When Is It a Good Idea for Campus Panhel Expansion?

[dukedg]

I have had some abstract ideas about expansion and its purpose floating around in my head for awhile. The ideas are really not organized or structured, but I thought I'd put them out there. I've really been thinking about two schools, specifically:

Duke - when I was at Duke we had ten sororities, one of which did not participate (or rarely participated) in FR. After I graduated this sorority left and then Panhel opened for expansion. A new sorority came on and did a fabulous job. Now there are ten sororities and one is struggling with numbers (a chapter that used to do well while I was there). So, in retrospect, I don't know if expansion was a good idea for the greek community there. Why couldn't they just have nine strong chapters?

Ole Miss - I know we have discussed many times here whether Ole Miss should bring on new sororities. Right now it seems (from what I have heard from others) that every group there is strong, large and well-respected. Maybe I'm crazy, but should they open for expansion? How do we know that doing so will not cause one group to become weaker than the rest?

If a certain number of women do not get bids through recruitment, maybe they were not meant to be in sororities? Maybe if they did all get together they would be considered the weak sorority on campus? Obviously, wonderful women fall through the cracks, but I'm speaking of this group generally.

As I said, these are just random thoughts. I hope I didn't offend anyone! I don't feel these thoughts are "right" per se and I'm interested in hearing other people's views of expansion.


P.S. I'm not looking at this from a numbers perspective (i.e., quota is increasing so we should expand). I do see that if a university is dramatically increasing the size of its undergrad population, that may be a different reason to expand.