Tom is 100% right on this one, as my campus has found out.

Even if you have resigned from membership, unless the HQ of the NIC fraternity you were a member of sends you a letter stipulating that it has released you from membership and that you are no longer a member whatsoever in their eyes, you cannot initiate into another NIC fraternity.

It's a very tight legal situation, and you have to dot your i's and cross your t's very carefully.

I just wanted to clarify, because technically, no you cannot just resign, transfer, and pledge another group unless you have that letter in your hand.

Well. . . what others don't know won't hurt them lol . . .

But NIC is not like NPC with its unanimous compacts that bind all of them into the same rules.

NIc is basically a trade organization that Kappa Sigma for example no longer belongs to.

So each Fraternity is going to be different. As long as there is not a National by-law in your fraternity that doesn't allow you to initiate the chap with his situation then its irrelevant what the other groups do or do not.

If you are truly concerned do a rules check with the National Office.

I'm with Tom on this one. Sure you could pledge someone that took an oath and then just changed his mind.

But why would you want to?

I would have a difficult time respecting anyone that placed such a small value on oaths they take. How likely will he be to honor his word if he's initiated into your house?

Excellent point Tom & ktsnake!

I think GeekyPenguin has a very realisitc outlook on this.

Kath and I have discussed this so I'm going to share some of her viewpoints as well as my own. What I'm going to discuss mainly concerns transfer students who join one group at one school, transfer and join another group at a different school. Here are some points.

(1) Unless you've been through their initiation (which you haven't), you don't know what kind of oath they took with their first organization. So you don't know what kind of promise they're breaking, or even if they're breaking one at all. Which means that you probably shouldn't judge them for it.

(2) A lot of times people leave their original organization for good reasons. Would you expect somebody to keep a promise to an organization that treated them like isht?

(3) People make mistakes. People are allowed to remarry, and often people have unsuccessful first marriages but go onto have very successful second marriages, despite the fact that once they took a pledge to remain with someone "til death do them part" and broke it. And given that joining a GLO isn't as serious a commitment as a marriage (well, shouldn't be, at any rate), I don't see why GLO members shouldn't be given the same chance to make mistakes.

(4) Once you know what transferring is like, it's hard to judge people who do this. Nine times out of ten transferring SUCKS. Kath and I are both transfer students so we know. I don't regret coming to Wisconsin . . . but I also had friends from high school who were here already, made friends in the dorms, and pledged my sorority here -- and even so I still have trouble adjusting to the fact that I "lost" a year. A lot of transfer students (especially those who pledge at their first school) don't have any of those, and transferring can be really lonely. Joining a GLO is sometimes one of the only ways to make friends without working at it for six months. If it comes down to keeping someone out of my organization and simply because she already knows Gamma Phi's secret handshake, despite the fact that she will be lonely and miserable -- sorry, but I'm not into that.

(5) If you don't know anybody who's double-initiated, it's hard to understand why they do it. I do know people who have done it, and I understand why. I know a girl that said, "XYZ [the second sorority she initiated into] saved my life and I'm scared of where I might be without them." Sororities can help people deal with a lot of things that they might not be able to deal with on their own: depression, rape, death of a loved one . . .

If that isn't what sisterhood is really about, I don't know what is.


Sure, I don't advocate double initiation in every case that it comes up. But I think you are taking your GLO a little too seriously if you judge a person's character by a GLO oath that you assumed they made at a time when they were probably at a very different stage in their life than they are now at.

s&s, & GP, those are all really good points, and now I completely see what you mean & agree with you.

I was also a transfer student, and when I moved, I didn't know anyone, and it quite honestly, it sucked when I first got here. I've met so many wonderful people since I've joined ADPi, and I'm glad that I had the opportunity to do that. :)

thanks to everyone that has replied so far, with out going into details the letter he has pretty much says that his name and adress have been removed from there membership files and his name is in there records are resign or self expulsion. And also without going into more detail something happend at a party they had and his niece was almost raped and then it tried to get covered up. He has our full support and we would love to extend a bid to him just checking up on the rules but I think that he will be in the clear. We also have respect for his because he is coming from a college almost 600 miles away I'm sure he could have been shady and hid the whole situation from us but we respect the fact that he was very up front about it all.

