Quote:
Originally Posted by ASTalumna06
I think that right now, the main concern is that this fraternity doesn't have Greek letters, and while that shouldn't define you as a fraternity, like I've mentioned, the GLOs on campus are unfamiliar with these types of organizations (Triangle and Farmhouse are the only two fraternities without Greek letters, I believe).
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No, in the NIC there's also
Acacia. And outside the NIC and NPC, there's
Ceres for women in Agriculture. (And though we did add the Phi Mu Alpha to our name a while back, there's also Sinfonia.)
So far as I've ever known,
Triangle functions pretty much like any other social fraternity, except that it is not a "general" fraternity -- it does not draw members from the student body generally, but rather only from certain disciplines.
It's probably worth remembering that Triangle, like FarmHouse (and Sinfonia), was founded at a time when many if not most of the existing general fraternities expanded only to liberal arts colleges, not to technical, agricultural or other specialized, non-liberal arts schools (like conservatories). Couple that with the fact that while the study of Greek and classical culture was a staple of a nineteenth century liberal arts eduction, it was not part of the course of study in something like engineering, agriculture or music. So around the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, you had new fraternities being formed that would meet the needs of those non-liberal arts students, and you had at least some of them (Alpha Gamma Rho would be an exception), choosing names that would mean something to their non-Greek-studying members.