By Sue MacDonald '77

Both represent communities of people whose ties to each other are deep, whose experiences are based on shared values, and whose lives intertwine year after year, often generation to generation.

Cliff Alexander '56 knows both worlds. His ties to his hometown of Piqua, Ohio, are evident in everything from his presidency of such groups as the Piqua Rotary Club and Piqua Chamber of Commerce to his chairmanship of Upper Valley Medical Center, several YMCA fund drives, and the founding of the Piqua Education Foundation, which has given hundreds of scholarships since 1985 to local high-school students. In fact, his family's name graces the football stadium at his high-school alma mater … "and I didn't even play football," Alexander says, chuckling. (Daughter Mimi Crawford Alexander '86 helped with the stadium fund drive).

"When you're in business in a community this size," says Alexander, 71, founder and CEO of Crayex Corporation, "it's important to be a good volunteer."

So in 1980, when Alexander was approached by Miami's Sigma Nu Fraternity to serve on its house committee — a group of alumni that oversees each Greek chapter's financial affairs and operations — he felt called to be a good volunteer for his college as well. That's mostly because of an incident in 1955 when he was a Miami business major and Sigma Nu's treasurer.

"In the dead of winter my junior year, the furnace in our house blew," he recalls. "We couldn't get the alumni on the ball and get a new furnace. The president of the committee was in Cleveland, and he was busy, and they couldn't get to Oxford fast enough, and they had to have a meeting first. We're down there on Tallawanda Road, burning up old furniture in the fireplace just to keep warm.

"I always remembered the problems we had when I was an undergraduate, so I tried very hard to make things work for the house committee when I was on it."

What he needed when he was in college, and what Greek chapters need perhaps even more today, he says, are mentors, role models, and leaders committed to helping young men and women learn the social, personal, and professional skills they must have to live their lives and be positive forces of change.

That's why in 2004 he endowed the Cliff Alexander Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life and Leadership at Miami, thought to be the first endowed Greek office at any U.S. university.

"At least 50 percent of my encouragement and remembrance of Miami is fraternity life," says Alexander, whose Crayex firm manufactures extruded plastic sheeting and bags used in shrink-wrapping everything from pallets of merchandise to pleasure boats being shipped overland on tractor-trailers.

"I matured a lot when I was in college, and I always thought it was due to the fraternity and living with so many different people. It gave me a lot of experience."

But the Greek system continually faces challenges, and as a house committee member, he experienced them firsthand: the gradual disappearance of house mothers (and their influence); the occasional decommissioning of chapters for improper or illegal behavior; the influence of drugs, drinking, and dozens of young adults living on their own, often for the first time.

"You assume that young people at that age know how to behave," he says, "but you still have to teach these young men and women the proper way to live. It's more of a philosophy of life that they need. We were so fortunate when I was in college to have many military vets coming home from Korea. They had a good influence on us. Today, we need to train more people to be fraternity and sorority advisers."

Training, in fact, is one of the key tangible initiatives now under way at the office that bears Alexander's name.

Miami staff members are providing leadership and values training to new fraternity/sorority members and emerging chapter leaders. They're hosting weekend retreats for executive board members and chapter presidents. They're offering sexual assault peer education. They're recruiting and training much-needed chapter advisers and sponsors. They're even working to create a Miami-based archive of "Greek fraternalism," thanks to the numerous documents, artifacts, photos, and texts that date to the late 1800s, as part of Miami's role as the founding university for four fraternities and one sorority.

Dick Nault, Miami's vice president for student affairs, says his staff hopes that other universities around the United States will adopt Miami's groundbreaking initiatives.

And Nault hopes that Miami's Greek students will appreciate the real meaning of Alexander's endowment "and realize that he's the kind of role model today's students need, not just because of what he's doing for the University but mostly because of what he's done and continues to do for his community."

For more about the Cliff Alexander Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life and Leadership at Miami, go to www.muohio.edu/fsll.

Sue MacDonald '77 is marketing manager for Cincinnati-based Nielsen BuzzMetrics and co-author, with her husband, of the soon-to-be-published book Step out of Pain the Rossiter Way.

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