Kappa Sigma Fraternity,
located on Alder Street,
sits shuttered and
empty after the
chapter’s national
organization shut it
down this past year.
Danielle Hickey
Photo editor
Doors dose at University
fraternity Kappa Sigma
Due to large debt and small membership, Kappa
Sigma terminated its University chapter this August
BY KARA HANSEN
NEWS REPORTER
A University fraternity chapter
shut its doors for good when it closed
up for summer 2004.
Members of the University’s
Kappa Sigma fraternity returned this
fall to boarded-up doors and a chapter
that officially closed in late August,
University junior and the chapter’s fi
nal president Michael Sanberg said.
Lacking $200,000 to pay off a
loan used to remodel the fraternity
house about seven years ago, the
chapter underwent a critical trial
before its national organization,
which was followed by a restructur
ing process that reduced the frater
nity to fewer than 10 active mem
bers, Sanberg said. Combined with
the financial turmoil it already
faced, these developments created a
situation that was impossible for the
fraternity to control, Sanberg said.
“We just kind of got thrown into
it,” he said. “It really came down to
powers outside of us. It was really
frustrating, but at the same time,
everybody realizes there wasn’t really
so much we could do unless some
body hit the lottery and decided to
pay off our debt.”
About seven years ago, several
Kappa Sigma alumni decided to
remodel the house at 1090 Alder St.
with an optimistic but somewhat un
realistic financing plan, Sanberg said.
“It was financed with the opti
mism that we’d have at least 30 peo
ple living in our house,” he said. “Ba
sically, that never happened. The
number has been gradually going
down, so we couldn’t cover the oper
ating costs to pay off our debt.”
Greek Life Coordinator Shelley
Sutherland said the number of
members in most campus fraterni
ties has remained constant, but she
noted that recent recruitment at the
University’s Kappa Sigma chapter
had declined.
Following a hearing in Vancouver,
Wash., last spring in which the chap
ter’s five executive members ex
plained why they should remain affil
iated with the fraternity, Portland
attorney and Kappa Sigma Assistant
District President Matt Fisher was ap
pointed to review the house.
Fisher said there wasn’t a sufficient
number of people willing to commit
themselves to the fraternity’s values
and rules.
Sanberg said the review of fraterni
ty members narrowed membership
from about 35 to seven people.
“We would literally have had to
rush like 30 people this fall term and
then got them to all live in (the
house),” he said. “And if we didn’t
get that 30 people to live in, we
would have been in breach of anoth
er loan and would have been fore
closed on anyway.”
Fisher said after interviewing the
fraternity’s members, he recom
mended that the parent organization
shut the chapter down.
“Kappa Sigma has made it very
clear over the course of many
years that chapters are to comply
with laws of the fraternity, laws at
their universities and in their states,”
Fisher said. “Without doing a
full-scale investigation to determine
whether there had been violations,
we suspected there had been some.
Rather than fight them to enforce the
fraternity values, we decided to close
the chapter down.”
While Fisher said he hopes to
spark another Kappa Sigma chapter
at the University in the future, frater
nity members said they were sad to
see it close.
“1 put a lot of time into my three
years there and a lot of work,” said
University senior Drew Wedeking, a
former chapter president. “It’s really
a disappointment to see it go.”
“It’s tragic,” Sanberg said. “We cele
brated our hundredth-year anniversary
in April, and then the next month was
basically the beginning of the end. ”
karahansen@ daily emerald, com
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