Fraternity enrollment at Ball State has been on a steady decline for more than 10 years partly because of recruitment, the director of Student Organizations and Activities said.
Fraternity enrollment has decreased because the chapters are not actively seeking members and the men who come do not always meet the chapter's standards, Lynda Wiley said.
"It's not rush anymore; it's recruitment," Matt Heffernan, president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, said. "You have to physically find people to fill the house. You need to be selective."
Men used to be waiting in line to join fraternities, but that is not the case anymore, he said. Now, chapters have to market themselves to potential members, but they do not.
The closing of six chapters in the last 10 years has contributed to the decline. Enrollment went from 928 in Fall 1993 to 502 in Spring 2004, according to university records.
Recruitment
The recruitment process was an issue addressed by the Fraternity Advisory Committee, a temporary task group formed in September 2003 by Doug McConkey, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management.
"[Fraternities] expect men will just join the organization and there is not the one-on-one recruiting that needs to take place," Wiley said. This lack of one-on-one recruiting means fraternities will accept new members who might not make the grades or who only want to party, she said.
If members don't meet chapter and university requirements, the chapter could lose members, he said.
However, the nature of low enrollment means fraternities might not have the budgets to create an elaborate recruitment process the way sororities have, Ben Mong, a former member of Zeta Beta Tau, said.
"They have rush events with free food," he said. "A lot of fraternities don't have the budget to wine and dine," he said.
Part of the enrollment drop is attributed to fraternity chapters closing, Wiley said.
"We have lost chapters and that definitely has an impact," Wiley said. Ball State has lost five fraternities since 2002. Alpha Tau Omega, Beta Theta Pi and Delta Chi closed because they defaulted on their mortgage loans; Theta Xi closed because of hazing; and Lambda Chi Alpha closed because it did not meet the national chapter's requirements.
Culture Change
"Animal House" made the idea of the drunken frat party serious, but that is an image Ball State and the Interfraternity Council do not want on campus, Wiley said.
The university and IFC want to erase the drunken party perception from people's minds by changing the fraternity culture, Wiley said. By changing fraternity culture, the chapters can have and keep members who are interested in more than drinking beer.
"Fraternities haven't always been designed to be places where you have large frat parties," Wiley said. "They are a place where men live and study."
The dry fraternity policy might have the opposite effect and turn people off from greek life, Mong said.
"People don't want to go to parties that don't have alcohol anymore," he said. "You can't have an ice cream social."
Ball State wants the new image because it does not want to be labeled a party school anymore, he said.
The university isn't asking every fraternity brother to never drink alcohol while at Ball State; it's the underage drinking that poses the problem, Wiley said. If fraternities want to have parties, they should go to a third-party location and have professional help to keep out people under 21.
Need for change
If the remaining chapters don't change how they operate, the fraternities could end up like their ill-fated brothers, Mong said. As a former brother, he saw how quickly the dynamics can change when men join for the wrong reasons.
"It's the people in the fraternities," Mong said. "Within five or six years, there won't be fraternities for people to talk about."
Even though fraternities seem to be disappearing, the remaining chapters have grown stronger in the past two years, Bowen Moreland, president of IFC, said. Closing fraternities might have actually helped the state of greek life on campus.
"The ones we lost had problems with finances and member retention, and I don't see the ones we have left going anywhere," Moreland said. "The stronger organizations will survive, and the weak organizations will fall."
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