People also pledge to love someone forever when they get married, yet divorce rates have skyrocked in the last 50 years. People break oaths. It'd be great if everyone was 100% honest and kept their word, but it just doesn't happen.

Once again, he has no obligation to the fraternity that has released him from membership. It's like the episode of The Nanny where Maxwell told Fran he loved her, but then he took it back.

I think Hell just froze over. :p

I by no means claim to be an expert on NIC/NPC rules, however, I know that NIC allows this. We've discussed it before, and while ktsnake certainly has a valid point that the person did break an oath, we don't know the circumstances. What if he was initiated into Delta Upsilon Mu, then discovered that the DUMs had secretly been practicing a racial discrimination policy, like discussed in the "White-only membership clauses" thread. DUMs best friend happens to be Martian-American, so he resigns from the Alpha Sigma chapter of DUM as well as the national fraternity. DUM national headquarters strikes him from their rolls and sends him a letter saying he's no longer recognized as a brother. If DUM wants to go pledge ABX now, nothing is stopping him in NIC bylaws. Maybe he finds the brotherhood he THOUGHT DUM had in ABX, which doesn't discriminate as they have several Martian-American brothers.

Well that's a somewhat extreme example (although still possible) there are a lot of other possibilities, ranging from the fact that he transferred and no longer feels close with his brothers that he only had a semester with, to the fact that he doesn't agree with the hazing going on the organization, to he dislikes the alumni attitudes.

sugar and spice further expresses a lot of these points in her post above, so I'm going to stop here for now. UT SAE21, I hope you find an awesome brother in this new guy, and that he finds the home he's been looking for with you and your SAE brothers.

I tend to agree, James. Situations where students transfer to schools where there's no chapter of their GLO can be tough. By no means is this a brand new phenomenon; long before my time, probably long before the time of anyone who posts on GC, the University of Louisville (KY) had a perhaps unique solution. Their yearbooks from the very late 1940s and early 50s include pictures / writeups on a "Wandering Greeks" organization for transfers whose NIC groups weren't at U of L. The men in Wandering Greeks were represented on IFC, took part in intramurals, and had social events. The guys even had a house, at least for a year or more.

The corresponding NPC women's group was called "Stray Greeks." No house, apparently, but had a member on Panhellenic.

While an arrangement like that is not the same as actually disafilliating and being initiated into another GLO, it would appear to at least offer "homeless" Greek transfers a way to participate in Greek life to some extent, form friendships, etc. Whether it would work in the 21st century, or at any particular school, is another question entirely.

That's a really cool idea...I know there's a few misplaced ATOs and Alpha Sigma Phis on our campus - I wonder if it would be possible for me to start something like this.

I too am a transfer student and know that if I had joined a sorority at my first school and then transfered where there's no chapter seeing all the greek life going on and not having sisters to participate with would hurt.... I think that the rule for NPC is so strict as to avoid any shadiness that could result by stipulating special circumstances under which one can be initiated into two organizations...

It seems as if the young man has his required paper work stating that he is no longer a member of his former fraternity and if he is that interested in being a member that he would choose to do that so he could be active and participate I think he'd be a great brother and probably an asset to your chpater

GeekyPenguin,
Alpha Sigma Tau has a "social membership", in which transfer students who were in a sorority at their former school (thereby unable to pledge AST) can be social members. They don't have all the privledges of an AST member (obviously they can't go to ritual, etc.) but it does offer the opportunity for that woman to experience a sisterhood at her new school.

PsychTau

Just to let you know...the story I told in the beginning about knowing a guy who did this...he ended up being initiated into a 2nd NIC fraternity...the 2nd fraternity was EN. He ended up being a great member too!!



Sigma Nu (Kappa Lambda) Sweetheart 2000