Quote:
Originally Posted by AGDee
We were on campus last semester. The existing collegians were given alumna status. There's a thread about it in the Recruitment forum. Two of our international officers went there in person and talked with the women who were being given alumna status. The women were strongly encouraged to immediatley be active alumnae and were given all of the options available to them to do that, including a Junior Circle, which is what we call our alumnae groups for women under 35. They were wonderful women who had been working very hard and they received recognition for that hard work. They were tired and hadn't had a great collegiate experience since they were struggling with numbers for a while.
This is the second Big 10 school where we've done this in the last 6 years. We also did it at the University of Michigan. That chapter is doing alright, but it has been a slower progression. They had their best recruitment year this year and are still building up numbers, but have shown a huge improvement. Different campuses yield different results.
At Michigan State, the Fraternity chose to not immediately recolonize for various reasons. We are renting that house out to either AOPi or ADPi(sorry, I can't remember which at the moment). We are behind Alpha Xi Delta for recolonization and recruitment is down all over the state due to our extremely poor economic situation, so it's difficult to estimate when that recolonization will happen. We are all pulling for it though. It's one of our earlier chapters.
The decision is based on so many factors that it's really hard to make a blanket rule. Campus climate, finances (especially when there is a house to consider), the general state of other NPCs on campus (you can note that several closed at Michigan State within a couple years of each other so that could be a factor), etc. I think a lot of it ends up being HOW it's done, not whether it is done. It is ALWAYS a heart wrenching decision as Heather pointed out earlier.
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AOPi are the ones renting "my house" (sorry, I lived there for several years, so I'll always think of it as "my house"
) - ADPi does not have a chapter at Michigan State.
AGDee has summed it up pretty well. The reorg at University of Michigan and Ohio State both seem to be going very well. (And, in both cases, involved making current undergraduate students alumnae.) However, I agree that the difference with the situation vs. the blow up surrounding the DePauw issue was the way IHQ handled things. Having been involved with Michigan State's chapter almost up to the closing, I think that the women of the chapter would have been receptive to an immediate reorganization/recolonization. (For the reasons AGDee mentioned - having been stressed out from trying to keep a small chapter afloat...alumnae status may have been a welcome break vs. the heavy commitment involved with a recolonization.)
But, I don't think the campus climate would have been as receptive to an immediate recolonization as perhaps OSU and U of M were. As AGDee mentioned, there were other chapters closing around the same time as ours did. Personally, I think that chapter total should have been lowered on campus years before it got to the point where we closed. We lost one chapter (Tri Delts) while I was an undergraduate in the 90s. Of the 16 remaining chapters after Tri Delts left campus, at least 6 were seriously under chapter total. (Chapter total was 110, I believe, at at least 6 chapters were around 60 members or fewer. And there was a stretch of time where only 3 of the 16 sororities had 100 members or more.) 3 chapters - AGD, Alpha Xi Delta, and Phi Mu - closed within a few years of each other shortly after 2000. That left a few other struggling chapters to be the "low men on the numbers totem pole." If chapter total had been lowered in the mid to late 90s, I firmly believe that some (if not all) of the chapters that closed could have been saved. (In retrospect, I wish I would have pushed a little harder to consider the chapter total issue - I served for a year on the Panhellenic Exec Board during a time when it could have possibly turned things around. However, most of the rest of the exec board and the chapter delegates were not receptive to the idea - I had the impression that many of them felt that their Nationals would not "let" them vote to lower total...for reasons I didn't completely know and/or understand.)