wonder why?

[Erik P Conard]

We have pretty well drained the topics of mergers, badges of yore and other escapes into the past...so how 'bout this?
Where are the schools and details about them who've tossed
out the greeks or the entire system died...and why? Have we
given any thought about re-entry?
For example, in North Dakota...Minot State once had a 100 member TKE chapter, thriving Sig Taus et al. And Dickinson State
and Valley City. Gosh, Black Hills never thrived nor did General
Beadle or Sul Ross or Southern Oregon or New Mexico Highlands or College of Santa Fe or William Penn or Upper Iowa and so on.
Gosh, and here we are worryin' about the hues of our drapes or
the badge shapes of our old defunct precursors...
Yep, there are lots of things for us to think about. Oh, yes, the binge drinking and lack of vomitoriums and housemothers and the
topic of pledge duties. Gosh, lots of things to do, and we can feel
proud of the great things we are doing, whilst extending the elitist concept of Fraternity to the needy. Uh, where was I?

[Erik P Conard]

we have tossed about the sacred images of Mary Love Collins,
of Emily Butterfield, John O Moseley, Noble Leslie DeVotie, of Wilma Smith Leland and several other icons of our beloved clubs,
and Chi Psi's H Seger 'Slip' Slifer's clipping of the IRAC bulletins...
and Wilson Heller and Lloyd Balfour...et alii.
But what about the thousands of orphaned alumi we have left in
limbo from those chapters now closed for a plethora of reasons?
Just thought I would bring up some other threads to discuss as
we seem to get hung up on some topics or beat a dead horse.
You gotta have old codgers to whip as Tommy and me. Us and
an occasional Beta are gettin' mental mental hernias from the oft
beatings administered by eager youngins who have not yet faced
the need for a return to discretion and manners and house-pride and sanity in the operation of our systems. We are so do-good oriented about some of our public service and paintin' of houses for folks who don't give a rat's ass...to please the limpdicks and the Greek advisers...why don't we do something for ourselves?

[KSigkid]

At my alma mater, Boston U., the whole system was pretty much decimated in the 1970's. The President of the school sold all of the on-campus Greek housing to MIT, and made it nearly impossible for the system to survive. I think SAE may have been the only one to survive, and they eventually ended up off campus.

In the mid-to-late 1980's, a group of fraternities (including Kappa Sig and Lambda Chi) explored bringing the Greek system back to campus. With the help of faculty members (including a Sigma Chi alum with happy memories of his undergrad days) and a whole lot of work, they got the system going again. By no means is it a huge Greek system, but it's noticable and thriving.

[Taualumna]

From the Queen's University Encyclopedia

Fraternities and Sororities. Queen's is one of few universities in North America which does not have fraternities or sororities. They have been banned at the university since a ruling by the alma mater society in 1933. The ruling was a response to the formation of two fraternities in the 1920s, one for arts and science students and a second, more active one, for medical students. The majority of students, who prided themselves on Queen's egalitarianism and united community spirit, disapproved of these organizations because of their external affiliations and the exclusivity that they fostered. A coalition of anti-fraternity forces, led by the levana society and Arts and Theology students, swept the AMS elections of 1933 and sponsored an open meeting of about 1000 students at grant hall, at which students voted to ban all fraternities and sororities. The 24 members of the medical fraternity, however, defied this ban and were brought before the AMS Court in 1934 for contravention of the AMS constitution. They were found guilty and declared ineligible to participate in all student political, social, and athletic activities for a year. This finally brought an end to fraternities, but the medical students carried on what became known as Medical House, a residence for medical students at 49 King Street East which still flourishes, but with none of the external affiliations or traditional rites of fraternities. There have never been any sororities at the university

Technically what they're doing goes against the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which allows for the freedom of association, but first of all, this was passed way, way, way before the Charter was created and secondly no one's challenged it.

[Tom Earp]

1st, E. Empty Your PM Mail Box!!


2nd, Alfred Un, in New York. A Local had a member die from "Hazing" so just banned all Greeks, @ 3 Years ago I beleive.

[Firehouse]

The top award in Pi Kappa Alpha is named for Robert Adger Smythe, an initiate of Lambda Chapter at The Citadel in the late 1800s. Lambda was killed by anti-fraternity faculty after only a few months of existence, and only initiated 13 men altogether, but one of them was Smythe, a man who served as the fraternity's leader and inspiration for half a century.

