10 minute read
Bands of Brothers and Sisters
BY RICK DE YAMPERT
For years, Ernie Ahlquist ’70 has been retreating to his “little fishing cabin up in the mountains,” as he calls his bucolic getaway nestled in the northwest corner of Georgia. The picturepostcard beauty of the lakes and Appalachian Mountains around the town of Hiawassee would make Henry David Thoreau, he of “Walden Pond” fame, quite envious.
That beauty and serenity were diminished after Ahlquist’s beloved late wife, Molly, was diagnosed in 1997, at age 48, with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
“The wheels came off, and my life as I knew it had ended,” Ahlquist says, his sturdy but friendly baritone revealing his Southern roots in the Atlanta area, where he still lives today.
After years of providing his wife inhome care, followed by a year she spent in an assisted living facility, Ahlquist made the heart-rending decision a decade-and-ahalf ago to move Molly to a skilled nursing facility.
“That was when they really started coming — you know, when I was sitting up there in the cabin by myself,” says Ahlquist, who retired after working 15 years at a steel mill and 20 years as a representative for “boutique specialty domestic steel mills.”
That “they” is Ahlquist’s fraternity brothers in the Stetson chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha.
‘How Can We Help … ’
When George Mitcheson ’70 heard the sobering news about Molly’s move to a nursing home, with the help of fellow fraternity brother Bill Armour ’70, he put word out to his Lambda Chi mates from his days at Stetson.
“We said, ‘How can we help Ernie maintain a little bit of a positive outlook?’” says Mitcheson, a marketing and finance graduate, founder of the sports merchandising company Native Sun Sports, and a St. Petersburg resident.
And so, 15 years ago, a dozen Lambda Chi’s — a band of brothers — convened at Ahlquist’s own version of Walden Pond for four days of reinvigorated friendships and fellowship. The bonhomie was so overflowing that the gathering has become an annual tradition at different locations, continuing after Molly’s passing in 2020. There are customized T-shirts, too, to mark the occasions.
That Lambda Chi gathering is a palpable, although serendipitous, example of Stetson’s initiative to make the university “relationship-rich.”
“At Stetson, it is all about the people,” President Christopher Roellke, PhD, said in an October 2022 faculty meeting address. “As we embark on making Stetson as ‘relationship-rich’ as possible, let us remember that building a lifelong relationship with an institution requires kindness, empathy and shared ownership over this magnificent enterprise.”
Greek life in toto, by its very nature — in which fraternity and sorority members embrace each other as “brothers” and “sisters” — will play a significant role in Stetson’s relationship-rich focus. All totaled, members of Stetson’s nine fraternities and eight sororities represent 18% of the student population.
Indeed, Renee DuBois, director of Fraternity & Sorority Life, will sometimes refer to Stetson’s fraternities and sororities as “relationship organizations,” as well as the more common “social organization” term.
Change and Revitalization
While the university pursues its relationship-rich goals, DuBois notes that Stetson’s Greek life, even as it celebrates its storied past, is in the midst of a period of change and revitalization.
Thoughts of such change in campus Greek life might seem incongruous.
Check the Fraternity & Sorority Involvement page of Stetson’s website, and such words as “tradition” and “roots” will come to mind, along with images of a bygone era when Greek-columned buildings were a proud staple on U.S. campuses.
While the Stetson chapter of Alpha Tau Omega was founded in 1983, the fraternity’s national founding date was Sept. 11, 1865, just five months after the end of the Civil War. Pi Kappa Alpha, established at Stetson in 1977, traces its national founding to 1868.
Sigma Nu’s national founding date was 1869, paving the way for Stetson’s chapter to become the university’s oldest fraternity when it was founded in 1913. (Stetson, of course, was founded in 1883.)
The university’s oldest sororities, Pi Beta Phi (national founding date 1867) and Delta Delta Delta (national founding date 1888), were each established on campus in 1913.
This year, the fraternities Lambda Chi Alpha and Sigma Phi Epsilon are celebrating their 75th anniversaries at Stetson. Mitcheson says Lambda Chi Alpha will be holding a huge gala for its alumni at Homecoming in the fall. In February, Sigma Phi Epsilon held a banquet, with alumni returning to campus to celebrate with the chapter. In 2025, Delta Sigma Phi will celebrate its 100th year at Stetson. Also, Phi Sigma Kappa celebrated 50 years in 2023, while Delta Delta Delta and Pi Beta Phi each celebrated 110 years on campus.
That’s a lot of tradition, and tradition often dictates that things shouldn’t change. Yet, the Fraternity & Sorority Involvement page of the university’s website also proudly proclaims that “Greek life is always growing and changing at Stetson.”
Part of that change is borne in response to recent trends.
Stetson’s 18% Greek enrollment is down from 2016, when the university’s Greek members were 30% of the undergraduate population.
The pandemic hit Greek life especially hard because participation in fraternities and sororities comes with a fee (averaging about $500 per semester), and students “didn’t want to have to pay for what would be a virtual experience,” DuBois says.
However, she adds, “This year our numbers are going back up, which we’re very excited about. Thankfully, President Roellke (who was not a fraternity member during his college days, she notes) has made fraternity and sorority involvement one of the top priorities for the university.”
