With doubts now clouding the gang-rape allegation at the core of the Nov. 19 article, many fraternity and sorority advocates are asking why the university must continue a seven-week suspension of social activities at the Greek-letter organizations, which U-Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan announced on Nov. 22.
The leadership of the Sigma Chi International Fraternity, which has a chapter at U-Va. that dates to 1860, is saying the university is considering proposals to give police “unfettered access” to private fraternity houses and to require that chapters make alcohol-detecting breath-test devices available during parties.
In a letter to U-Va., the Sigma Chi leaders asserted their opposition to any police-access proposal that would violate members’ constitutional protections.
In addition, requiring undergraduates “to assume the role of policing their friends with breathalyzers is an unnecessary elevation from the responsibilities they presently have when they consciously decide to invite other students into their homes for social gatherings,” wrote Michael A. Greenberg, grand consul/international president of Sigma Chi, and Michael J. Church, executive director.
Virginia to get uber-ethics laws
RICHMOND — The anything-goes gift culture that once dominated Virginia’s Capitol is giving way to a game of legislative limbo, with state lawmakers and the governor competing to take the value of acceptable handouts ever lower.
Republican leaders of Virginia’s House of Delegates made their move Wednesday, proposing a $100 cap on gifts of any sort, including meals and travel. That standard would be tighter than what the legislature imposed on itself earlier this year — and what an ethics panel appointed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) recommended just nine days ago.
The announcement prompted McAuliffe to declare that he, too, would propose a $100 gift cap — and to suggest that the Republicans had gotten the idea from him.
All of these proposals and counterproposals stem from a gifts scandal involving former governor Robert F. McDonnell (R) and his wife, Maureen. McAuliffe and legislators made an initial series of reforms in the General Assembly session that began last January. Now comes a second push, triggered by the shock of the McDonnells’ conviction on federal corruption charges in September.
McDonnell: Virginians should be suspicious…again
Is Bob McDonnell corrupt or just dumb?
A suspiciously large public grant from the controversial Virginia tobacco commission to a natural gas project in the southern part of the state should add to citizens’ misgivings over how business gets done in the Old Dominion.
The tobacco commission dished out $30 million for a gas pipeline even though its staff calculated that the project merited just $6.5 million based on the commission’s own economic formulas.
Intriguingly, commission staff said the larger grant was made because of political pressure from the office of former governor Bob McDonnell, according to a draft report by the state inspector general’s office recently made public by the Associated Press.
Neither the commission’s acting head, Tim Pfohl, nor McDonnell’s lawyers denied that such lobbying might have occurred.
Pfohl insisted, however, that the larger grant was made to ensure that a $1 billion power plant and $300 million pipeline would be built in tobacco country, which the commission is supposed to serve, rather than in a competing location.
