Couldn't have thought of a better way to say it.

I realize that when you join a sorority there are some personal "freedoms" you might have to relinquish, like watching what you say or do when representing your organization, coming to events when asked to, etc. It might include doing things like dressing up for class during rush and wearing make up during rush. I don't think asking that much is unreasonable. But asking a member to overhaul her personality, or totally re do her wardrobe, do something that doesn't mesh with personal values or, essentially, be someone she isn't is not what sisterhood is about. And that's not right. We don't know what they were asked to do, but I am betting it was more than wear a skirt and some blush to class.

I can safely say that my chapter also fits into that first example, and that I've never seen us make a woman change who she is. Look cute during rush? Yes. Wear some make up, brush your hair. But do we tell them what style of clothing to wear, or to act like a different person? Never. And I've never seen the attitude that a woman won't be considered for membership because of her looks. It's nice to get a girl who is everything we are and pretty as a bonus, but dang...what is the point of picking a girl because she's cute, and not because she has that Alpha Gam spark?

I agree... and Ithink the whole deal revolves around the fact that those women who were dismissed were at one time given and accepted bids to join... they went through the whole process and then became full sisters.

Then, not even suddenly, because several articles have stated that the "Great DZ Decline" happened over a period of TEN YEARS, DZ decides they want to overhaul their image and consider closing/reopening because their centenial is coming up.

All of a sudden image mattered.

I think that even if DZ was able to close then suddenly reopen, they would not have received the great response that they hoped for because even if they held an open recruitment, DZ would have still had to deal with the "image" it had before on campus. Those don't die suddenly on most schools.

lol...... I just didn't know how else to put it but really that's what this is boiling down too......I've been pretty tactful so far on GC but in real life that's not exactly my strongest quality......

That's what has always bothered me about this situation. If a chapter only wants to take the pretty women during recruitment then as much as some of us think that's awful, in the end, it's the decision of that chapter. More power to 'em! And if there are chapters that use that filter, we won't really ever know b/c that falls under MS. But to come in and re-organize and only keep the pretty girls...... that's just weak! If you're going to re-organize then do it, don't pick and choose. That's just stupid and that is what has caused this big bruhaha. If they had just done a straight-up reorganization we wouldn't even be talking about it.

I see re-organization as a last ditch effort to prevent closing, because well -- no one really wants to close a chapter.

As many already know, the Alpha Gam chapter at Ohio State had a successful re-organization last January. I don't know the details leading up to the re-organization, but I know that all existing chapter members were granted alumnae status. Key word here is all. If I'm not mistaken, the remaining collegian(s) are set to graduate this semester, and I think IHQ waited to start re-org efforts so that the timing would allow the chapter to rid themselves of whatever hurt them in the first place.

I'm curious...besides AGD at Ohio State, have any other chapters been successful with re-organizing? I hate using that chapter over and over again, but they're proof that it does work and it can be a good thing. DZ HQ just didn't know to do it, I guess.

Re-organization saves the HQ from closing the chapter and a) having to wait until the next open opportunity to recolonize on campus or b) negotiating with PHC on an agreed time to come back on campus. I can think of two chapters off the top of my head that AGD IHQ closed recently that have agreements to return to campus by [insert date here].

If DZ HQ simply granted all (there's that keyword again) the Delta collegians alum status instead of picking and choosing, maybe they could have remained on campus to celebrate that darned Centennial they were so gung ho about. :rolleyes:

Depauw should close them all down for 2 years and start over fresh :cool:

By all, you do mean DZ, right? Because if you mean all = DePauw sororities, then that makes no sense whatsoever.

After this mess, DZ's lucky if they're ever going to be invited back on campus again. I think it's safe to say that if President Bottoms (teehee just for you, 33) and his adminstration are still there, DZ has no chance.

Alpha Phi has been successful with it. I'm not sure of how many times we have done it, but Cornell was recolonized the same time my chapter was installed (late 90s), and I know it was very successful. I never heard anything bad about it, no sisters that were upset or hurt or anything like that. I think as long as it's done right it can really be a good thing.

Oh yes, and we like to put on babydoll jammies and have pillow fights with each other too :D

There was actually an extremely successful recolonization at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1980s. The chapter had about a dozen members, their National gave alum status to the majority of the sisters and they worked very hard to recruit some great girls.

I understand they're still doing very well today.

I might be speaking out of "school" so to speak, but considering I was just in grade school in the late 1980's, wouldn't it be strange to compare something that happened almost 2 decades ago to something going on very recently?

