Quote:
Originally posted by KEPike
Now, even at the top, there is no one climbing the mountain!
This is Eric's point and is incredibly insightful and indicative of how ALL GLO's should think. Regardless of anything else, competition is a great way to build leadership skills in an organization, and needs to be embraced by ALL GLO's!!!
|
I'm all the way behind the idea that every group should strive to excel. But counting numbers, while
easy, is not the
only measure of excellence, and I do not think there should be an arbitrary cutoff where a chapter is deemed worthless because it slipped below the magic numbers line.
Erik was talking as though numbers are the sole measure of a chapter's merit, and that a chapter with fewer than, say, somewhere from 35 to 50 members ought to be shut down. I don't think that's an exaggeration of what he's been arguing, if you read back through his posts. That way of looking at the life and the potential in a chapter leaves too much out. Bad years happen. Bad
fives of years happen, sometimes even though committed members try to prevent them. Sometimes you have a group that has good people but has trouble marketing itself. Its members can still have a strong fraternal experience. Other times you have a group that has had a few crops with too many bad apples. They have to reform the chapter as well as figure out marketing. Either way, times like that
can be followed by years of excellence.
I, too, would ordinarily not expect a chapter that is down to 10-15 members to survive; I agree that a chapter in that kind of situation would probably have to set expansion as its top priority. But when a group that size has shown its determination to survive, then it's not yet time to put the charter in trust. I know of an example where a sorority chapter is rebounding from about five or six members (with some out of town) to 14 now, and I predict quite a few more this year. It's deferred rush, so we have to wait and see. They're a remarkable group, and I believe that they have what it takes to survive in a situation where recruitment is very difficult and to show off Greek excellence while doing it. If someone had arbitrarily shut them down at some point in the last few years, they would never have had the chance.
My chapter was down to 14 in 1995 but rebounded nicely. It would have been an astonishing shame to lose them in 1995. I am pretty certain that I would not have gone Greek (at that time, none of the other chapters on campus fit with my personality, and I hadn't even considered going Greek until I met my future brothers, so it would have passed me by). We certainly wouldn't be here today to have people saying things about us like you see at the very end of
this post.
Thanks for your post.