Weeding out chapters

[DeltAlum]

As usual, I find my self admiring 33Girl's idealism (I always think she should have been with us in the 60's), but in just a slight disagreement.

To my way of thinking there IS an overall problem with Nationals who are losing chapters -- and for many of the reasons 33 identifies. However, I think that a larger reason for that national malaise (geez, I wonder if that spelling is even close -- let's say sickness) is that our stately old organizations have allowed the problems to grow and fester without taking the tough action of closing some of the storied old chapters that have become dead wood. I know it was true of Delt for years.

Now that we're taking a more proactive approach to cleaning up chapters, our number of charters is down somewhat, but our number of undergraduate members is up! Less chapters but more members is not necessarily a bad thing.

I think that by being more selective and colonizing smaller schools with higher academic standards, we're finding men of higher quality, intelligence and moral values. And that, I think, will serve us well over the long haul.

As for the alumni of the closed chapters, some will be bitterly dissapointed, but most will understand that, like a cancer, those groups who can't seem to bring themselves to obey the law and fraternity rules are a huge problem to the overall health of the fraternity and must be excized -- cut away. I can tell you for certain that the loudest voices for NOT recolonizing some of our biggest and oldest chapters are the alumni who have been burned and spurned by their chapters closing/failing over and over again.

It could be argued that the selection of new members in those recolonizations brought in the wrong people. I think it's more likely, though, that the "bad apples" came six or eight pledge classes after recolonization -- after the recolonizers and their higher ideals have moved on.

I would be interested in knowing whether any of the large fraternities -- say Delta Tau Delta's size and up (we have about 120 chapters and colonies at this point) are growing number of chapter-wise.

I hate to admit it, but I'm beginning to think that my older and wiser alumni brothers who have advocated this movement into smaller schools may be right.

Finally, while losing your chapter can be traumatic to the undergraduate brothers, for the most part they aren't expelled from the Fraternity, but may be put on immediate alumni status. And, of course, sometimes that core group of good Delts becomes the nucleous of recolonizations.

These decisions are very hard -- but have to be made for the greater good of the order.