U of Charleston Suspends TKE
 

U of Charleston (WV) Suspends TKE for One Year

http://wvgazette.com/News/201110210125

Tau Kappa Epsilon HQ reportedly is also investigating.

Six members in total in the chapter? I hate advocating closing down a chapter, but when your average chapter size is 35-40 and you're at 6, you're really past the point of no return.

TKE seems to have a little different approach to things. That's why they are the biggest fraternity in terms of number of active chapters, but rank a lot lower in terms of average chapter size. At least from my anecdotal experience with our own TKE chapter at my alma mater, which doesn't seem to suffer much from their HQ despite bad numbers and sub-2-point house GPAs, that's been my experience.

For real. Kevin, stop being a cheese dick. It's not very excellent or honorable.

(I think that throwing someone's GLO's motto at them is probably the Godwining of the GC world.)

Did I read this right? Are/were they the only Fraternity on campus. That would also make them the largest and smallest Fraternity on campus, too.

You read correctly, but you may have missed where it said the chapter had six members. A lot of national organizations would shut a chapter down if it only had six members.

I agree with you. While at the national convention, I met a guy from a chapter at a pretty big state school and the group had a house and only FOUR members (despite attempts at fixing things, sending a recruitment person down to that chapter). It blew my mind they were still allowed to operate.

It's funny, because when I was active, the loud and clear message my chapter got from HQ was, "you NEED to double your recruitment," despite us being in the middle of the pack out of 4 (then 3) fraternities.

Agree. Mine would either shut it down or, if there was a good level of alumni support, do a total restructure. I did read that there were only 6 members but if TKE is the only Fraternity, that makes them also the largest (tongue firmly in cheek).

UCWV must have a truly weak Greek program if this is it or maybe they are just really new at this.

This would go with my recollection of the chapter at my alma mater as well. They are doing better now than ten years ago, but they are still quite small. I often wondered ten years ago how they were surviving/getting by as a chapter.

I'm definitely not the only one who has made this sort of observation about TKE. Hell, go do a search, the late and venerable Eric Conard (remember him?) used to joke that his group would open up chapters at strip mall beauty schools if they thought that they could.

Nothing wrong with it, they just have a different philosophy, and it surprised me to see not one but two stories in the same day about TKE shutting down chapters. It's not something you see a whole lot.

And you jumped right to comment on both of them. And you're using the word "different" in the same way my mom used to use it, which is kind of cute. ("She's different" as uttered by Mom33 = "She's a freakadoo whackjob who should have probably been drowned at birth.")

And yet the one Teke who has posted in this thread not only didn't seem to take offense, but agreed with Kevin.

Just sayin'.

True.

As for chapter size, that varies across GLOs and across councils/conferences. The members of TKE can speak for what the criteria is for TKE.

Oh, I definitely take some offense. But it's hard to disagree when you see chapters with 6 people and wonder why the national organization is wasting time + resources at the school. Six people does not a chapter make unless you had many volunteers helping you during recruitment/pledging. That's a lot of money and volunteer hours to spend on a failing chapter.

Pack up the bags, invest that money in chapters who may be on the brink or are experiencing hardship (but aren't lost causes) and go home. Too often, I feel, the national organization is so drawn to the "We have the most chapters" marketing slogan that it sometimes defies logic on expansion.

So, 6 members is below the specified minimum chapter size for TKE?

Minimum chapter size and minimum size to charter are two different things. I know there've been some guys on here saying TKE was pretty inflexible about the minimum of members required to charter.

I honestly don't know if any group has a "minimum chapter size." To put such a thing in writing could come back to bite you in the ass later (i.e. if once you leave that campus, the campus will never let you back on).

Off the top of my head, I don't know the specific number (if there is one), but I do know that there being not enough members to operate as a chapter, that is one of the clauses for shutting a chapter down.

There are 8 officer positions in TKE and this chapter only has 6. In my mind, there is no way this chapter has enough members to function.

And while not to speculate on this chapter's finances, I'd suspect with only 6 members, chapter finances will probably be less than stellar.

Edit: And yes, I'm fairly sure 35 members is needed to charter a colony and that number is completely inflexible, you either meet it or you don't.

Plus, chapter size is really campus dependent, at least for NIC/NPC groups. I think the trend is much more important than the point-in-time number.

Wouldn't the difference between minimum charter size and minimum chapter size depend on the organization and institution? Could the same also be said for whether there is a minimum active collegiate chapter size for some organizations?

This would also highlight whether there is a difference between being a "struggling chapter" and being a small chapter. Delta, for example, has collegiate chapters in which the active members love being from really small chapters. I am a product of one of those chapters. However, depending on how small the chapter is, the university and Delta can see small chapters different than the active members do. That is one way in which Delta's special dispensation was sometimes used to accommodate/assist/be patient with really small chapters that needed special dispensation. That decision would be based on a number of factors including an assessment of the expected chapter size.

Thanks for answering. I know small NPHC chapters where members held more than one office.

35 is the size needed to charter a TKE chapter?

See, if 35 was the requirement to charter Delta collegiate chapters, there wouldn't be so many Delta collegiate chapters. LOL. That's why I asked about the minimize chapter size for TKE.

My bad for inferring too much from your earlier post. Sorry.

It should. However, this thread (even though the OP pruned his post) says that for TKE, the min is 35, regardless of whether the average chapter size is appreciably smaller.

