Despite Associate Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life Josh Welch’s repeated efforts to be transparent about the university’s implementation of security cameras in all houses in Greek Village over the summer, the cameras have continued to be characterized by some as a effort to keep an eye on the residents.
These sentiments have come from one side of the Greek community — the fraternities — while sororities took the opportunity early on to get educated on what the cameras were for, who could access the footage and under what circumstances footage could be pulled.
According to Welch, all six of the sorority chapters in Greek Village responded to his initial email on May 24 seeking feedback on the screenshots. Alpha Delta Pi invited Welch to a chapter meeting to discuss the cameras, while Kappa Alpha Theta and Pi Beta Phi had Welch on conference calls with chapter leadership.
By June 4, the sororities’ requested adjustments had been made.
“Besides the camera adjustments, my perception is that they’ve been pleased with the security update,” Welch said of the sorority women. “They actually see the benefit of it.”
Shelly Dobek, director of Fraternity and Sorority Life, said that one incident from 2010 stood out to her when thinking about why sororities need more security, in which a female resident was woken up by a strange man touching her feet. She startled him and he ran off but was never found.
“We could have been able to hold the gentleman accountable if we had cameras,” Dobek said. “We don’t live in a bubble we live in an urban area, we’re not central on campus we’re on the perimeter and there are a lot of people that walk through there which create potential problems.”
The chapter president for Alpha Delta Pi, Anna Dettmer, a senior studying industrial engineering, declined to comment. The president of the Panhellenic Association, Meredith Mason, a senior studying elementary education, could not be reached for comment.
Kappa Alpha Order and Sigma Phi Epsilon were the only two fraternities to have cameras installed because they are scheduled for demolition at a later date than the others. Their story was much different from that of the sororities: KA and SigEp did not get their adjustments made until Sept. 23 and Oct. 5, respectively.*
Welch said that he was contacted by SigEp’s house manager (at the time) Jackson Mathis, a senior studying natural resources, on July 1 asking for information about the cameras. Welch responded on July 2, saying that he would send screenshots of what the cameras could see when they were available. After sending the screenshots on July 10, Welch never heard back from Mathis about what adjustments he wanted to be made.
In an email sent to the Technician in response to an article published on Oct. 10, Mathis said that he had not received this email and considered his requests for information ignored. Mathis then found the email in his inbox shortly after corresponding with the Technician.
The addition of the cameras to all Greek Village houses was part of the 2015 Security Master Plan to raise all NC State University-owned property to the same security standard. This meant replacing the keypad access to Greek Village houses with card readers and installing cameras to monitor all external entry points, as is required for all other residence halls.
Despite Welch meeting with chapter leadership at a Chancellor’s Roundtable in March to discuss the changes to come, even taking house corporation presidents on a walkthrough to show them where the cameras would be located, many members were shocked to see six cameras with black orb casings positioned throughout the interior of the house when they returned for the fall semester, though the cameras only pointed at the exterior doors.
SigEp held a chapter meeting where they decided to cover the cameras with tape because they felt they did not have enough information about what the cameras could see to use their common area as they normally would: partying, hanging out and conducting their secret rituals, without feeling that they were being watched. Mark Hove was the brother it fell to to cover the cameras, according to Mathis.
“I don’t think anyone is against increasing the security of our house but there was unrest not knowing what the cameras could and couldn’t see and not knowing what they were being used for,” Hove said. “We honestly didn’t know if they were being used to protect the house or to livestream us.”
SigEp Chapter President Charlie Gray, a senior studying political science, said that the number of cameras was not made clear at the meeting in March and that attempts to learn more were ignored.
“He made it sound like it would be one camera, I had it in my notes that he said it like that,” Gray said. “That was the first and last time I heard about it.”
Welch has also been accused by Gray and others affiliated with the fraternity of breaking university rules by accessing the security cameras outside of a criminal investigation after screenshotting Hove in the act of covering the cameras. Welch emailed Gray Hove’s picture saying “we need to discuss this” and asked for Hove’s name.
SigEp’s Balanced Man Steward, Chris Mercer, a graduate from the UNC-Wilmington class of ‘91, reached out to Welch to try to understand what Hove was facing from the Student Conduct. Both men reported not being fully focused on the conversation, with Mercer saying “I had a thousand things going on” and Welch saying “I did not have the [Student Conduct] policy in front of me at the time.”
“I could have misheard him — either he said they were sending him [to Student Conduct] or they could send him,” Mercer said. “If Student Conduct is even being considered then the chapter needs to know about it.”
Regardless of this bit of nuance, the story became that Hove “was going” to Student Conduct, and that the cameras were accessed without any legal cause to do so.
Welch said that he was notified of the cameras being covered by NC State’s Security Applications and Technologies (SAT), which oversees the university’s security network, after they reviewed the footage as part of a general system health check.
“My understanding is that an unrelated incident in another facility required the review of video a week or so prior which prompted a staff member to review recently installed cameras to make sure they were functioning properly,” said Director of Security Applications and Technologies Scott McInturf.
Gray, Hove and Welch have since met to dispel any lingering concerns about Student Conduct. Hove was never referred to Student Conduct, though the university policy is now being changed to specifically include cameras among university property that cannot be tampered with.
Dobek said one potential factor in the discrepancy in reactions between the fraternities and sororities could be that fraternities and sororities use their houses for very different purposes.
Fraternity houses are designed to have large open spaces with relatively little furniture to make room for parties and secret ritual practices, while sororities houses are designed for “living and learning,” according to Dobek. Because of this, she said, fraternities have more opportunities for things to happen outside of their control or to have part of their secret rituals be made public.
“The amount of risk that the university is willing to assume has changed drastically in the last few years,” Dobek said.
Between 2001 and 2012, NC State had four fraternity closures related to misconduct. Since 2013, NC State has had seven, according to Dobek.
Dobek said in an email that this is not evidence that negative behavior has increased, but of a cultural shift at the national level.
“Where the university and national fraternities used to offer recovery plans, closure is now a common outcome,” Dobek said. “Couple that with the expectation, on a nationwide scale, that the good which comes from the Greek community does not mitigate the risk and that communities must simply do better and you have a culture shift happening related to the experience that overlaps with the university’s strategic plan to enhance security.”
*Editor’s Note: This article initially referred to SigEp and KA as “the two remaining fraternities in Greek Village” which was misleading. These chapters live in houses 7 and 2, respectively, which will not be torn down as part of the Greek Village Master Plan until beyond the summer of 2017, according to the current schedule. Other fraternities are scheduled to be torn down sooner so were not given cameras in order to save money. The article has been edited to reflect this.