To that end, DuBois’ job changed on July 1 when her duties will no longer include advising non-Greek student organizations.
“We’re creating a department just for fraternities and sororities, and I will be working strictly with them,” says DuBois, an alumna of Gamma Phi Beta sorority from her days at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. “With that come changes for our Greek community, with more support and resources for them.”
As for growing on campus, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc. became Stetson’s newest Greek organization, and the university’s second historically Black sorority, when it joined the community in 2022. Zeta will relinquish its “newest” title when Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority Inc., founded nationally in 1975 as the nation’s first Latina sorority, opens on campus this fall.
More Greek life revitalization has been in the works.
At the two Hatter Saturday events this spring, student organizations and other facets of campus life, including fraternities and sororities, were for the first time in recent history given individual tables to greet potential new members. In previous years, there was only a single Greek station. Hatter Saturdays are generally university events to help bolster student enrollment.
DuBois credits John Downey, PhD, vice president of Campus Life and Student Success, and Jeffery Gates, LPD, senior vice president of Enrollment and Marketing, for enabling Greek organizations to reach out to new students far in advance of the hubbub that surrounds the start of a fall semester.
Leadership and Philanthropy
When Colleen Coughlin, a senior Psychology major and Biology minor from Ormond Beach, attended Stetson’s “involvement fair” at the start of her sophomore year, she suspected sorority members might be “partiers and kind of like that rude, clicky type that high school is for a lot of people. Growing up, I only heard about Greek life in movies, so it was pretty stereotyped.”
Yes, Coughlin had seen “Animal House,” that outrageous 1978 comedy about college Greek life. However, she adds, that day at the fair she “met some of the sorority girls, and they seemed a lot nicer than they do in movies.”
Coughlin joined Zeta Tau Alpha, and she became the Stetson chapter’s president in December 2023. She notes that Zeta’s national philanthropy is breast cancer education and awareness. Additionally, the Stetson chapter, seeking hands-on involvement in the local community, also takes on such service projects as beach cleanup and helping at a local Humane Society.
Further, Coughlin asserts with pride that Zeta has one of the highest GPAs of any group on campus.
During this past academic year, Stetson’s Greek organizations “raised over $70,000 for different philanthropies,” DuBois says. “Last semester, we had 116 fraternity and sorority members make the Dean’s List, and 113 members make Honor Roll, which is huge considering right now we only have 402 members in our community.”
Fraternities and sororities also present leadership opportunities within their organizations, and networking opportunities. As Zeta’s president, Coughlin is traveling to Indianapolis this summer to represent Stetson at the national Zeta convention, where she will be joined by more than 600 Zeta members and advisers.
Greek alumni “are always finding ways to work with our undergraduate students, whether it’s helping members find internships or get jobs outside of college,” DuBois adds.
“We are deeply grateful for our Greek alumni — especially our chapter alumni board members and chapter advisers!”
’Building Balance’
Matt Murray, a junior Finance major with an Investments concentration and a Sales minor, joined Sigma Phi Epsilon in fall of his freshman year. In March 2023, he became the fraternity’s president.
“I realized that Greek life was a way to get myself involved,” says Murray, who grew up in Plainville, Massachusetts. Older siblings and friends convinced him that fraternities offer “the ability to not only make friends in the short term, but also to forge bonds that can last a lifetime.”
The message: If you come into joining a fraternity expecting it to be all fun and all partying, you’re in for a rude awakening.
“SigEp is all about building balance in men,” describes Murray. “It’s all about not only achieving academic excellence, but also making sure you grow as a person in your time in the fraternity. The professional and the business side of a fraternity is extremely important. The amount of connections you can build through alumni networking and many other factors, just knowing brothers at other chapters. You really can’t put it into words how impactful those relationships with alumni and other SigEps across the world can be.”
Spearheaded by Mitcheson, the Lambda Chi band of brothers holds its annual springtime meetups at various locales in Georgia and Florida, with attendees numbering from 10 to 14 fraternity alumni who travel from as far as Chicago and Denver.
When the gathering is held at Ahlquist’s cabin, the four-day weekend includes golfing, pontoon boat rides and barbecue. The gatherings sometimes embrace somber moods, along with the solace that only dear friends can provide. Ahlquist recalls that one of his fraternity brothers had a 9-year-old son who died. Another fraternity brother had a 29-year-old daughter who passed away just two months after giving birth to her second child.
Yet, mostly, Ahlquist says, the mood “is kind of like you’re 18 years old again, sitting in the fraternity house. We’re talking and laughing, joking and reminiscing about the crazy stuff we did all the way back to 1966.”
As country stars Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton sang in one of their hit songs: “You can’t make old friends.” That is to say the deepest friendships can only evolve, organically, over time.
“Lambda Chi always preached — and I’m sure this is the case with the other Greek organizations — that our relationships were not just for a mere three or four years, but for life,” Mitcheson says. “Most of my lifelong friends are from Lambda Chi and Stetson. Lambda Chi is one of the greatest things that’s happened to me in my life, and I know a lot of brothers feel the same way.”
“I was telling someone in Stetson’s alumni relations office that ‘I wasn’t an undergrad at Stetson. I was Lambda Chi at Stetson,’” Ahlquist says. “That is the way we felt about it. That was who we were.”
