No need to apologise… I ought to have said I SHOULD be offended by the term… I get instant messages basically every day from preteen girls saying “R U in a Frat?” (no, I don’t respond to them… I’m not that kind of “frat boy” either) and I’ve long since learned to live with the fact that the general public likes abbreviations 
I looked at the chapter roll, and all the other Phi Sigma chapters have a single-letter designation. The Iota Alpha designation probably means that two chapters were combined (possibly because two schools merged)… I suspect the “San” is short for San Francisco or San Diego where the other merged chapter may have been located.
Do you mean one with greek letters that look like ØX?
Is TKE the on-the-verge-of-getting-kicked-off-campus fraternity everywhere? Seems like in every college town where I’ve spent some time, TKE was either the zoo fraternity, or a former fraternity.
TKE is quite often “the zoo fraternity”. Partly, this is due to what are euphemistically described as “aggressive recruiting practices”… its often said, “if you can’t go Greek, go TKE; and if you can’t go TKE, go home”.
TKE’s headquarters have an expansion policy that tends to put individual chapters in a lot of places where the Greek system is already overstretched, thus making recruitment really freaking tough.
I should point out I have several TKE friends and I really only posted that nice little rhyme so I can forward this to them and piss them off
Wow, TKEs (teeks, for non-collegians) are that bad everywhere? I had no idea. That’s the asshole fraternity here.
I don’t think we have a PDT chapter here, though.
And thanks for your answers dutch.
I just thought I’d come and throw my Greek 2 cents in.
Fraternities are diferent at every campus. Theta Chi (ØX) may be the 'roid heads at one school but the nerd house at another.
For some reason TKE’s are consistantly the “fat drunk and stupid” house. One of my best friends from high school went TKE. He is also the guy who ends up being picked on for doing stupid stuff (shaving his head, committing a quadrupal letter foul, starting an underground fraternity, hooking up with ugly girls, and so on.)
Anyhow, the pros of joining a fraternity are:
-Brotherhood - Yes, as corney as it sounds, even 8 years after college some of my best friends are my fraternity brothers. We get beach or ski houses together, go to each others wedings, drop by whenever we are in town. No, out of the 50+ guys who passed through the house during my time there, I am not best buds with all of them. But it’s still cool when I bump into one of them at random on the street.
-Secret Hand Shakes - Who doesn’t want a secret hand shake?
-Career networking - Most of my fraternity brothers are pretty successful - MBAs, traders, bankers, management consultants, lawyers, even a graphics designer. The caveat is that you need to join a fraternity that values success as well as partying. There are a lot of houses that are great networking opportunities for bartending jobs.
-Living Conditions - At our school, it was like you see in the movies - Big mansion style houses with party rooms, a chef who cooks for you and no reason to leave except for class.
-Girls, drugs, alchohol - Lets face it. The real reason most of us joined a house was to party. When you live with 30 guys, well…
There are a few cons though:
-Elitism - Hey, they are elitist organizations by their very nature. I was lucky that I went to a school with nearly 30 fraternities so there was generally at least one for everyone who wanted to join (roughly 50% went Greek). Then again, I tend to be elitist anyway so it all worked out.
-Living Conditions - 30 guys in the same house able to pool their resources to buy drugs and alchohol…enough said.
-Girls, drugs, alchohol - Womanizing, drug and alchohol abuse can become a problem if you let it get out of hand.
-Other - Hazing, bad grades, etc. There are a lot of distractions.
Onre more question. What’s the deal with Farmhouse? I heard that it’s a fraternity with extremely harsh hazing rituals, but it doesn’t have the usual Greek letter name; it doesn’t sound like a standard GLO.
mrsmith… nicely summarized, thank you… there’s nothing in there I’d disagree with at all really.
I don’t know anything about Farmhouse, except that one of their national officers (treasurer, I think) spoke to a group of my brothers (including me) at our annual leadership training camp… he seemed rather normal, and went off into a rather angry anti-hazing rant, which is usually a good sign that he hazed the hell out of HIS pledges… There are several other greek organizations with names rather than Greek letters- Acacia, for example.
And no, I wasn’t talking about Theta Chi- don’t know a great deal about them.
