[john1082]

I was the High Pi at Texas Tech following an ill-advised house cleaning in 1982. These are some thoughts on the TTU Greek sysytem.

First, there are two distinct groups - the wealthy houses on "Greek Circle" and the fraternites that are NOT on Greek Circle. Years before I got to TTU, the University set aside some land on the west side of campus for a Greek row. If you were going to own, you had to build there. The old money fraternities did just that. Our chapter at TTU was young and did not have the dollars to do that. I might add that the buildings were fraternity lodges - nobody could live in them, they were meeting halls only. And they were palaces.

There are a great many long time west Texas families that send their kids to Tech. If daddy was an SAE then sonny will be, too. The established fraternities had multiple generations of family initiates - surprise - these were the fraternities on the Circle.

For the small town, first college generation kids the houses on the Circle were most appealing. And the ones that these kids were the least likely to receive a bid from. TTU seemed then to be very much a class driven Greek system, moreso than I have seen at other campuses, either before of since.

The small town, humble kids did indeed gravitate to the smaller houses like LXA. Kids that may not have had the best academic preparation before college, kids that were having to work 15 hours a week and then go to school full time and then try to squeeze house activities into the mix.

TTU was a tough campus for us as we did not have the same house dynamics as some of the wealthier, more established houses on the west side of campus. The west side chapters had perhaps 80 men in them and we were fortunate to run with 25 to 30. Add to it the small alumni base that TTU had at the time (perhaps 220 or so) and the picture becomes all the much clearer.

TTU did recover after the ill-advised membership review and operated for another 18 years or so. But the small town fraternity model that they operater on ultimately failed. Had they been willing to change the model, had the alumni stepped up with a major capital campaign to build on Greek Circle then it might have turned out differently.

But it didn't.