Welcoming Sigma Chi back to campus is like welcoming an older brother home from college. Albeit, it’s like welcoming home an older brother who was grounded after he brought strippers home and then got drunk and pushed a friend out a fourth-floor window. But we can overlook those transgressions. After all, it’s family.

So, in the spirit of forgiveness, I thought I’d give Sigma Chi an update on the old neighborhood. It’s only been three years, but it’s changed a lot.

A couple of old faces are gone, and they’ve been replaced by some new ones. Phi Kappa Sigma and Delta Kappa Epsilon are gone, and Pi Kappa Alpha and Alpha Epsilon Pi have replaced them. Phi Kap left because it didn’t want to clean up its house, while DKE was kicked out for getting two freshmen dangerously drunk at an off-campus pledge party.

Kappa Sigma was almost kicked off for an alcohol-related incident. Instead of leaving campus, they were put on probation, a position with which several fraternities are familiar. Of the 17 fraternities on campus, all but four can’t have alcohol in their house, either because of probation or the fraternity’s choice. Several national fraternity organizations have gone dry. NU officials have said that when new fraternities are looking to come on campus, they give preferences to those that promise to have a dry house.

There are two reasons for this shift away from booze. The first is that we live in the most lawsuit-happy time in our nation’s history. It started with an 81-year-old woman winning $480,000 from McDonald’s for spilling hot coffee on her lap. Ever since then it seems that any time someone does something stupid, they look for someone rich to blame it on and sue. Neither NU nor any national fraternity can afford to be sued every time someone gets drunk and hurts him or herself, so they have to take a hard-line stance and ban alcohol in fraternity houses.

The second reason is that NU fraternity members have been irresponsible with alcohol in recent years. I don’t want to jinx anything, but so far this is the first year since I’ve been in Evanston that there hasn’t been a reported case of someone almost dying at an event where alcohol and fraternities were mixed.

These events have endangered non-fraternity members as well. A dry Greek scene means more parties are pushed off campus, away from health aides and other safeguards.

Because it doesn’t want to be in violation of Illinois law, NU can’t teach freshmen and sophomores to stop drinking when they’re drunk. But older students can. Hopefully this is a role fraternity members have started taking this year.

People always say fraternities exist in flux — there’s either too much alcohol or not enough. The events of the past few years have pushed the pendulum to the point where most fraternities are dry. Hopefully the pendulum is about to swing back. Hopefully fraternity members will continue to party responsibly. Get drunk, dance and pass out. Not get drunk, dance and drink some more. With a few more years of incident-free Greek life, fraternities might even be able to go wet again, and they can bring parties back from off campus.

And if Sigma Chi comes back to lead this charge, we’ll have something better to remember them for.