Sororities say brief goodbye to Brewer

Although some students hit a roadblock Tuesday morning trying to register for housing, one group of female students sat back knowing where they would live this fall.

Sororities currently housed in Brewer Hall will move to Centennial Hall in the fall while Blanton, Nason and Brewer halls undergo construction. The actual bid for renovation will not be processed until the University is certain Missouri Hall will be open again for the fall semester.

"When we're definitely sure that Missouri Hall will be coming up so that we can open with it, then BNB will go down," Andrea O'Brien, director of Residence Life, said. "... There's still eight months between then and now."

O'Brien said the University is very confident Missouri Hall will be ready in time, which will allow renovation for BNB to begin mid-summer.

Several proposals were made about which hall the sororities would move to, but in the end Centennial Hall worked out the best, she said.

"A couple of the other options just weren't nearly as attractive, or they had a lot of extra space or it would end up feeding over onto a third floor and then mixing with a lot of other non-Greek students," O'Brien said. "It made for not the ideal situation for the sororities to try and keep to themselves and have their own community within themselves."

The first and second floors of Centennial Hall south will accommodate about 100 sorority women, O'Brien said. These floors were chosen because they do not contain crossovers and will allow sororities to have sufficient space and freedom, she said.

"We've already met several times, and we've talked about the floor plan of which sororities are going to go in what rooms," O'Brien said. "The chapter room areas have been identified, and basically it's going to be some lounge spaces or some quad-size rooms that will be taken off-line to accommodate the chapter rooms."

The move will disrupt the sororities because they will have to find new places to store their organization's personal items, O'Brien said.

"We'll provide storage for some of the larger stuff like some of their furniture and, obviously, the stuff that the University owns," she said. "... Any ritualistic types of things that they have in their chapter rooms, they need to be responsible for those things."

David Gillette, professor of economics and National Panhellenic Conference adviser, said it is only natural to incur some type of commotion during periods of construction.

"[Residence Life] did a lot of homework beforehand, and they were very good at thinking through the impact on the women," Gillette said. "They presented a couple options, and certainly this is what they thought was best, which we agreed with."

Truman sororities always have been housed on campus and probably will continue to be, Gillette said. Sororities have looked into what it would take to have their own houses several times, but there are too many complications, he said.

"In the past when they've looked at it, they've come up against realities of what it would take to do that and how expensive it would be and the length of time involved in getting something like that off the ground," Gillette said.

Problems that often arise are zoning, lack of available property close to campus and the amount of money and time it would take to build a house and maintain it, Gillette said.

Such a project would require massive national and alumni funding, which the sororities do not have, he said.

Erika Wolf, president of the University's Panhellenic Conference, said sorority women do not mind living on campus and have little to complain about.

"[The University] recognizes our need as a Panhellenic organization on this campus ... and the need for sorority housing," she said.

The women actually will move twice, first to Centennial Hall and then back to Brewer when renovation is complete, Wolf said. The transition has been smooth so far, with very little interruption to their lives, she said.

"It hasn't added any disruption, really," Wolf said. "We understand that the campus is trying to improve itself, and we were willing to comply with whatever needs to done for the renovation."

Wolf said it has been an positive experience, and the University has worked very well with the sororities and NPC.

She said mostly they are glad to still be offered a spot in Brewer in the future.

The sororities affected by this transition are Alpha Gamma Delta, Alpha Sigma Alpha, Delta Zeta, Sigma Kappa and Sigma Sigma Sigma.