Two of the most important legacies of the Greek system are the social skills and leadership skills a person learns. Nationally, about 10% of undergraduates join Greek-letter societies, and this percentage has been fairly constant for several decades. Yet about 25% of the members of Congress are members of Greek-letter societies. And four of the last six presidents have been fraternity members.
Phi Delta Theta quite proudly claims Neil Armstrong and President Benjamin Harrison as our heavy hitting “famous alumni”… and Burt Reynolds, if he’s more your cup of tea
what’s with all those fraternity paddles? (and sorority paddles, too)
I assume that in the past, much of the hazing rituals invovled getting spanked with them (like the movie “Animal House”).
In today’s sexual climate–isn’t that a bit embarrassing?
And the sororities have paddles, too. But aren’t their hazing rituals usually less physical than the fraternities?
Chappachula, no. You assume wrong.
Brother in the bond, dutchboy.
Baylor '80.
dutchboy, as a fellow SDMB frat boy (I do loathe the term, but sometimes it’s hard to reject the vernacular), thanks for starting this thread. We’re a much-maligned group, and killing off the stereotype can only help.
Quick question though, isn’t PDT officially dry? If so, isn’t it a bad idea to reveal on a public message board that a particular chapter is heavily involved in drinking? Don’t have a dog in the fight, but in a fraternity one must always (unfortunately) be mindful of risk management.
From the Risk Management Policies of Phi Delta Theta:
2004 Democratic Presidential Candidates
- Howard Dean — Zeta Psi Fraternity (Columbia University)
- Richard Gephardt — Beta Theta Pi (Northwestern University)
- Bob Graham — Sigma Nu (University of Florida)
- John Kerry — Skull and Bones (Yale University)
- Carol Moseley Braun — Delta Sigma Theta Sorority (University of Illinois)
Phi Delta Theta is not a dry fraternity. Phi Delta Theta chapter houses are dry.
Key point here… “All chapter facilities/properties”
Our chapter house has a no alcohol policy at all times. However, events we hold off chapter property (ie. @ third party vendors such as bars and nightclubs, or members’ residences) do not have to be dry, they simply have to observe GHQ’s other risk management policies (ample security, wristbands, DDs, etc.).
In any case, I don’t believe I noted anywhere in this thread that my chapter or any other was heavily involved in drinking- just that I was
Another fraternity member here, proud brother of Alpha Cho Rho, Delta Phi chapter at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I know somewhere 'round the board there is another crow (that’s what were affectionatly known as.)
It’s funny that people are mentioning TKE as athe “not-so-good” house, because it’s the same here. They actually just got suspended last semester for giving alcohol to rushees and high-schoolers. They are also our [sub]unofficial[/sub] rivals here, so we laugh it up when bad things come to them (which is almost all the time.) They almost got thrown off campus a couple years ago for trying to steal the letters off of our house. It was a couple of their pledges, but the pledges came forward and said they were doing so on their own, without TKE’s knowledge, etc…
Some of our famous alumni? Well…
Oscar Meyer- Hot Dog guru
Patrick Kelly- Pro football player
Frank A. Langella- Actor (he was skeletor in the He-Man movie, but has also done reputable work as well.)
Senator Hugh Scott- a Senator (duh.)
Senator John Stennis- See above.
Robert J. Wise- Founder of Wise Potato Chips
Go here to learn about crows in general, and here to learn about my chapter.
Well fine, if you’re gonna go into that much detail on famous alumni, then so will I…
Frank Lloyd Wright (the architect), F. Story Musgrave (the astronaut) , Tim Conway (the actor), Adlai Stevenson (the US VP), Roger Ebert (the movie critic), Grantland Rice (the sportswriter), Weeb Ewbank (the NFL coach), James Baker (the Secy. of State), Dirk Benedict (Face from the A-Team and my personal favorite), and Lou Gehrig (the baseball player and (sadly) the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis namesake)
Anyway, we’re off topic, but I figured this was a good excuse to bump, because I doubt this thread is done.
I am a proud member of Phi Tau, a local coed fraternity here at Dartmouth, which has quite a reputation for our Greek system… (why yes, this is the school Animal House was based on.) My frat isn’t normal by any stretch of the imagination, though.
I just wanted to note that I have a shirt with my house letters on it that says “lesbian fratboy.”
Carry on.