winter Term.
"With winter term, the last couple years we have had issues with unregistered events, and we've continued to try to communicate to chapters our expectations," Mitchell said. "Ultimately, though, it is a choice, and if you violate the expectations, then there is a measure of accountability that's going to come with that violation."
While Freund is upset with the trouble that his fraternity has gotten into as a result of Public Safety's interventions over Winter Term, he believes that there is a better way to go about the discipline process.
Freund explains that, as of now, everything goes through Public Safety and the Campus Living and Community Development offices. However, he suggests that the Interfraternity Council should act as a liaison, meaning that they should go into the houses themselves to evaluate the situation, and give a warning if there is a problem, so that the chapters do not get into trouble so often.
"I think if IFC would be able to go into the house and say...'this is kind of out of hand. If it's not shut down in 20 minutes you're going to get charged with an unregistered event. If it is, you're fine.' If they did that, I think we wouldn't have any problems on campus," Freund said. "Right now it's, if you get this call it's like, you're already going to get charged for it. What's the incentive not to keep the party going?"
According to Nally, there are three fraternity chapters holding nine total violations from activities over Winter Term at this time.