After a multi-year absence, Sigma Chi is returning to where it all began more than 160 years ago: Beginning Feb. 24, 2016, the Fraternity will have its expansion personnel on the ground in Oxford, Ohio, to work on recruiting potential new members for a colony at Miami University, the site where Sigma Chi was founded in 1855.
“Our alumni are strongly motivated to bring Miami University and the Alpha chapter back into the fold of Sigma Chi,” says Ryan Temby, RUTGERS 1990, Grand Praetor of the Southern Ohio province and one of the principal Sigma Chis in the effort to reactivate the Miami (Ohio) chapter. “Local alumni have been working virtually since the day the chapter closed in 2012 to bring it back into existence, and now with the support of the Executive Committee and the New Chapter Development Committee, we are ready to make their vision a reality.”
Temby says that he envisions the colony starting with about 30 members and slowly increasing that number, in order to ensure that the colony is selective in its recruitment of potential new members. “Several years ago, there was a group of guys in the chapter who were responsible for it being shut down through their bad behavior,” says Temby. “Now, there are men at the university who should be Sigma Chis, but can’t because of the actions of those people who never should have been in the Fraternity to begin with. What we want to do is present Sigma Chi to them and help them to develop into the kinds of men that we know they can become.”
In order to make that happen, Temby says that alumni have done their part to attract the best and brightest to Sigma Chi by raising enough money to provide $25,000 per year in scholarship monies for colony members. Now, he says, “we need to recruit those types of men and work alongside the university administration to change the culture of the Greek[-letter] world at Miami, simply through living our values.
“We want to make the Alpha chapter one that we can point toward and say, ‘They know what it means to be a Sigma Chi,’” he says.
For more information about Sigma Chi’s colonization efforts, contact expansion team lead Desmond Robinson, TARLETON STATE 2015, at (847) 869-3655, ext. 223, or expansion coordinator Walker Patten, NEBRASKA 2015, at (847) 869-3655, ext. 254.
