Quote:
Originally Posted by 33girl
The problem is that if you stay off campus, you might not be able to get back on. There's room for another sorority, it's just that your sorority isn't able to attract women. How many times on here have we read about a chapter closing at State U, and then 2 years (or less) later, the Panhellenic is open for expansion, a new group comes on and does fabulous?
It's kind of like staying in a marriage you know is messed up for the sake of the kids or your lifestyle. You (the national HQ you) have to figure out how much that marriage/chapter means to you, and what you're willing to do to keep it. There are women who put up with their husbands cheating so they can have the perks of being "Mrs Important." There are sororities who put up with their chapter being at the bottom of the totem pole on large campuses because they feel that chapter is important to have there, for alum support or whatever reason.
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Well, not getting back on campus would be the risk you took with a keep-membership-this-high-or-we'll-drop-you kind of policy.
Personally, I favor just letting some chapters be small and figuring out a way for them to do it without running in the red. But letting them exist isn't enough: GLOs need to figure out a way to keep the programming for the women who join at that chapter strong so that it's a chapter worth being in from a ritual and campus activities point of view.
What I think happens a lot at smaller chapters is that the experience can start to stink all the way around.
Within the campus PC community, the group is looked down on or pitied because they are so far from total or quota. Formal recruitment is kind of doomed no matter how hard they work if reputation and current size are the issue. Alumnae support may not be that great, so there's not much immediate help. The group is small enough that the officers are already working pretty hard just to exist, so the group ends up actually doing less in terms of activities. The average member makes a commitment of time and money for an experience that might be less fulfilling than being in the glee club.
And rather than saying, "we need to make sure that we put something in place so those members have a great experience," everything the chapter hears from the national or international group is likely to be negative about recruiting.
So, I'd first like to see a commitment to support all chapters, but if we're going to narrowly define what a successful chapter is, then a resolution to close chapters who hit a well-defined membership level is the only option that seems fair to current members. Any form of the "we are going to dump you for someone better" kind of stuff, which was the connection between the DePauw thread and this one, always seems to backfire from a practical point of view in addition to its betrayal of the ideals of sisterhood.
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