MOVING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK

Kurt-Alexander Zeller, International President, Mu Chi, Atlanta Alumni | presdient@muphiepsilon.org

Welcome to 2023! The first month of the year, January, is named for the Roman god Janus. This deity had two faces, one facing forward and one facing backward — allowing him to see both where he had been and where he was going. While we in Mu Phi Epsilon certainly don’t want to be two-faced, we also should attend simultaneously to past experience and to what is coming up in the future. The bridge metaphor that we have been using throughout my term is apt — when you’re crossing a bridge, the span connects where you’ve come from with where you’re going.

This year, the fraternity is engaged in two big projects. One is the oral history being coordinated by PCI. Over the next couple of months, all the members in our database should be contacted by this company with an invitation to participate and to record some of their cherished memories of their experiences in Mu Phi Epsilon. In this way, we hope to document more of our past, of “where we’ve come from,” as a fraternity — and to create a media repository about who we’ve been and what we’ve achieved that will inspire current members in the present and prospective members in the future. I encourage all of you to consider participating in this look back into our past — your past — in Mu Phi Epsilon.

But this year’s most important event will be our look ahead: our 2023 International Convention. At our first face-to-face fraternity-wide gathering since 2017, we will be focusing on “A Bridge Forward” to the fraternity’s future. We will have new experiences, learn new things, meet new friends, hear new music and elect new leadership. I hope we will ask and begin to answer some fundamental questions about what we want our fraternity, and perhaps even convention itself, to be like and to accomplish in the future. Like any well-constructed bridge, our path forward to the future must remain connected to our past if it is to have structural integrity. At the same time, if it doesn’t take us somewhere different from where we started out, it will be the proverbial bridge to nowhere.

The members of your International Executive Board hope that International Convention 2023 will be a time of exploring and discussing exactly where we as a fraternity want to go in the future and what that future should look like, so please be making plans to attend the convention July 19-22, 2023 and to take part in the discussion!