I don't think it has anything to do with being "smarter than their organization." I just think the rule in general is stupid. It also sounded like this party was held at a nightclub, not the fraternity's house (i.e. 3rd party vendor in play).

At any rate...it might have been better to close the chapter completely rather than to cause a divide in the sisterhood like this. The 25% left (who I'm betting are fairly new sisters) have a huge task ahead of them to rebuild the chapter, and I would hope that they get above and beyond the normal amount of help to do so.

As far as I know, that's the plan. Before all this happened, the NYU chapter was doing great. The goal is to get it back to where it needs to be :)

You may find the rule stupid, but a chapter that is a risk management problem is an insurance nightmare for the entire organization. Someone gets hurt at this party, and AST becomes liable regardless of where the party was held and who supposedly sponsored it. As to whether or not the chapter should have been closed, NYU is a very valuable asset for an organization, and I'm sure they will try everything they can to make this chapter survive. I don't blame them for trying. With that being said, that doesn't include letting the chapter members threaten the welfare of members or the reputation of the organization.

While I get the RM/liability/Insurance issues, I concur. Especially if the rule is "routinely" ignored for chapters in good/ok standing.

For smaller chapters, this rule can b/c a nightmare when just trying to just hang out.

EXACTLY. It was obviously passed by people thinking only of huge schools and huge chapters. And (like many RM rules) it is not enforced equally across the board.

This is the problem with a rule like this. While I was a collegiate member, we had 19 members at the most. One semester, we were down to 9. Depending on the semester, anywhere from 3-6 sisters hanging out would have been considered an "official sorority event.". Because of this, I'd be willing to bet that between Spring 2004 and Fall 2006, we probably had between 500 and 1,000 sorority events.

I don't know what the alternative is, but it gets a little ridiculous for smaller chapters.

Heck, you may have had course lectures that counted as "official sorority event"s.

Oh yes, we definitely had some of those. And nearly every semester we would recruit at least a couple members from Lion Ambassadors.. So every LA meeting and event could also be considered an "official sorority event."

It really does get out of hand when you start to think about it..

The rule I referenced required 1/3 of members AND a second trigger: alcohol, the expenditure of sorority funds, a location associated with another GLO (i.e. a fraternity house), and I think there was one more thing that I can't think of right now.

The point is that, even if something is not an "official" event, we all know that the RM fall-out still exists when a bunch of women from one house do something wrong. Saying "it wasn't a real event" is a stupid loophole, and we all know it.

There are other 'unknowns' here which the newspaper would probably not ever know about. It doesn't take much to make it look like an official event in court. For example, a mass email is sent out to the chapter "Hey, XYZ is having a big party tonight, let's all go to celebrate Initiation."

We just don't know all the details. I can say that I've never seen actions like this taken without a lot of deliberation, heart ache on both sides, and a prior history of issues.