I Take Just Pride: Book-Signing and Discussion
Thursday, September 20
Start Time: 4:30 PM
Join us for an afternoon with Scott Conroe, author of I Take Just Pride. At the age of 49, this Cornell faculty member decided to join a fraternity.
Conroe’s narrative follows Cornell’s chapter of Phi Kappa Tau national fraternity from “colony” stage to award-winning chapter, starting with the chapter’s folding in 1995 and ending with its growing pains in 2003, with an epilogue in 2006 after the chapter was named most outstanding in Phi Tau national (headquartered in Oxford, OH). But this portrait, told from Conroe’s perspective as faculty advisor, shows the temptations and struggles facing the men as they liked being a model chapter, yet wondered what they were missing by following adults’ expectations.
A former newspaper writer and college public relations officer, Conroe was teaching writing at Cornell in 2000, and researching fraternities, when he met the Phi Tau colony. The Phi Taus needed a faculty advisor and Conroe agreed to do it, with little idea of his role. He was moderately qualified. A baby boomer with little responsibility or loyalty to anything, Conroe had not belonged to a fraternity at tiny, elite St. Lawrence University in northern New York. He had served as Interfraternity Council advisor at SUNY College at Potsdam for two years.
Conroe gradually became the men’s friend and ally. Then he actually became a Phi Tau, initiated the night before his 46th birthday, setting himself on a path of self-discovery even as the restless brothers questioned their own vision and dealt with the complicated life of a college student and Ivy Leaguer in the 21st century.
By turns humorous and poignant, powerful and practical, I Take Just Pride is a baby boomer story, a look at the challenges facing fraternities and all young people, a look inside a fraternity chapter, and a fish-out-of-water narrative as Conroe tries to help the men deal with crises large and small, from a father’s death to battles over who should belong to the chapter – even as he must learn to work with young people as he never needed to before.
“Part memoir, part social history, part coming of age heroic tale, Scott Conroe’s I Take Just Pride comments, critiques, observes and frequently delights in the fraternity system and its role in our lives,” says Marion Roach, author of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers and The Roots of Desire. “A great companion for anyone, from the college-bound to the college-graduate reader, it’s an American story for our time.”
An advisor to Cornell’s Phi Kappa Tau chapter since 2000, Conroe serves on its alumni Board of Governors. He has been a facilitator for the fraternity’s national Leadership Academy, a presenter at Cornell’s annual conference for Greek leaders, and part of Cornell’s efforts to combat hazing in its Greek system. He attended the Interfraternity Institute at Indiana University in 1995.
A native of Potsdam, NY, Conroe worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer for 17 years, the last 10 as a sports writer in Syracuse, NY. He was associate director of college relations at SUNY Potsdam from 1994 to 1996, and taught science writing and magazine journalism at Cornell for seven years.
Conroe received a bachelor’s degree in English from St. Lawrence in 1977 and a master’s degree in communication from Cornell in 1998. He lives in Cortland, New York.
