Sigma Alpha Epsilon

The University of Oklahoma takes on Clemson University in the Orange Bowl Thursday evening. The rematch of the 2014 Russell Athletic Bowl is the first of two national playoff semifinal games on New Year’s Eve.

The Sooners are two wins away from an eighth national championship, and a second for head football coach Bob Stoops. He attributes some of the team's success to an incident off the field before the season even began, when the Sooners were coming off a 40-6 shellacking at the hands of the Tigers.

The fraternity connected to a racist video that roiled the University of Oklahoma campus during spring has announced the hiring of a new director of diversity and inclusion.

Evanston, Illinois-based Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity said in a news release Thursday it had hired North Carolina native Ashlee Canty to help oversee efforts to enhance diversity at the fraternity's more than 200 chapters.

A former University of Oklahoma student seen participating in a racist chant in a video made aboard a fraternity party bus is scheduled to speak at an event sponsored by a leading black Oklahoma state legislator.

The Dallas Morning News reports Levi Pettit, who is from the Dallas area, will make his first public remarks since controversy erupted over the Sigma Alpha Epsilon video went viral.

The executive director of Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s national office announced plans Wednesday morning to combat racism and insensitivity within the fraternity at a press conference in Chicago.

Those steps include the hiring of an executive director of diversity and inclusion, a mandatory online diversity and education program for all SAE members and staff,  a national advisory committee on diversity and inclusion, and establishment of a confidential hotline to report offensive, inappropriate or illegal behavior.

Recent controversy over a racist chant at a University of Oklahoma fraternity focused attention on the state’s race relations. But the numbers beneath the headlines perhaps cast a longer shadow.

By almost every metric, blacks struggle in most of the quality-of-life factors in the state. Oklahoma is first in the nation, per capita, for blacks to die at the hands of police officers among states reporting. Blacks are about half as likely to own a home, are more likely to go to prison, less likely to go to college and less likely to graduate.

Sigma Alpha Epsilon's international headquarters may be in Illinois, but the fraternity's roots are firmly planted in the antebellum South. "We came up from Dixie land," says a ditty from an old songbook, boasting about SAE's success.

Now, nearly 160 years after its founding at the University of Alabama, another song — this one chanted by members of the frat's University ofOklahoma chapter and containing racial slurs and lynching references — hearkens back to the bad old times in the land of cotton and puts a new spotlight on the group's activities over the years.