I would think that the campus climate might have been very different back then, and I would think NPC would have been also. A lot of things that happened in NPC-Land back then are no longer tolerated in NPC organizations. NPC seems to be more 'politically correct' in recent years based on some things I've heard (can't really compare because I was in grade school back then, but we are no longer allowed to call "new members" "pledges", we can't go on scavenger hunts, and we have 'equal opportunity type clauses on every NPC website... I would imagine that "back then" things were way different)

Way to make me run out and get a Botox shot! lol ;)

I was just replying to Sandy's post and she didn't make any mention of dates as far as I saw.

My chapter recolonized in '99, the year before I pledged. All the members were given alum status as far as I know, but HQ waited only a year before restarting the chapter--there were still some of the "old members" on campus when I joined. Of course there was drama, but it appears to be a successful effort because they usually get quota each year during formal rush.

haha sorry :o

I found the 20 year old example very helpful because I had been wondering if re-organizations ever work long terms.

I would expect any group to get a big boost by having a colonization type rush, but whether they could sustain that long term is a little different.

In the south, twenty years ago might be pretty recent activity. I think that it was about the same time ago that UGA expanded for the last time, and it was a DZ re-colonization, if I'm not mistaken.

ETA: I'm nearly positive that DZ was off campus and came back, (a lot of girls from my town were early members after the recolonization) but there doesn't seem to be a record I could verify. Is it just standard practice to report dates on campus as continuous since the chartering? Edited Again: An online UGA factbook gives the DZ date as 1987. 20 years later, they are doing very well.

Okay confused, shouldn't re-organization and recolonization be two different things? I ask because it seems like people are saying they are one in the same. Recolonization, to me, signifies that the chapter left the campus and came back.

It confuses me too.

Unless you can see when a chapter left and see a break of more than four years, which would clearly be a re-colonization, then I think it's going to be hard to tell the difference between the times a GLO has ALL current actives go alum and then starts with a new group vs. telling some actives to go alum and starts with a new group, which both might be re-organizations.

I think part of what causes the problem it that no or few groups really openly talk about doing these things at all. It always seem to be presented as if the old actives are long gone.

And that's what it is. They are different in the sense that recolonizing means the chapter officially closed and came back.

When chapters re-organize they don't leave campus. I know that HQs have different procedures when handling re-orgs, but from what I've seen -- the collegians are granted alumnae status and HQ decides when would be the best time to hold a special recruitment.

I was kinda wondering why people were talking about successful recolonizations when clearly they are different.

So, even when it's a totally new batch of members with no initiated members in the re-formed group, it's a re-organization?

I'm not challenging your knowledge. I know that I don't know anything about it. But for some reason I was thinking that having the old members as part of the new group made it a re-organization.

How could an outsider know when the group officially closed and re-colonized nearly immediately ( as DZ at DePauw apparently originally intended to do) as opposed to a re-organization in which all the old members went alum but the chapter didn't close?

I'm no expert either, but I see the chapter as just being dormant. In this post, AXOBuckeye provided some info about AGD at Ohio State. To be honest, I didn't even know about Ohio State being re-established until it was posted on the IHQ website and I know many were surprised because they didn't know of Alpha Lambda's situation.

As far as your last question is concerned, I have no clue. To an outsider, I wouldn't think that it would matter too much as the terms are more internal based.

I don't know, I may be presumptious in saying this -- but as far as re-orgs and re-cols go, maybe things really do work out better when efforts are kept quiet?

[I've been up for almost 30 hrs with little to no sleep so my apologies if I'm not making sense at the moment]

Your post makes sense, and I think you're right.

I'm afraid that the only differences between the right way to do reorganization and the wrong way are that in the right way, you give everyone alum status and while you try to make sure the alums are treated well, you try to keep them out of the media and the university president's office. Focus on the future and the new girls.

Generally, I'm not sure that I like policies whose success depends on keeping them quiet.

I think that (speculation) DZ didn't want to do a membership review initially, they were just going to close the whole chapter and start fresh when they recolonized. Then when the school told them they couldn't let the chapter lie dormant, they had to think of a way (quickly) to get rid of the sisters they didn't feel were beneficial for the chapter, yet keep the chapter on campus. To do this, they had to have some active sisters. It seems as though there was a lot of last minute changes and confusion.

