don't give him any ideas

:o

Right! So obviously the 'stringent' criteria for membership seems to be working.

OK, now I see where you are going, my apologies...
 

Now I REALLY see where you are going with this (I read your post without seeing that you were replying to a previous post).

Having said that, offhand none of us can say for sure that the majority of mergers or dissolutions of former NIC/NPC orgs were as a direct result of them being too young, having a weak membership, or not solidly established.

But fear not; I will go to the library and get the latest copy of Baird's Manual where there is an entire section devoted to "Greeks That Are No More", which among other things, gives explanations as to why they merged or dissolved. Perhaps that might give us more insight as to whether the stringent membership is truly justified.

I'll keep you posted. Stay tuned. ;)

ETA: Don't forget that at one time there was a proposed merger between Kappa Alpha Psi and Phi Beta Sigma, in which the latter party declined the offer*, so even NPHC orgs weren't immune to such actions. OTOH, both orgs were less than 10 years old, so at the time, perhaps considering a merger wasn't such a bad idea. But again, I see where you are coming from

*Taken from the book The Divine Nine, p. 103

Re: OK, now I see where you are going, my apologies...
 

The discussion occured before the formation of the NPHC.

Re: OK, now I see where you are going, my apologies...
 

Re: Re: OK, now I see where you are going, my apologies...
 

Thanks. I feel that this whole conversation is going in more circles than Sasha Cohen.

Re: Re: OK, now I see where you are going, my apologies...
 

Y'know I actually almost mentioned that in my post, but I figured that was pretty much a given, so I left it out.

Re: Re: OK, now I see where you are going, my apologies...
 

I am merely citing the source where I got the info from. No more, no less.

This is to avoid folk assuming I am just pulling data out of the air without any print source to back it up.

Having said that, the credibility of the source is another matter altogether that, in agreement with you, I really don't care to entertain discussion on.

And that's that. ;)

Re: OK, now I see where you are going, my apologies...
 

OK, I began my research on this topic. However, because it is going to be lengthy, I will put the specific details in the "A Question to the NPHC Greeks" thread and a summary of the data from those posts in this thread to help aid in answering Mccoyred's question on whether or not NIC/NPC mergers were due to the respective orgs being too weak to sustain itself.

I already find this to be an interesting topic. You'll see why in the other thread.

Rain Man, this could be interesting fo all of Us on GC!

I dont know enough about Devine 9 History as Most of us dont!

Any Info I am sure will be enlightening!:)

Well there are 2 organizations know as Gamma Phi Delta. Both are somehow incorporated. The original is an African-American Sorority that was founded in 1943. The latter was founded in 1988 and is a Christian Fraternity.

Summary of the research - sororities
 

I decided to start with the sororities because there was fewer orgs and that their reasons for no longer existing were much more cut and dried than that of the fraternities.

Of the 18 orgs:

3 died out being too weak to sustain themselves (it is unsure if 2 of those orgs dissolved or merged with another org).

10 merged with an NPC org

4 merged with an org that later merged with an NPC org

1 was renamed due to a merger with another org which subsequently merged with a third org that later merged with an NPC org.

The oldest and largest org that merged was Beta Sigma Omicron, which existed 75 years and had 61 chapters. The second largest org was Pi Kappa Sigma, which existed 64 years and had 48 chapters. Neither org acquired their chapters from mergers.

Sadly, however, BSO only had 15 active chapters at the time of the merger. It is unknown how many were active with PKS.

Perhaps if we knew for all orgs how many active chapters there were at the time of the merger, it would help us to reach a more definitive conclusion on the strength of their orgs and possibly why they merged.

ETA: OMG, there is already a GC thread on this very subject that I briefly perused, then forgot all about it. I'm still glad I did my own research, I think a got a little more meat in my data that helped me with my research:

GC Thread: NPC Orgs That Didn't Make It

Ultimate summary of my research: INCONCLUSIVE!
 

Well, as you can see, I have spent a week trying to put some sort of finality on whether the reason many of the NIC/NPC orgs merged were because they were too weak to sustain themselves. For some of the orgs that ultimately dissolved, that may well have been true. For the orgs that merged, that may not have been necessarily true. I was hoping that Baird's Manual would've included the reason(s) for the orgs' decease, which it did for some orgs and not for others. I think Diamond Delta's post in the NPCs That Didn't Make It thread said it best:

So while it's quite possible that some of these orgs merged because they were weak to begin with, it isn't fair to blindly jump to that conclusion because it is the most convenient answer either. DeltaBetaBaby and 33girl address other possible reasons for mergers:

To which 33girl responds:
But it still comes back to Diamond Delta's point that Baird's doesn't address the reason for mergers and absorptions of orgs across the board, for some orgs it does, for others it is never mentioned at all. Heck, for 3-4 orgs I had to take an educated guess as to whether the org dissolved or merged, and I could be wrong on those.

For these reasons, I am not going to even hazard a conclusion for the fraternities, as such factors as the Civil War, and the two World Wars (and possibly even the Vietnam War/antiestablishment movement) along with the Great Depression, will only obfuscate the issue even that much further. Not to mention the fact that some of the school that these orgs had chapters with were anti-Greek and were either abolished or made those chapters extremely hard to survive. Without more definitive facts, it is very easy to make speculative conclusions that are unsubstanciated.

One thing I learned from my research is that I overestimated the usefulness Baird's Manual would be to me for the research I was trying to seek.

As far as to why the NPHC orgs got to where they were without mergers or acquisitions, all I can say to that is, "They just got lucky. But that's not to say that something like that couldn't affect their org in the upcoming years either."

I enjoyed the research and the insight it provided, and yes, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Now I'm going back to the "Question to NPHC Greeks" thread and re-iterate the original question I had in that thread, now that we went full circle again (but ya gotta admit, it definately was a lovely ride) :D

Re: Ultimate summary of my research: INCONCLUSIVE!
 

indeed

To the Group -

At the risk of stirring up a hornet's nest, this isssue of NPHC Expansion/Non-NPHC group survival is at once very complex AND very simple.

Very few of the posts here really address the true issue. If we want to have that discussion here, we can but it will be pretty controversial and I really don't want to start a flame war.

If we want to have the discussion (and play nice), I'm game. If not, let's leave it alone.

Let me know.