Will Universities Increasingly View Chapter House Corporations as Competitors?

Tim Burke, Fraternal Law Partners, tburke@manleyburke.com

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Daily Briefing of August 3 linked to a story on TRIB live “Empty dorm rooms pose financial problems for Pennsylvania public universities”.  That article reported that many of the Pennsylvania state systems’ universities were “struggling to deal with another consequence of declining enrollments:  entire wings and floors of dorms sitting empty”. 

With declines in enrollment, not just related to COVID 19, those schools are not the only ones facing that problem.  There was a time when colleges and universities provided sweetheart deals to fraternities and sororities incentivizing them to build chapter houses on their campuses to relieve the schools from that burden.  That is certainly no longer the case.  Today, universities are more likely to view chapter houses as competitors, just as the University of Southern California did when it planned the construction of new student housing at the same time deferred recruitment was imposed. 

As a result, we are more likely to see efforts to gain on those competitors by delaying recruitment, encouraging the use of zoning to attempt to close chapter houses, or using the disciplinary process to do so.

Beware.