There wouldn't be all this mess going on if they had closed the chapter period, or closed it and completely recolonized. That happens all the time and none of it has ever made the NY Times. It's the picking and choosing, plus the timing of the notifications to the girls given alum status, plus the different info coming from all corners (collegians, alums, housing corp and HQ) that has made this such an issue.

I'm not quite sure where the distinction between "recolonization" and "reorganization" is, either. I was under the impression that it was a recolonization if everyone was given alum status and then a new batch were chosen, and I have always thought of reorganization as an interchangeable term. However, I guess a reorganization happens if only some members go alum. I'm only familiar with the scenario in which everybody goes alum and then new ladies are recruited, though--before this DePauw incident, I had never heard of some members going alum while others stayed active during any kind of reorganization/recolonization attempt. We always referred to what my chapter did as a recolonization, but the chapter didn't stay away for years and years before it came back...I'm pretty sure that recruitment for new members started the year after the previous members were granted alum status.

I look at it the other way - a recolonization is when there is a whole new group of members and all the old members become alums, whether the chapter went dormant for a time or not. Reorganization is when you keep some of the old girls, or merge with a local group and give them all status on the same level of the old girls or something.

Last fall Kappa Kappa Gamma reorganized at Georgia Southern. I heard it went well.

My point wasn't really that the reorg worked even 20 years later - it was more of a "it might have been OK to make the majority of the chapter leave in the middle of the semester back then, but since the NPC (not really just the governing org, but the invididual groups) are a tad bit more PC nowadays, and always trying to cover their bases, something like that might not "fly" like it used to."

Schools were probably very different back then too... in a make-believe world, maybe it would have been OK for the DZ HQ to do this at DePauw 20 years ago, but something like that is no longer acceptable. At least not at DePauw.

I think reorgs/instant recolonizations went over much better 20 years ago, just because Greek life was more popular. People wanted to be Greek a lot more than they do now and they weren't going to really delve into the "why" of what was happening.

The thing is though, the smaller the school, the more quickly what happened is going to get around to all corners. That was true before and now with the internet it's even more so.

I don't think have changed as much on campus as far as Greek life in the last 20 years as you might think, especially at a school like UGA. Of course I can’t speak for DePauw.

1987 may seem like the dark ages to you, but having lived then, I can assure you that many of the restrictions that we see in Greek life now were in full effect by the early 1990s, and it's likely would have been being implemented by 1987. I suspect there were some radical shifts in Greek life about the time that the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 in 1984, but by 1987, the only areas that have probably been more regulated now than then are rules for new members and some groups adding sexual orientation to their non-discrimination clauses.

Kicking girls out of their housing mid-semester would never have played well, and I don’t think we can assume that it has happened in other re-organizations unless we have evidence that it did. It’s one of the most remarkably callous elements of the treatment of former members in this case.

I think that the new media that the former members had access to, maybe more than any other aspect, may have changed how the re-organization played out. Previously we would have been at the mercy of the traditional media alone for information on the story, and here, we had social network sites, GreekChat, the official university and GLO websites fanning the flames of public interest. The “officials” can’t spin as effectively as they used to, and GLOs are going to need to keep that in mind.

There’s one other aspect I think may contribute to conflicts like this, but I don’t think it falls under the idea of PC and it didn’t seem to be an aspect of the DePauw situation: college students today are more likely than ever, if you believe the media reports, to continue to run to Mom and Dad with their problems. I think this behavior, more than any Political Correctness, maybe what causes colleges to start thinking in terms of “protecting” members from their groups.

I want to emphasize something: DZ at UGA in 1987 was a true re-colonization; they were closed and re-opened. They’ve done very well and remain a strong chapter. I wanted to emphasize this because I didn’t want anyone to think they had some kind of history of unpleasant re-organizations.

I'm as old as you are, silly :)

I think we were just answering questions about reorgs & recolonizations in general. I agree that forcing people to leave housing w/out RM issues, at a small school where everyone knows what's happening, would never have gone over well.

Who knows how things would have gone if DZ had made everyone alum, gone along with the chapter's vote to self-close at the end of this school year and recolonized at DePauw in 2008-09, as seemed to be the original plan? Do you think it would have worked out?

I got the impression that maybe Texas*Princess thought we just cast people out into the darkness for gaining five pounds back in the olden days of 1987. Actually, Texas*Princess, I didn't think you meant any harm at all, but I did want to reassure you that the values weren't that different back then.

Here's the thing: I have my doubts about how almost immediate re-colonizations and re-organizations are ever going to work. Would a year be long enough that the reputation of the group would change that much?