Parsons College comes to mind as a school with great Greek system. they seemed to fall overnight; never did know what happened.

Some Northeastern private schools did away with fraternities because of far left political agendas. Outside the Northeast, it's hard to find schools that tried to get rid of Greeks.

Armstrong State in Georgia had a horrible collapse brought on by a disastrous edict of the state legislature and lost all their national affiliates. A few are now trickling back after 20 years or so.
Some younger readers don't know about the horrible "junior college experiment" in the 1970s were legitimate national fraternities intalled chapters at junior colleges because they thought that was the wave of the future. It wasn't - and there was a lot of controversey over it at the time - and now there are junior colleges all over the place littered with dead systems of legitimate nationals.
Around 1969 I think, Davidson College in North Carolina made an infamous imposition on their strong fraternity system. Far left faculty and administrators imposed what they called "self-selection" on the fraternities. Fraternities were told that rushees would be able to select them, instead of the other way around. And anyone who didn't like it would be required to leave their university housing and go sub rosa. Unfortunately, my own national decided to capitulate and stayed in their house as a self-selection chapter. Even though 90% of Davidson students were in traditional fraternities, radical left administrators destroyed the system to be replaced with a series of "eating clubs". There are some fraternities still at Davidson, in one form or another.
Yale University deliberately worked through local city rdinances to impoe crippling property taxes on college fraternities. The succeeded in driving them all out of their houses except for the DKE's (W. and his father both DKEs here) who had a chapter endowment large enough to absorb the punishment.

[AngelPhiSig]

Phi Sig was founded at Hunter College, which is now part of the CUNY system. When Hunter split in 1968 to form Lehman in the Bronx, our Alpha chapter did too, to become Alpha Alpha. Both schools no longer have greek systems - I believe that the whole CUNY system went non-greek as well...

If they did, does anyone know why?

[hoover815]

There are several stories as to why the Greek system collapsed at Lake Forest College in the early 1960s. One says that a fraternity was held responsible for a fire in the City of Lake Forest and local residents demanded their removal. Some people say that a left-leaning administration banned them. Another story comes from a relative of mine who was a member of a GLO there about that time, saying some fraternities challenged their nationals' segregation policies and had their charters pulled. I have no idea if there is any truth at all to any of these theories, but I would love to hear from anyone who has more information. The campus became very liberal and egalitarian in the 1960s and 70s, and I think the last national fraternity left in 1973 or so (I had notes from Baird's somewhere on this ...). In their heyday, I think there were six or seven sororities and roughly the same number of fraternities.

I am happy to report that you can't keep a good thing down, and greek life returned in the late 1970s and early 80s under the banner of "purpose units" (PC even before PC was PC!), a title which was gladly dropped by the late 80s. By 1990 there were four fraternities: Phi Pi Epsilon (long rumored to be the oldest local fraternity in the US, founded in 1895 -- it's not), Beta Triton (a loose reorganization of the Theta Delta Chi chapter that had been there), Alpha Chi (unofficial reorganization of the Kappa Sigma chapter of the same name), and one simply called The Brotherhood; and three sororities: Alpha Pi Delta, Gamma Rho Delta, and Gamma Phi Omega. In 1990, AX petitioned the administration and won back their charter and became Kappa Sigma. It took more than ten years for college officials to realize that they could remove huge liability issues from their books by requiring all remaining fraternities and sororities to affiliate with national organizations or lose official recognition as campus organizations by 2005.

As of now, there are three fraternities: Delta Chi, DKE, and Phi Pi Epsilon (not sure how they are pulling this off, but suffice it to say they have some influential alumni). There are five sororities: Alpha Phi (reorganized a former chapter), AKA, TriDelt (colonized Gamma Rho Delta), Delta Gamma (colonized Gamma Phi Beta) and Kappa Alpha Theta (colonized Alpha Pi Delta). Greek life is back at Lake Forest.

It's my understanding that Alpha Phi was the only sorority interested in reorganizing a disestablished chapter. I wish I could find my Baird's notes, but does anyone know what other sororities had chapters at LFC?

Thanks!

[LFC_BaDGer]

FYI- Delta Gamma colonized Gamma Phi OMEGA (my chapter), though Gamma Phi Beta definitely was on campus pre-1960's. Our founders read about them in an old yearbook and were inspired to form a new group (1988)- the borrowed the "gamma phi" and added the omega to personalize it.

The whole move to nationals happened in the spring of 04; the first DGs were initiated at homecoming that fall.