Some universities say you have to have X number of members to remain a registered student organization. I think those are fairly few and far between though, as some perfectly feasible student orgs just don't lend themselves to having a lot of members.

So if there are 35 needed to charter one must ask what happened either with the Chapter, or with Greeks in general, that caused the only Fraternity at UCWV to fall off the cliff and lose all these members and not be able to replace them. It certainly isn't competition from other Fraternities.

Our GLO requires 40+ (not absolutely sure on this #) to charter but per our bylaws it takes 4 members to constitute a duly recognized chapter. So, in reality, there could be a very small chapter but this is highly improbable as our National would most likely step in and reorganize.

I seem to remember that Psi U has a set chapter size required for chartering as well.

Pretty sure your sorority or my fraternity would have shut down a group of that size. Is that inaccurate? Would your organization continue to support a 4-member house or wait until serious alcohol and hazing violations to shut down a six-member house?

My guess is no.

That has nothing to do with anything. The point is that you're acting shocked that TKE shut down a chapter at all and implying by your shockedness that they have no standards. That is the cheese dickish behavior to which I am referring.

UCWV is a very small school, in an area that's not exactly booming. If TKE recognizes that and doesn't want to force the group there to be like its chapters at SEC or Big 10 schools, but still feels those men are just as deserving of brotherhood as any other, more power to them.

You're going to great lengths to ignore/refuse to answer my question. Would your organization tolerate a 4-member chapter?

The standards are clearly different. And frankly, yes, I am a little surprised they shut down this chapter. The chapter at my alma mater was caught by the Greek Life Advisor (she walked in on this) holding a fundraiser for MDA which consisted of $3.00 all you can drink beer being served by a 14-year-old girl. Our campus was dry. That same semester, TKE had a sub 1.0 GPA, fell to less than 10 members and was de-recognized by the school, yet they held on to their charter. Anecdotal? Yes. But absolutely true.

Of course, that was a little while ago, and standards have apparently changed.

Sometimes an organization deserves to be criticized when it acts in poor taste. We're all lumped together by non-greeks and when one organization, particularly one as well-recognized as TKE tolerates bad behavior, it reflects on all of us. I've seen them tolerate some pretty absurd things in the past. Maybe they're turning a corner.

Is this an NIC-NPC thing?

Yes. Maybe I should have specified. 33 is a member of an NPC organization.

Yep...or at least NPC. My chapter was shut down for low numbers with 30 members. Not to say a chapter couldn't stay open with 30 members if that's at or close to total. Our total was around 80, but probably should have been lowered as evidenced by two chapters closing for numbers less than a decade apart and two of the 5 remaining chapters still struggling. I'm still relatively convinced it was a housing issue for us, since our house held 30 + housemother suite and we couldn't even get half the chapter to live in.

Yeah I'm a GC regular so I know that 33girl is a member of an NPC organization. I asked that to explicitly place this within the proper NIC-NPC context (well, the TKE context is far more important than the NIC-NPC context) to remove the implication that a 4-member chapter is problematic, in general.

I couldnt agree more with this statement!

As I said to DrPhil, there may be an instance where an organization (mine, yours, NPC or NIC) will support a 4 member chapter. There are various reasons for this. So no, I will not definitively say that my org would shut down a 4 member chapter, solely for having 4 members.

Lots of strange dealings happen and to say "this will NEVER occur" is just plain folly.

This chapter in the original post, from what I can see, was not shut down for having 6 members. It was shut down for hazing.

That's what I thought and the fact that chapter size was brought up (and by a non-TKE if I remember correctly?) is why I asked whether there is a chapter size minimum for TKE.

There are Delta collegiate chapters with 6 and fewer active members; and chapters for other NPHC GLOs with 6 and fewer active members. Whether that works and "is appropriate" is up to the NPHC GLO and school.

For NIC-type groups, there is a fixed cost for operating a chapter because national consultants have to be flown in annually or bi-annually, so there needs to be a minimum amount of membership to make that cost-effective for the general fraternity to be able to continue that as a service.

Also, just to be competitive for membership, single-digits won't cut it. In most, maybe all cases where a fraternity is that far down in the tiers, the best thing to do is to shut down and start over with a clean slate.

For flying in consultants, it might make a difference whether there was another chapter of the fraternity within the city.I went to college at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, it has Sigma Alpha Epsilon and so does University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University. All of these schools are *considerably* closer to each other than either is to the Pittsburgh airport.

Out here in flyover country it's a bit different than in Pittsburgh. Things are a lot more spread out.

Not doubting that. What you said was much more true in flyover country. There is a difference between a 3 hour drive to the nearest other chapter vs. a 15 minute walk. I know one of the Fraternities at Carnegie-Mellon, the pledge class meeting that focused on being part of the National Fraternity was always held jointly with the pledge class of the chapter at Pitt.

Actually Kevin, as a TKE alumni I am not a proponent of the OMG WE NEED CHAPTERS EVERYWHERE OR SIG EP WILL OVERTAKE US IN TOTAL CHAPTERS!!!11111 approach. TKE has focused so much on expansion at the expense of maintaining the chapters it has. Honestly I believe TKE has so many chapters that they don't have the manpower to keep track of them all. I would rather cut the bottom-feeder chapters and put the resources into decent chapters and colonies with potential. Not all our chapters suck, however. Not that you said that, but a lot of people don't know any better.