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Old 11-09-2017, 02:05 PM
clemsongirl clemsongirl is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: roe dyelin
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ASTalumna06 View Post
My question is: why were some of these chapters closed in the first place?

If you look at the chapters below, each of them has a recolonization that occurred within 2 or 3 years of them closing. Why did they close? Was it a "The chapter will close in 2003 but will have the opportunity to return to campus in 2006" type of situation? Are these closures due to numbers or risk management?

Either way, a chapter returning to campus within a few years of closure is likely in for an uphill battle. It means that seniors were freshman or sophomores when the chapter closed, and current students (both Greek and non-Greek) remember what happened and saw it first-hand. It's much more likely that rumors will fly, tent talk will be harsh, and some upperclassmen will continue to hold negative feelings about the sorority (or fraternity) that are hard to shake.
Taking Illinois Phi Sigma Sigma as an example, because two years is a really short amount of time to wait, I found these two news articles about them:

https://dailyillini.com/news/2005/04...es-a-comeback/

https://dailyillini.com/uncategorize...-recolonize-2/

The first one is from 2005 but says they've been a colony since 2004, which sounds like a reorganization or recolonization of the chapter? The article says they also closed due to low numbers in Fall 2004 so it's not really clear what's going on. I also appreciate that they say the women in the colony advertised on "thefacebook.com"

In the second one, it sounds like they wanted to recolonize as soon as the lease a fraternity had signed for their house was up and they had time to prepare it. I imagine at a school like Illinois, part of the motivation might be "if we don't take this opportunity when we get it, we get bumped to the back of the line for recolonizations". Phi Mu also closed that year and didn't return until 2016.

Plus, the second article mentions that their national president was an alumna of this chapter. That probably didn't hurt.

ETA: this demonstrates that the concept of being "open" or "closed" isn't always as simple as we'd like it to be...
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