Ivy League Schools Chapters

[Munchkin03]

Originally posted by aephi alum
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the MIT AKA chapter has members who attend Harvard or Wellesley. But that chapter is recognized by MIT as a student organization, which by definition means that at least half the members are MIT students.

Okay, and your point...? I never said it wasn't, since the focus was Ivy League chapters, I mentioned that chapter.

Moving on...

When we get into considering a school an "Almost-Ivy," it gets us into a lot of trouble. From what these college counselors have told us all summer (I'm working with kids interested in attending primarily Ivy League schools), MIT/Stanford/Northwestern/ Chicago/Cal-Tech are almost always considered near-Ivies. The question isn't academic quality, it's what schools are overlapping application-wise with the Ivy League schools. Just because a school is selective or regionally prestigious doesn't make it an "Almost-Ivy." Let that distinction guide us in this thread.

[aephi alum]

Originally posted by Munchkin03
Okay, and your point...? I never said it wasn't, since the focus was Ivy League chapters, I mentioned that chapter.

... is that it's not "the Harvard chapter" - if anything, it's "the MIT chapter" - although it would probably be more accurate to say that it's a citywide chapter with enough members from MIT to be recognized by MIT as a student org. But, whatever... what's important is that it's there.

[Senusret I]

My friend is in that chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, and she tells me they are specifically NOT called a city chapter.

At any rate, i think the point was that it is open to Harvard women.

[aephi alum]

Thanks for the clarification. That is what I suspected - I thought there was already a Boston citywide chapter, and it wouldn't make sense to have two citywide chapters in essentially the same city. It's still more "open" than NPC/NIC chapters would allow; NPC sorority chapters will only accept new members who are actually enrolled in the university where the chapter is.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

[PhiPsiRuss]

... almost-Ivy ... near-Ivies ...

I think that these phrases are non-specific and open to misinterpretation. Does it mean that this school is applying for Ivy League membership? Is Stanford almost able to leave the Pac-10 for the Ivy League? Is Duke near receiving an invitation to join the Ivy League and leave the ACC?

The Ivy League is simply a NCAA Division 1-AA conference composed of eight schools. If a school is not in the Ivy League, it is not necesarily inferior academically. It may be on par, and it may even be superior to many of the members of the Ivy League.

The term "Ivy League" does imply academic excellence, but it does not define it. I prefer the term of "Ivy League caliber", but I'm sure that there are other excellent terms.

[XOMichelle]

There are schools that are not in the Ivy League that are more selective than those schools in it, and they have better athletic departments. :-)

[Munchkin03]

Originally posted by XOMichelle
There are schools that are not in the Ivy League that are more selective than those schools in it, and they have better athletic departments. :-)

The whole point of the Ivy League's creation as an athletic conference (1954) was to promote amateurism in athletics--not the super professional stuff that we see in the rest of Division I. They wanted to separate Harvard, Yale, Brown, etc. from the emphasis on sports which was beginning to plague the other schools they played against (USC, Notre Dame, etc). Actually, the only place where the Ivy schools are in I-AA is in football--there is no post-season play allowed in Ivy football. So, yeah...the athletic departments of a large state school may be superior, but there are benefits of going to a school of a certain academic caliber that cannot be denied. I personally loved going to a school where academics were the top priority, and not winning the SEC championships.

[queequek]

bump

[ajuhdg]

Here's Delta Gamma's rundowns:

Brown: none
Columbia: Zeta Theta
Cornell: Chi
Dartmouth: Zeta Beta (inactive)
Harvard: Zeta Phi
UPenn: Epsilon Eta
Princeton: none
Yale: none

Others mentioned:

Carnegie Mellon: Beta Nu
Chicago: Eta Zeta
Duke: Beta Theta
Johns Hopkins: Zeta Kappa (inactive)
Northwestern: Sigma
Stanford:Upsilon (inactive)
Swarthmore: Alpha Beta
William & Mary: Epsilon Mu

[Blue Violets]

Originally posted by aephi alum
AEPhi has, or has had, chapters at the following schools:

Ivy League:
Barnard (Columbia) - Alpha
Columbia Univ. Teachers College - Gamma (does this count?)
Cornell - Kappa
Yale - Beta Delta

Ivy+:
MIT - Beta Epsilon
Northwestern - Omicron
Duke - Alpha Epsilon
Carnegie Mellon - Alpha Nu
hmmm... who else would be considered Ivy+...

Munchkin03 - AKA actually has an MIT chapter that is recognized by the school. I believe it predated all the NPC sororities.

AEPhi is inactive at Duke.

[Blue Violets]

I don't want to go through and recorrect each individual post, but there is a widespread misbelief that Wellesley does not have a Greek system. True, Wellesley does not have any NPC recognized sororities, but it does have its own "Greek system" consisting of local greek letter societies, which have their own recruitment ('teas'), ritual, colors, crest, symbols, house (not for housing--but for parties/functions/meetings), and history.

Some of the societies at Wellesley are 125+ years old, meaning they rival other GLOs founded around the same size, but they were not taken nationally. Seeing as Wellesley was often considered as the premier women's school in the 19th and 20th centuries (A Seven Sisters school which produced the likes of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nora Ephron, Cokie Roberts, & Diane Sawyer as well as a slew of others, particularly those well known in academia), a friend of mine said some of the societies' earliest members didn't want their organizations to grow to other schools because they "weren't sure of the calibre of women there." Just an interesting thought.

In any event, societies at Wellesley which are still active include
Phi Sigma, Zeta Alpha, Tau Zeta Epsilon, and The Shakespeare Society.

(And no, I don't go to Wellesley, although I think it's a wonderful place and I almost DID go there!)

[AEPhiSierra]

Originally posted by Blue Violets
AEPhi is inactive at Duke.

AEPhiAlum was referring to active and inactive chapters.

And also for the Ivy League chapters she left off the inactive UPenn chapter.

[Rudey]

Originally posted by XOMichelle
There are schools that are not in the Ivy League that are more selective than those schools in it, and they have better athletic departments. :-)

Haha...True - especially, in your case.

-Rudey

[XOMichelle]

Thanks Rudy!

[CanadianZete]

We are selective about the campuses at which we establish chapters, focusing on forging new territory and maintaining a presence at prestigious institutions: we were the first fraternity on the West Coast in 1870, the first fraternity in Canada in 1879, and the only fraternity to have chapters simultaneously at all eight Ivy-League schools, with the chartering of Eta at Yale in 1889.
Matt
Zeta Psi Fraternity
Alpha Mu Chapter @ Dalhousie University