The Battle For Letters

It’s more than just sticking letters on a house. Take a deeper look at the process behind the struggle for a Greek organization to put their chapter’s letters on display in the city of Kent.

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Imagine East Main Street. Chances are you’re seeing Starbucks and Chipotle as you work your way down to the construction of the Portage County Courthouse across the street from a string of Greek housing that you pass by en route to downtown.

You can’t drive or walk from campus to downtown via East Main Street without passing by that assortment of Greek life that ends with Phi Sigma Kappa’s painted wall as you hit the Kent Stage and the rest of downtown, but what if one day those houses became Greek-less?

The city of Kent and campus have recently physically been unified with an Esplanade extension connecting South Lincoln Street to South Willow Street to Haymaker Parkway. Although this may be used as an easier route for students and residents to travel back and forth between campus and downtown, it does not mean the people themselves are any closer to being connected.

There has been talk within the Greek community over the apparent pressure to move some of their current houses on East Main Street and within other residential areas to the near campus locations of Fraternity Circle and the Greek Village on West Campus Center Drive, the latter of which is across the street from the Student Recreation and Wellness Center.

Meredith Bielsaka, Assistant Director of Greek Affairs and the Center for Student Involvement, explained that Fraternity Circle is privately owned property that includes Greek housing while Greek Village is owned by the university.

“I don’t think it’s explicit, but [the pressure to move is] certainly implied based largely on the zoning requirements downtown,” Kent State Interfraternity Council President and Kappa Sigma Grand Procurator Rob Lierenz said. “You cannot letter a new house. It has to have been a lettered house in the past, so as those go away, there’s nowhere to get a lettered house except on campus.”

Lierenz explained that if a fraternity purchases an unlettered house off campus then they are not permitted to add Greek letters signifying their fraternity to the front of the house. Members of the fraternity would be allowed to live there, but it would be considered an unofficial headquarters, which would complicate insurance coverage for the fraternity. The only way a fraternity moving into a new house can add letters is if they’re purchasing the property from another fraternity who had lettered their house within the past two years. Once the three-year mark of the previous chapter’s letter addition passes, no new letters can be added by the next fraternity or sorority inhabiting it.

Greek Village is zoned land for the university that allows organizations to buy property to build upon, and Bielsaka said it was created in response to some challenges that existed prior to her arrival in Kent.

“They changed some of their existing town code in regard to lettering facilities, and so they basically said, ‘Well, we’ll grandfather any organizational housing that currently exists in town, but we’re not going to permit any new zoning,’ so that kind of limited the number of houses that currently exist in our town that are allowed to actually put any kind of decals or letters of any kind outside their facility that indicate that they’re organizational houses as opposed to another rental house,” she said.

Zoning requirements such as this enforce the belief that fraternities are unwanted within the community of Kent on the city’s mission for what Lierenz described as the goal of a “nice, clean [and] quiet residential downtown.”

“I want to point out that I’m often sarcastic, but it’s because obviously we [as fraternities] are a blight on Kent, Ohio,” Lierenz said. “All the beer cans in the front yard obviously mean we don’t bring valuable things to the community or at least that’s how we’re perceived, [but] I can’t really fault the community because we don’t really present the best face to convince them otherwise.”

Those beer can yard ornaments disappear for the most part when fraternities move in closer to campus because although they can letter their houses, they are not permitted to have alcohol on their property, forcing them to be a “dry house.”

Both on-campus houses for Kappa Sigma and Phi Delta Theta are dry houses, but Phi Delta Theta is also nationally a dry house fraternity, which makes the move to campus less of a change for them.

Kappa Sigma’s house was previously owned by Sigma Nu who could not fill it, so they wanted to sell it. Kappa Sigma leases the house and “ten feet of wonderful grass from the outside edge,” but the rest is owned by Kent State Lierenz said.

Lierenz also said the university has the ability to take his chapter’s 20-year land grant at any point. Although, Bielsaka said that the university never has the intention to be a landlord, so they prefer it when organizations lease the land to house their members.

Delta Upsilon’s house is the one exception to this preference. The university recently purchased the house, which sits on South Lincoln Street adjacent to the newly added Esplanade extension, in order to demolish it and replace it with the new architecture building that will bring all the departments for that major into one building instead of spread across campus.

Like Delta Upsilon, the forthcoming new sorority chapter, Phi Mu, will also be homeless in the city of Kent this semester. The sorority, which will launch in October, was voted into the Panhellenic Council after an extensive yearlong process.

While Phi Mu will reside wherever each member personally does this semester, the university will allow them to meet in the student center when necessary and they are also willing to aid the officers in finding a rental home to live in next semester as a place to hold their chapter meetings.

Delta Upsilon is also being offered help from the university in relocating their home if that’s what they decide they would like to do. They have the option to go without a house, but can also take the money from the university’s purchase of their previous home to build a new one elsewhere such as on one of the five empty plots in Greek Village.

With 12 out of 18 fraternities and all of the current six sororities having houses in which their members can live, Phi Mu did not want to be left out or less appealing to potential members.

“We’ve been in conversation with [Phi Mu] since they were chosen and it is their intention that once they’ve raised the capital, they will also build over there as well since all the other sorority chapters have housing,” Bielsaka said. “They want to be able to provide that experience for the women.”