I drove through Oneonta, NY last week. Oneonta is a relatively small city which has two colleges located in it. I drove by a frat house and I was wondering which college it was associated with.
Now I wondering if it was specifically associated with either. What happens in a small city if there are two colleges and each has a chapter of Delta Tau Chi. Do they maintain two separate chapters? Or does the fraternity maintain a single chapter which includes students from both colleges?
Boston has a few dozen colleges with many, many frat houses. They don’t share, as far as I know. Each house is associated with a specific college/university.
I can see that in a big city like Boston. But Oneonta is small enough that it only has a single Burger King. It would seem somewhat silly to have a chapter of a fraternity with another chapter of that same fraternity three blocks away.
It’s a social club, organized by college admission. Again, there may be joint college fraternities out there somewhere but I haven’t seen it.
Okay, I did some online research. There are three fraternities that list themselves as having chapters at both Hartwick College and SUNY Oneonta; Alpha Sigma Phi, Kappa Sigma, and Tau Kappa Epsilon.
Going through the Tau Kappa Epsilon website, I see they list two separate chapters in Oneonta; the Gamma-Zeta chapter, which is associated with Hartwick College, and the Sigma-Epsilon chapter, which is associated with SUNY Oneonta. So clearly they are two separate organizations.
I guess part of the question is how many people they can get to join. My last year of college, I had a room at a frat house - because they had spare rooms, they couldn’t recruit enough bros to fill the house. Admittedly, Toronto or Canada in general seemed to see frats as quaint Animal House level nostalgia. (One letter writer complained to the campus newspaper about the boys at one house hanging out the windows yelling at passing girls, holding up signs with a number from 1 to 10 for each passing girl. Can you tell that (a) this was a long time ago and (b) they lived up to the Animal House reputation?)
Think of it a little differently- my granddaughter goes to school in a district of 3800 students. There are two middle schools about 2 miles apart. There are about 600 students in each - but each school has its own student clubs and other extracurricular activities. They could have joint clubs ( the sports teams aren’t separate) but they don’t. Hartwick has about 1200 students and SUNY Oneonta has about 5500 - and I don’t think there are very high minimum membership requirements for chapters. And I am 99% sure that not all chapters maintain houses- I went to a public commuter college that now has fraternities and sororities ( but didn’t when I attended) and there is no way those groups could have bought houses in Brooklyn in the last 40 years.
I can’t account for fraternities, but a National Panhellenic Conference sorority, of which there are 26, can and will charter a chapter at a college with enough women with sufficient GPA, stable finances, alumnae support, and demonstrated sincerity. If there are multiple colleges in the same city that qualify, so much the better, because of the alumnae support.
My sorority is one of the smaller ones and we have three chapters in Cincinnati, for example. That equals some 200+ collegians who hold a couple of events a year just for their own city.
I’m sure some of the bigger sororities who have half a dozen or more in bigger cities like Boston. It’s just that much harder to establish a chapter in an outlying place, like say Wyoming (no offense) because you (we) don’t have any alumnae there to advise them.
I hope this is helpful.