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Originally Posted by AOII Angel
They may not have an option to change their by laws to allow officers to be on academic probation. It would also be a bad precedent. Also, technically, if you change your bylaws, it shouldn't change your chapter's actions retroactively. Having bylaws would be useless if you just changed them everytime you wanted to get around them.
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Well, that would be true maybe with your organization, but I can speak to Sigma Nu in that if the bylaws were voted to be suspended for that purpose or they were changed and deemed retroactive, our President decides all points of law and order, so procedurally, that'd work. I can only speak for my own group though.
Also, whether they could do that might depend on their HQ governing documents or some rules which they're not allowed to suspend. Robert's rules, however, and most bylaws provide for a suspension of the rules or a suspension of a bylaw if you have enough votes to pull it off. Documents need to be flexible enough to give structure while not holding the organization back as a whole.
The problem with being chartered in 2004 is that they likely don't have much of an alumni support network. As a founding member of my chapter, I remember exactly what our advisory group looked like when our chapter was 6 years old. We had one chapter adviser, who did a terrific job, but probably wasn't the strongest or best person to ask how to resolve issues under the bylaws.
Now, whether you should lower your standards is a whole 'nother discussion. We're social organizations, not academic honors societies, but GPA requirements being met and performance as a whole do correlate. Being chartered in 2004, they have the luxury of not being able to bring down the wrath of the alumni which would definitely happen in my nearly 11 year old chapter (as in the last 3 years, we've put together some pretty cohesive and organized alumni entities) and maybe lowering standards would be a good temporary fix if they do some real work to address their academic deficiencies.