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Old 11-29-2001, 01:52 AM
lenoxxx lenoxxx is offline
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Independent Chapter?

Ok - lets get some threads rolling - at least for Tom

What do you all think of Lambda Chi going to a college where they dont want Greeks or Lambda Chi- Franklin and Marshall come to mind- they have 8 fraternities but dont recognize any of them- should we go in?

Here is an article on that from Syracuse about ATO- some fraternities do this= should we?

Lenoxxx

FROM ONLINEHERMES.com

Independence comes with price, chapters weigh advantages
By Jason Grunberg

Every year salmon go against the current to spawn and proliferate.

The same is true for independent greek chapters nationwide. The chapters and their members must strive to recruit new members and keep their chapters alive in an inflexible system.

But salmon have a significant advantage over independent chapters – the fish swim the same route every year, but for the chapters, they are venturing through unfamiliar waters, said Wynn Smiley, Alpha Tau Omega's national chief executive officer.

“This is something completely new for us, and our typical policy is to get rid of a chapter once the host institution dissolves the local chapter,” he said.

Syracuse University’s Alpha Tau Omega is the only independent chapter of the fraternity's 240 nationwide. Their national policy is not atypical of other nationals nationwide, Smiley said.

National greek organizations rely on local institutions to support their chapters through greek advisors and the dean of students. Individual chapters do not have access to those support systems and are often times failed experiments, he added.

“You really want to work in conjunction with any host institution because we certainly rely on them quite a bit,” he said. “Independent chapters were something we always wanted to stay away from.”

Theta Tau, one of SU’s three independent chapters, is similar to many other Theta Tau chapters nationwide. The fraternity is often branded with independent status because their national regulations conflict with those of the Interfraternity Council.

Because Theta Tau is a national engineering fraternity, they only allow engineering majors to join the fraternity. This goes against IFC rules because the chapter discriminates against anyone who is not an engineering major, Theta Tau brother John Wise said.

Theta Tau's new member education period also conflicts with the IFC. According to IFC regulation, the education period can be a maximum of six weeks, but for Theta Tau, six weeks is the minimum.

Although Theta Tau is not a member of the IFC, the chapter will only worry about recruitment if SU’s engineering college is dissolved, Theta Tau brother John Carpenter said.

“Theta Tau members aren’t people who would have joined other fraternities in the first place,” said Carpenter, a sophomore mechanical engineering major. “They are people who before going to college never though about going greek.”

Although chapter numbers are typically used to determine a chapter’s success, Bill McClung, Theta Delta Chi national executive director, uses a different scale for independent chapters.

The success of an independent chapter is based on both their national’s willingness to recognize such chapters, and the status of their host institution, McClung said.

“The hardships faced by independent chapters differs from campus to campus, but the major differences can be seen between public and private institutions,” he said.

Theta Delta Chi opened its first independent chapter in the mid-1990’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. McClung thinks the chapter has a greater chance of survival because its host institution is public.

“Generally private colleges usually move to assume a great deal of control of that aspect of student life, so operating a greek organization becomes difficult,” he said. “The situation becomes indefinitely more complicated when an organization attempts to become independent of a university.”

In the 1950s, Williams College, McClung’s alma mater, took total control of its greek community and soon prohibited any student from joining greek letter organizations. Because Williams is a private institution, students could not contest the decision in any public arena, so the greek system died there.

But public institutions are unable to impose similar restrictions because they can be successfully challenged in court, McClung said.

Because independent chapters can have difficulty surviving, McClung hopes the Greensboro chapter will soon join the local Interfraternity Council. By joining the council, he believes most survival difficulties will be avoided, provided the chapter follows IFC and national regulations.

“We don’t have anything parallel to the Greensboro chapter because all of our chapters are recognized,” he said. “Regularizing the situation will make it easier on us as a national and on the chapter because any real antagonism or hostility will probably be solved when they are recognized.”
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Last edited by lenoxxx; 12-04-2005 at 11:07 PM.
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