Spring 2017 marks a new era for Sigma Nu Fraternity here at the University of Tulsa. No stranger to the campus, the chapter was established in 1951 and led a prosperous life until it was shut down in 2004 for financial reasons.
Due to the overwhelming amount of Sigma Nu alumni in the surrounding Tulsa area, though, the fraternity has decided to return to TU’s campus, and while this may not be an easy feat, the brothers of Sigma Nu are up for the challenge.
At the front of the line is Will DeViney, an expansion and recruitment consultant for Sigma Nu. Charged with overseeing the chapter’s establishment and growth, he has broken down the semester into two parts.
“The first six weeks is all about recruitment; my entire day is spent meeting one-on-one with potential recruits to really get to know them and see if they are a good fit,” he explains. “From there, I focus on training the new members. We will nominate and elect officers, and I will walk each officer through his duties. The goal is to get everything fully functioning, so by the time I leave at the end of the semester, they won’t even need me.”
DeViney doesn’t want just any regular recruit, either. He hopes to create something that goes beyond the stereotypical fraternity and attracts students who normally wouldn’t be interested in joining a fraternity. He is looking for young men who are academically-driven leaders who want to leave the university knowing that they’ve played a hand in creating something that has changed TU for the better.
“We are basically building this chapter from the ground up,” DeViney explains. “We need guys with strong values who can lay the foundation and set traditions for Sigma Nu that future brothers can build on. Trying to make a name for this fraternity on a small campus like this with so many already established fraternities is going to be a challenge, so we need guys who are hard workers and have a clear vision of where they want this fraternity to go.”
The job of establishing a chapter of Sigma Nu on TU’s campus does have its share of hurdles, though. DeViney has had to overcome plenty of obstacles, including finding young men who meet Sigma Nu’s standards that aren’t already committed to another fraternity in the roughly 4,500 undergraduates on campus, and dealing with the rumors that have surrounded the chapter’s closing back in 2004.
He remains hopeful, though. “At the end of the day, guys join fraternities to be part of a brotherhood and have an impact on the surrounding campus and we can definitely offer that,” he concludes, “but Sigma Nu has an upper hand in that it’s a clean slate. It has the possibility to be completely different than any other fraternity, and if guys are willing to take a chance on it, it can definitely be something that this campus has never seen.” For more information about the new chapter, email will.deviney@sigmanu.org.
