Associate Panhellenic Membership
 

How many of your campuses offer an associate level of membership in the campus Panhellenic organization? If you do, what are the differences between associate membership and full membership? Some of our OPhiA chapters are associate members of Panhellenic on their campuses, and I'm curious about whether this level of membership is widespread.

My campus does, and my chapter is a member of it. The only real difference for us is voting rights: as an associate member of PHA, you don't have a vote in expansion/recruitment/etc. However, we've always been allowed to voice our opinion and say how we would vote.

Back in the day at Illinois, we had associate members that were non-voting members of the CPH. Initially, they participated in formal recruitment by doing an info session during open house round. Eventually, there got to be too many associate chapters that wanted to do that, so it stopped.

The flip side, though, is that nobody really paid attention to what rules the associate members did or did not follow.

At GT, Panhel has associate members (AOE & ADX). They don't participate in recruitment. I don't know what they *do*, though.

At Penn State, Omega Phi Alpha, Sigma Alpha, and Phi Sigma Rho are all associate members of Panhellenic. I am not sure if they are voting members or not, but they do participate in Homecoming, Greek Sing, and Greek Week with the rest of the NPC chapters. They do not have dorm floors though nor do they have suites, I believe they reserve common rooms for meetings. None of them participate with the NPC sororities for recruitment, most (from what I can tell) do events in the weeks afterward.

I think part of the reason they would participate in those things at Penn State is because there are so doggone many fraternities and they need someone to pair with. At places where there are, say, 11 NIC fraternities (three of whom are super small) and 7 NPC sororities it might not be the same deal.