Trying to Start a New Chapter

[Senusret I]

Originally Posted by lucgreek

Since your school has no greek life, you need to talk with student activities and see if the school wants greek life. Without backing from the school, you'll get no backing from any prospective greek groups.

Not always true. Some NIC fraternities don't require university recognition. I don't all of them, but AEPi and Sigma Phi Epsilon both exist at Georgetown, which doesn't recognize Greek life. I personally feel like each of them fills a specific niche on campus and a whole system wouldn't exactly thrive there.

But I absolutely agree that you need to talk to student activities FIRST. It's a lot easier to go about it with the support of the school.

[naraht]

Your first step is to talk to your Student Activities office. I'd start with the relatively neutral question as to what the University policy is on Fraternities and Sororities. Here are a few possibilities on policy and were I *might* go from there...

1) We don't think the school is large enough for Fraternities and Sororities. Unlikely given that you identify it as a University, but possible. At that point do some research on some schools of similar size in the midwest, especially those in the sports conference for your University and those run by the same overall organization (religion or the state) and see if you can find some schools of the same size and control with greeks.

2) We don't allow any single sex organizations on campus. More difficult, but possible areas of research include some of the co-ed professional fraternities like Kappa Kappa Psi or the service fraternities like Alpha Phi Omega.

3) We don't allow National Organizations on campus because we want complete control over all of our student groups. Unlikely for Chicago (tends to be more true in fundamentalist protestant religious campuses), but some schools actually prefer locals.

4) Omega Nu Omega fraternity killed a pledge X years ago. With that, you *might* be able to get a national representative of a fraternity or sorority to talk about Risk Management with the Student Activities office or even a representative of the Student Activities office at a nearby school.

Please let us know what school you are from, we might be able to find the answers to some of these question on the web...