That's why I'm interested to hear about re-organizations that "took." I want to hear about cases in which five or ten years down the road the group is still as strong as it was the day that IHQs did the re-organization recruitment.

Alphagamuga, I'm with you as to having doubts. In the few cases I've seen, either the new group of women (or for that matter men) did not gain enough new members and closed before anyone was initiated, or they got barely enough members and were able to stay open but were no stronger than before.

Part of the problem is that, regardless of why they couldn't get members, regardless of how the new alums act, about 3/4 of the campus body remembers the old chapter and associates XYZ with that image.

FuzzieAlum, that's what I was afraid of, but I didn't have any direct experience. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for AGD at Ohio State that they will continue their success.

33Girl, I do think that if DZ had been able to do things the way they planned, things would have gone more smoothly. I have the impression that when the group voted not to do rush, that's what they were accepting. But, DZ erred greatly in two ways: not knowing what the university would permit before they began dealing with the chapter, and not letting the girls themselves select who would remain active and who would go alum when they did finally realize that they wouldn't be permitted to close and re-open as they planned.

(Thank for the re-assurance about age, as well!)

I believe the chapter is doing well.

The chapter did not officially close, but all members (to my knowledge) were given alumnae status. I was also under the impression the chapter itself voted on the issue, but due to just having built a very nice new chapter facility, it made more sense to reorganize than to close completely.

See my previous post. It's only been 6-7 years, but I think if the chapter was going to fold again immediately it would've already done so.

I'm only familiar enough with two recolonizations to talk about them, ADPi at Pitt and at PSU.

The one at Pitt started out great guns, but in such debt, it didn't turn around until the Sisters decided to become the masters of their own identity. The Sisters instigated tough rules, and those who didn't follow them were out the door. It took a few years, but they are now up for Alpha Delta Pi's most coveted award at this summer's convention.

At PSU, the recolonization was handled very well - the largest colony in Alpha Delta Pi history! From what I've heard, it had the same pattern. They, too, had a slight dip, but is now going from strength to strength.

I could name a few other sororities whose recolonizations went well, but it wouldn't be fair for me to do without intimate knowledge.

I was led to beleive that ADPi did not go back to a closed Campus and if that is not true, I suggest My Alama Mater as would love to see them return!:)

While not the cookie cutters of beauty they were the most hard working and the nicest. Very envolved and when I started my local, they were the first to give us recognition as being a founded group on campus.

Soft spot is still there!:cool:

It's good to know that some of the re-organizations do succeed!

I suppose some places it could be almost like being a new group.

I went to grade school with an ADPi sister at Pitt.

Not five or ten years yet.... but the Phi Sig chapter at Penn did a re-org with quick turn around..... and it seems to have worked out well so far from what I hear. We will see in the long run... I know 2005 was when they were first were all settled as a chapter and the new ladies had been initiated and they were winning awards at convention and had strong numbers. One of the sisters from that chapter actually posts here sometimes. How it works out in the long run is still to be determined however.

No that's not what I thought at all.

Actually this has nothing to do with weight or anything like that. I was talking about the way the "re org" was handled. (Casting people off in the middle of the semester - regardless if they were a size 10 or a minority, or really just not that into recruitment)

NPC sororities (from what I've noticed) like to keep all their bases covered a lot more now than they might have in the past. Third-party vendors at formals, gotta do everything by the "book" to make sure there are no risk-management issues, can't drink in letters, etc. etc... all for the sake of protecting our good name.

Which is why something like this (kicking the women out of their housing in the middle of the semester and yet late enough in the semester to make it a pain in the rear to have to find an apartment. I don't know about you, but back in D-town, if you didn't know where you were living next Fall by the time March or April rolled around, you were screwed) was really surprising.

You'd think a sorority like DZ would have some better sense and the foresight to see the repercussions of their actions because everything sororities have done recently seems to be to prevent PR-disasters like the one at hand.

And I'm not really sure what you mean by "running to Mom & Dad" with their problems, because on my old campus, a large portion of people I knew had their own jobs, payed their own rent and were for the most part self-suffecient. If my sorority kicked me out a few weeks before my finals, of course my parents are going to hear about it... not because I'm trying to be a whiney (*&#$ but because that's some major crap to have to deal with at a very crappy time in the semester.

We actually just won the Chapter of Excellence award here, which is an honor that only a handful of the 20 chapters actually receive... so I'd say things are doing fairly well :)