Delta Tau Delta close to having a Gayley home of its own
By Emily Inouye
Oct. 10, 2004 9:00 p.m.
They have gained members and lost them, worked out of apartments
and never really had a headquarters.
But next year, if all goes according to plan, Delta Tau Delta
fraternity will finally have a place to call home.
Located at 649 Gayley Avenue, next to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon
house, the fraternity’s future house has been occupied by
graduate students and other renters for the past several years.
But as their membership grows and their paperwork gradually
comes together, the “Delts” are looking forward to
moving into their new home.
“The house will be a central location. It will be easier
to meet and to mingle and to keep everybody in the loop because
right now we rely on e-mail and phone calls,” said Larry
Brown, a fourth-year communication studies student and secretary
and public relations officer for the fraternity.
“Having a house would be a lot easier,” he said.
Delta Tau Delta was originally a fraternity at UCLA from 1926
until the mid-1990s, and was recently reestablished during fall
2002.
To demonstrate their capability of becoming a chapter,
fraternity members must establish committees in philanthropy,
education and social events, to name a few.
They also must prove they are fully able to not only live in a
house but to run and support it, both of which require a membership
close to the average chapter size at UCLA, or about 40 to 50
students.
“We are a colony right now, and we have to prove that we
know how to run as a fraternity,” said Andre Svadjian,
president of DTD and a third-year chemical engineering student. A
colony is the designation for a fraternity new to a campus during
the period before it is officially chartered as a part of its
national organization.
Brown said that the fraternity is getting much closer to
becoming a chapter because much of their paperwork has been filled
out, but they are still working hard to recruit new students.
This quarter, the fraternity has a pledge class of 20 students
so far who will undergo a quarter of initiation and learning about
their fraternity before they can become official members.
“The biggest piece was recruitment and now getting the new
students through the education process. They have to get all of
those guys into the group as members, to not only say they are
going to do it but actually get through the education,” said
Nick Prihoda, director of expansion for DTD’s national
organization.
The fraternity faced a number of different challenges this year
in recruitment because they didn’t have a house in which to
hold their rush activities. Instead, they used other methods to
reach out to students.
“There is information available at the interfraternity
office that we utilized and it seemed pretty successful,”
Brown said.
Brown also said the members used the information to contact
various students over the summer who seemed to fit the criteria for
a DTD member: students who shared similar interests and would be
excited about starting something new.
Once they have adequate membership, the fraternity will be one
step closer to moving into its house. Although establishing housing
and becoming a chapter are separate processes, being established as
a chapter will also help show the members are ready to be
responsible for a house.
But that day hasn’t yet arrived.
“Our numbers right now can’t sustain the financial
burden of having the house and running the house,” said
Svadjian.
The national organization, through several local alumni,
currently owns and runs the house and is renting it out to a number
of graduate students.
Once the fraternity shows they are capable, whether it is by
next fall or later, they will be allowed to move in.
Scott Carter, fraternity adviser for the Center for Student
Programming, said that the process for becoming a chapter is driven
by the national Delta Tau Delta organization, but that it is
assumed that once the fraternity is a chapter it is considered
well-established.
Then, the Interfraternity Council, which Carter works closely
with, can accept the fraternity as full-fledged members of their
board.
“We see that colonies, because they are under the eye of
the national fraternity advisers, tend to be pretty
accountable,” Carter said.
The past two years for the fraternity have had their ups and
downs, but the members have managed to pull through the
difficulties.
“We run like any other fraternity but we don’t
really have a headquarters. We have meetings on campus in rooms and
for our events we rent out venues,” Svadjian said.
Usually, Prihoda said, colonies are able to be chartered within
one or two years, but UCLA’s colony initially had some
struggles that they had to work through.
“They didn’t gel very well right off the bat, and
they spent a lot of time losing members and replacing members and
finally developing some self-direction,” Prihoda said.
“That took place in March of last school year, and once
they got the right officers in place, they have done more in the
last six months than in the last year and a half,” he
said.
Despite the troubles, Brown said the end goal is worth the
work.
Each of the members who have joined the fraternity before it
becomes a chapter of the national organization is considered a
founding father, which means they have the opportunity to set the
traditions and the reputation of the fraternity.
“Everyone who joined felt it was an opportunity to build a
fraternity and make it how we wanted it to be. It’s for
someone who’s a self-starter, for anyone who really wants to
be a part of something and it was an opportunity to leave a legacy
at UCLA,” Brown said. “Anything they do in the future
will in part be credited to us.”
