New Sorority Housing at Auburn
 

I was looking on the Auburn website and stumled on this:

https://fp.auburn.edu/housing/docume...%20preview.pdf

It's set to be ready for fall 2009. It's not like how I invisioned it 4 years ago when it was first proposed. I dunno how I feel about it. What do ya'll think? How do you think this will affect recruitment?

Interesting - not quite what I was expecting either - 6 sororities in one bldg?? That's going to get really crowded when having members live there. Not sure what it will do to recruitment.

L
AU ZTA Gamma Rho

Crud. My computer froze when I tried to open it but....why are they doing this? Isn't the current system working any more?

The buildings look pretty big. 3 floors of 4-person suites. 20 suites per floor=60 suites. My guess would be 2 sororities per floor. It will be the same number of beds as they have on the Hill right now. But the 6 chapter rooms on the first floor... No privacy. at least on the Hill, even if you share a building, your chapter room in the basement, completely seperate from the other chaper.

They'd better rethink that. At Mississippi State in the seventies, there were several chapter rooms in each basement and each sorority pretty much knew what the others wore to initiation. Also, some would listen to each others' ceremonies through the walls with drinking glasses.

The new set up will give sorority women private rooms and they'll only share a bathroom with one other person. It will make it more like apartment living and make living in chapter housing more competetive with off campus options. Also, rumor has it, Auburn will be requireinf ALL freshmen to live on campus, so with sororities in the Village, that frees up over 600 beds on the Hill.

Back in the day, all women had to live on campus! Seems like it was changed to let seniors live off campus my senior year. I wonder when the rest of the rules changed.

I'm cracking up envisioning this.

I don't get why people get so bent out of shape knowing what people wore to initiation. I guess because ASA is pretty open about what we wear...I know we had pics up everywhere from before/after initations. We held our initiation in a local church though, so you'd have had to work pretty hard to "spy" on us.

I wonder if having 6 sororities all in one building would affect inter-sorority relations. Division in the building: Our side vs. their side? Or maybe a common bond: Our building vs thier building?

At least on the Hill, the chapter rooms were on opposite ends of the basement so there was some privacy. Of course when I was in school, we were still in the Quad and the only sorority in the bldg. If 6 are in a bldg, how will they do rush? 6 groups of girls in the lobby? Mayhem!

I think the PNMs will wait outside in the courtyard. That's how you access the chapter rooms.

At Birmingham Southern, 2 sororities share each of the 3 townhouses. I wonder how that works out.

I like the basic concept, but I agree that it might make more sense to place the chapter rooms throughout the buildings rather than all on one floor. Since they are already mixing the use of the floor on the other levels, why not?

I kind of think they should set it up so that each group has a designated section: like this floor has a couple of multi-bedroom suites, a chapter room, a couple of study room, etc that will be primarily used by ABC.

If you compare the idea of having a house to having that set up, it's pretty comparable. But when it's just chapter rooms all on one floor, why would that be a big improvement over having a chapter room in a dorm?

See, that's my point. They already have what they want in separate dorms or in some cases (the really big dorms), no more than 2 sororities to a dorm. The majority of each dorm is independent and that's okay. I'd hate to see intersorority rivalries spring up because supposedly this group is too loud or that one is trying to take extra space or you name it...

I do wonder if it's hard to keep people living on the dorm floor these days when the off-campus (or even on-campus in some cases) competition is better.

It's one thing to have members live in dorms if everyone is living in dorms. It's something else if the norm is to live off campus after freshman year, except for the Greek women who might have to live on the hall. I suspect they like living on the hall but would like something nicer. (At this point aren't even the hill dorms going on at least 20 years since the last big renovation?)

I agree with you that it's going to need some working out since it's less well defined than the old dorm floors plus chapter rooms, and that this plan seems to suggest a weird mix of uses that might end up troublesome.

I'm not generally sure that it makes sense to have undergraduate housing mixed with classroom space. It just seems like you are asking for some noise issues.

Similarly, what independent wants to be living above or below a chapter room during any kind of event?

Do you suppose the idea there is that they can mix funding for the project?