Alumni Associations limited in ways that chapters can't?

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by ree-Xi

If you're just talking about geography, and you're in an overlapping area, I guess the personal choice could be based on average age of current members, common interests, etc., but in AXiD and Gamma Sig, I personally know of no "special-interest" alumnae chapters.

I wonder if the example the OP used - a Catholic alumni group - might exist in the case that most alumni in a particular alum chapter graduated from a Catholic university? You don't have to be Catholic to attend a Catholic school at any grade, so I can't imagine there being a limitation for alumni/ae to be of a certain religion. Then again, enough people do move to areas outside of the geographic region from where they went to school and join their closest alum chapter. Neither of my alumnae association/chapter are fully comprised of women from the closest collegiate chapter.

Well in my case there's not an alum chapter in my city but chapters within about an hour's driving distance in any direction. I could pick any one of those if I liked. But no, there was a post elsewhere that was asking about making an alum chapter purely made up of people from somewhere else (lets say Virginia) while living in another location (lets say Ohio). So there are plenty of alum chapters in Ohio, but the individual wanted to make an Ohio alum chapter of Virginia people, it was weird.

And as a grad of a Catholic school, even if there were a lot of Catholics in the alum chapter it wouldn't make sense to limit it TO Catholics. There's nothing Catholic about recruitment, ritual, our sisterhood, etc. It's possible that one of our breakout groups (SIGs) could be oriented around that but I'm not actually sure that they can have something that's really exclusionary, if that makes sense. That is, it could be a group dedicated to going to Mass, maybe, but they couldn't prohibit another alum from joining. I'm not sure though.

Originally Posted by ree-Xi

Pardon the double-post, but how do you account for people who move into new geographical area? I would be pretty bummed out if I moved and tried to join a different alumnae chapter only to be forbidden. Then again, given what I have observed with APO (the chapter on my campus was co-ed, but not every male member was happy about it), I can see where there might be some clashes.

I wonder if any of the other split co-ed/single sex fraternities can weigh in on that too. And though I"m sure it's been answered elsewhere, what's the proportion of male/co-ed chapters in APO at the college level or otherwise? Are only current APO chapters allowed to remain male-only? Is the rule the same with alumni chapters?

I guess I'm curious if this is more of a current issue or something that's more of a grandfathered in situation. (Although obviously still a current issue to the people involved.)

I wouldn't think an alum chapter of any group would be allowed to discriminate based on something that the group itself doesn't discriminate on (religion for example) except in the case where orgs aren't uniform with their rules for all collegiate chapters.