Rewriting the chapter

When junior Penn baseball player Greg Zebrack first heard from representatives of Delta Tau Delta as part of the Penn chapter’s revitalization effort, his initial reaction was cautious skepticism.

“I remember when I got the e-mail, I couldn’t even tell if it was real,” Zebrack said. “This seemed like such a unique opportunity.”

Heading into this year, Penn’s Omega chapter had only eight undergraduate members, with half of them set to graduate in May.

Under threat of losing its charter, Delt recruited heavily from Penn athletic teams and other campus organizations.

In an unprecedented effort, the fraternity essentially recolonized with approximately 30 new pledges this month, all varsity athletes from the football, baseball, men’s track and men’s soccer teams.

According to junior football player Kameron Jones — who is serving as pledge co-chairman along with Zebrack — the “main hope” is to help return Delta Tau Delta to its once prominent reputation in campus Greek life.

“It’s kind of like leaving your mark,” Zebrack said. “Years down the line, they can be like, ‘well, these guys are the people who restarted it.’”

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Outgoing Delta Tau Delta Eastern Division President Larry Altenburg, a 1992 College graduate, said the national office had been pondering ways to reinvigorate the Penn chapter for more than a year but finally decided to take more aggressive action last August.

Over the past few years, Delta Tau Delta suffered from fiscal irresponsibility. Upon ascending to the chapter presidency, Jarrad Roeder, a Wharton and College senior, discovered that the brothers were responsible for over $4,000 in debt to the national office.

When the remaining brothers realized that a reorganization was necessary ­— paying dues as high as $450 per person with a total chapter discretionary budget of just $400 — undergraduate membership took another, seemingly fatal, hit.

“A lot of people weren’t willing to put in the effort and walked away,” Roeder said.

The Omega chapter’s struggles at Penn are not unprecedented. Since its founding in 1897, Delta Tau Delta has gone through multiple iterations on campus, including in 1992, when Altenburg was an “original, re-founding father.”

Altenburg said that the Omega chapter had 65 active undergraduate members at the time and a “tremendous amount of diversity.”

“Every organization goes through shifts in its character,” he said. “This group is much more varsity athletes than when I was an undergraduate … As long as there are the things that connect the men together as brothers, then that makes it a stronger group.”

Last year, the national board of directors informed local alumni that the Penn chapter would be suspended and could have its charter revoked if it didn’t quickly expand to at least 30 active members.

Although the current undergraduates knew their chapter was struggling, they had no idea that the situation was so dire, Alumni Board Co-Chairman and 1996 College graduate Norm Hetrick said.

“There was a breakdown in communication between the national and the chapter,” Hetrick said.

Together with the existing brothers, the alumni spearheaded the aggressive recruiting campaign.

“At that point, we realized we can’t just recruit our friends,” Roeder said. “So we needed to make a plan that would bring the chapter back to life.”

Since being rechartered in October 2006, Penn’s chapter had lacked any semblance of a formal recruitment process, leading to a dwindling of the fraternity’s population.

Delta Tau Delta Executive Vice President Jim Russell said the national office expects its local chapters to be at or above the average membership of other fraternities on campus.

“It was basically do or die for us,” Roeder said, “and so we decided to go big.”

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Delt targeted Penn athletes because it was easier to repopulate with large groups of friends pledging together.

“It was not the current members’ nor was it the alumni’s goal to create a ‘jock frat,'” Hetrick said. “It just sort of worked out that way because we were rushing groups.”

Jones also stressed that Delt wants to build a “non-exclusive culture” that is “very open to not just athletes.”

But Roeder also believes that student-athletes might be more likely to have the personality type sought by Delta Tau Delta.

“People that are members of an athletic team are already used to the concept of giving up their time and sacrificing their time for other people, for a group,” Roeder said. “I don’t want to be rude, but a lot of people at Penn, at Wharton and everything, they come here, [and] they’re very self-interested [and think] ‘what’s in it for me?’ Being at a fraternity, you need to find those people who are willing to give up their time for the greater good.”

Even if this was not the intention, the influx of Penn athletes will likely influence Delt’s campus reputation, which hasn’t been remotely associated with athletes in recent years.

For Roeder, the ability to keep Delt on campus will overshadow any impeding changes to the chapter’s culture.

“I can’t really speak to the current reputation as much,” Altenburg added. “But I can say that what these men bring will certainly change that reputation, and I would expect that it’s going to change things for the better.”

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Since Delt started recruiting late in the rush process, Roeder found that most of the athletes who wanted to join a fraternity had already done so.

As a result, Delt focused on finding students who were interested in joining a frat but never found the right fit in the existing options on campus or who weren’t ready to make the commitment freshman year.

Roeder acknowledged that partly due to to past generations, Delt “hasn’t established a solid tradition on campus.” He sees that as an opportunity for the new group of brothers to work from a clean slate.

“They’re basically going to be able to make it what they want,” Roeder said. “It’s like starting a new colony, and that was sort of our sales pitch.”

The Penn Delt alumni believe that the Omega chapter’s revitalization template — which Hetrick said “has never been tried before because the charter hasn’t been pulled off the wall” — can serve as a less costly future model for rebuilding other struggling chapters.

Since Delt’s infrastructure at Penn never completely dissolved, the new pledges will be able to start forging their own path immediately.

Altenburg said that as of Feb. 17, Penn’s chapter is no longer in debt, so the new pledges will have the financial freedom to set their own course.

“This kind of posed an opportunity for us to be able to do our own project, leave our own legacy, on our own terms,” Jones said.

The new pledges are still learning the ropes and cautioned that it will take some time to rebuild the chapter from the bottom up. Jones said Delt doesn’t expect to have an official on-campus house next year, and Zebrack added that it was unrealistic to expect the frat to “explode right away.”

“The guys who are graduating are excited that we’re going to have something to come back to in a couple years,” Roeder said. “And the guys who are here that aren’t graduating are thrilled because they’re going to be able to get the fraternity experience.”

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