By a 19-5 vote, Fraternity Council President Tim Bryson was removed from office Monday evening. The impeachment came due to his decisions to suspend recruitment for 13 fraternities. It was later revealed that he had only possessed enough evidence to do so for four of the fraternities.
Under the constitution of the Fraternity Council, which itself became an issue of contention in the initial hearings, Bryson indeed acted outside of his constitutional authority. Considering the rules in place, Bryson's impeachment was the proper outcome.
But his impeachment raises big questions about the rules in place.
Bryson's original intentions were good. He has stated that he suspended recruitment in order to protect potential new members from possible safety threats, some of which could lead to hospitalization. As conduct meetings are still scheduled with four fraternities, it is reasonable to assume he had some evidence that the threats were real in at least some cases.
With the university pressuring him to take action, Bryson probably believed he would send a signal to the university that the fraternity system needed no external oversight and that it was fully capable of regulating itself. It is unfortunate that what followed proved that notion to be dead wrong.
The strangest part of the entire ordeal is that the leaders of Fraternity Council, the organization most directly responsible for disciplining fraternities, can be impeached through anonymous nominations and votes by the groups they are supposed to be disciplining.
The system seems to encourage silence and aversion to punishment in favor of job security, and could possibly have made some fraternity presidents feel like they could be vindictive in their actions to counter Bryson's overreach. If wrongdoing is proved for any fraternity, it comes with the unsettling notion that in the future a Fraternity Council president could be impeached merely for trying to enforce actual order.
It is for this reason that we recommend that oversight and discipline of the fraternity system be handed over to some external body that cannot be easily punished for enforcing the rules.
Other changes are probably needed. This is the second fraternity rush suspension in four years, and sororities never seem to have problems on this scale. But, for now, external review of conduct violations would be a welcome first step.