I was reading the Argus this morning with the top of the fold headline blaring “ARBORETUM COULD BECOME SDSU FRATS,” in large capitalized letters as if it represented a major disaster that has befallen the nation.
And all I could think was “… where in the heck have they been?” SDSU has been pushing this for years, going back to when I was an undergraduate at South Dakota State, and a member of a fraternity.
The story goes on with regards to how areas of the arboretum connected with the now fenced off McCrory Gardens is somehow supposed to be considered some sort of enviro-museum. And that “The green space was designated as the South Dakota State Arboretum in 1988.”
I have no reason to dispute those things, but not too long before that, South Dakota State was pushing the fraternities and sororities hard to create a fraternity row on either side of the street, nearly the entire time I was an undergrad from 1984-1989 (Yes, I took 5 years, but I took 1988 off for an legislative internship & to work an election for the SDGOP).
The University was aggressively pursuing the fraternity row concept, and if I’m recalling correctly, was offering the fraternities and sororities extended leases on land running south from Alpha Gamma Rho and Farmhouse Fraternities. They wanted to create this Fraternity area to consolidate them all in one place. The kicker was that at the time, no one was really biting.
In my fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, we were quite happy with our house 1 block off of campus. And the Alpha Xi Delta and Chi Omega soroities who were even closer to campus were even less interested. And for organizations residing off campus, many were less than keen on the idea, wondering what would happen if we were then residing on University property, and the University decided to try to exert authority.
Leasing the land as opposed to owning, as well as not wanting to be subject to the authority of “the man,” we heard less and less of this as time went by, until we stopped hearing about it at all. I suspect that’s about the time the area on the east side of the road was designated as a state arboretum.
But fast-forward thirty years later. My old fraternity house burned down from a bad electrical outlet, and the long-standing sorority houses having been knocked down and subjected to the University exercising eminent domain. And we also have a big uptick in the number of fraternal organizations, many of whom have been renting and are now seeking to lay down stronger roots for the SDSU community. And so, the long-ignored fraternity row idea has new life, significant construction, and may actually come to fruition about thirty years after the fact, in the exact place that has been planned for it all along.
Of course, that means it’s time for the Argus to generate a non-story panic over the fraternity row that might finally come to be over thirty years after it was originally proposed.
Whatever sells papers, I suppose.
