After 12 years without a house on campus, University of Idaho’s Pi Kappa Alpha (PIKE) Fraternity chapter is redisplaying what it believes are its chapter’s first recorded meeting minutes from Sept. 1965.
The document is among decades of memorabilia throughout the house that sat in a storage container paid for by an alumnus since 2007 until PIKE found a house on Greek Row to live in this school year. The chapter is back to what it used to be like — similar to many other Greek houses on UI’s campus — with a house filled with members and decades of composite photos featuring alumni adorning the walls.
“When we cracked open (the storage container), I got choked up looking at all that history,” said Jesse Watson, president of UI’s PIKE chapter.
The minutes, enveloped in a pearl white folder, sit inside a glass display just feet away from the chapter’s biggest and newest trophy that recognizes it for being the most improved PIKE chapter for the 2018-2019 school year. That award sitting atop a mantle and the house bring a smile to Watson’s face.
“This is an accumulation of all the tears, sweat and effort. It’s everything,” he said. “When I walk into the house, I know I’ve made my mark.”
Winning the Harvey T. Newell award and moving into a campus house were the two goals Watson said he had this year. Both were achieved.
“The energy level of our guys is so high,” Watson said. Tyler Moye, PIKE’s recruitment chairman, said of the house, “It’s better than we could’ve ever dreamed of.”
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But moving into the house was not all sunshine and roses. The opportunity only surfaced when a long-standing women’s cooperative residence, Steel House, announced it would close at the end of last school year because of low membership.
With gradually dwindling residency rates that ended with ten house residents last semester, Steel House is looking to develop plans for its future. The Board of Director’s next meeting is in late September, and then it will have a better idea of what the future will look like, said Sue Nesbitt, president of Steel House’s Board of Directors.
The original president of the Board when it was founded in 2007, Del Hungerford, said attitudes have changed regarding cooperative living group — in which residents pitch in by cleaning or cooking to save money instead of hiring out that work. The organization that is more like a dormitory hall than a Greek organization, Hungerford said, may not be what many students want nowadays, as compared to when Steel House was founded in 1953 or when it became its own organization in 2007.
“I think people lost interest in the desire, for lack of a better word, to have a lot of extra responsibility,” Hungerford said. “It’s a lot of work. To run a house is not easy. Coops all over the U.S. are closing down for the same reason.”
Nesbitt said she agrees, but says that many factors play a role, including declining UI enrollment and the development of more apartments in the area.
Watson said he and other PIKE members were sensitive to the situation Steel House residents were in when it closed the house. After PIKE signed a five-year lease, Watson said some fraternity members helped the Steel House Board of Directors move out of and clean the house.
With a place to call home on campus, Watson hoped to dispel notions that the new house would change the way the chapter operates, its culture or its brotherhood. That said, he and Moye hope the campus house will rid the fraternity of a feeling of being an outsider in the Greek community because it did not have a presence on Greek row for about a decade. And the two PIKE leaders hope it will foster a different sort of camaraderie with members mostly living under the same roof.
Its house, filled with two dozen members before recruitment and the capacity for a little less than double that, has attracted visits by alumni from PIKE and from Delta Chi, the fraternity that originally lived in the house until 2012, when Steel House moved in. In that same week, PIKE also mingled with potential new members, which resulted in it recruiting 12 new members.
On top of their new house, there’s a new athletics director and a new university president, who is an alumnus of UI’s Kappa Sigma Fraternity chapter. That all makes Moye think this is an exciting time to be a Vandal.
“When you’re Greek, you know how important the community is. PIKE is adding to the energy on campus,” Moye said.
Kyle Pfannenstiel can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @pfannyyy
This article has been updated to correct information about PIKE’s house membership numbers.