Madison Rosario ’26 accepted her bid to Phi Sigma Sigma at the start of the Spring 2023 semester. But a few weeks later, she was told the Panhellenic Association sorority was disbanding.
Rosario said she felt completely blindsided by the change in sorority status.
“I knew that the sisters were really trying to get a lot more new members during [continuous open bidding] but I wasn’t aware of the risk of being disbanded,” Rosario said, referring to the informal process that sororities use to recruit new members after the formal recruitment process. “Everyone was very upset and in shock when the news was released.”
In February 2023, the Beta Xi chapter of Phi Sigma Sigma learned that the sorority’s national headquarters were disbanding the chapter after the Spring 2023 semester, shortly after it welcomed its 2023 member class through formal recruitment.
Over a year after its closure, former members of Cornell’s chapter of Phi Sigma Sigma reported a lack of transparency surrounding their chapter’s closing and disappointment with Phi Sigma Sigma national headquarters.
“There was no indication from our nationals that anything like [the disbanding] would happen leading up to [the announcement], and if we did know this would happen, we wouldn’t have recruited [new members],” said Esha Pisipati ’24, a member of the 2021 member class who previously served as the sisterhood development chair of the chapter.
Members of the chapter’s 2023 member class were allowed to join other Panhel sororities through COB that same semester.
However, initiated members could not join a different sorority.
Joining a National Panhellenic Conference sorority requires signing the Membership Recruitment Acceptance Binding Agreement, which stipulates that “if you join an NPC sorority and choose to become an initiated member of that sorority, you cannot join another NPC member organization, regardless of the circumstances,” according to the 2023 NPC Manual of Information.
For members including Pisipati, the disbanding of Phi Sigma Sigma ended their active Greek life involvement for the rest of their Cornell experience.
“I was upset [by the disbanding]. I was really involved in my chapter and it sucked to see all that hard work go away,” Pisipati said.
However, while members of the 2023 member class were disappointed about the disbanding, they said that they did not encounter as much of a social adjustment since the sorority was still a new experience.
“I was a little sad about the news because I was enjoying getting to know my pledge class and older sisters, but thankfully we were not initiated yet so I didn’t have any super strong bonds,” Rosario said. “But some of the connections that I did make I still talk to.”
After the chapter’s closure, all collegiate members of the chapter were granted immediate alumnae status, and all new members who received bids that semester were released allowing them to join another sorority in the future, according to Phi Sigma Sigma national headquarters.
Tess Stovall, international president of Phi Sigma Sigma, said that while the decision to disband Cornell’s Phi Sigma Sigma chapter was difficult, the experience offered by the chapter did not align with the national sorority’s expectations.
“The decision to withdraw a chapter’s charter is never an easy one and is not taken lightly. Over the course of several months, Phi Sigma Sigma collected information and feedback regarding the member experience and chapter operations to determine the chapter’s future viability,” Stovall wrote in an email to The Sun. “Ultimately, Phi Sigma Sigma determined that the chapter’s overall experience was not what we would hope for, and the organization supported the chapter’s activities through Spring 2023.”
At the time of the chapter’s closure, the house was owned by Cornell University, according to Phi Sigma Sigma national headquarters. This year, the house is being leased by Sigma Alpha Mu, a fraternity that was placed on a three-semester suspension for hazing violations in Fall 2021.
Panhel reported that the closure of Phi Sigma Sigma did not significantly impact the latest recruitment cycle.
According to Panhellenic Council President Aisling Mannion, though new member class sizes increased across chapters, sororities were not required to accept more women as a result of Phi Sigma Sigma being disbanded.
Approximately 100 more women went through formal recruitment this year compared to last year, according to rush documents obtained from current Panhel sorority members, also increasing the size of new member classes. Despite the reduction from 12 to 11 sororities, 79 more bids were distributed in Spring 2024 compared to Spring 2023.
Still, Panhel will need more time to determine if Cornell needs to bring another sorority chapter to campus.
“We saw a bit of a change in numbers this year and were able to place more women with their first choice chapter than in the past,” Mannion wrote in an email to The Sun. “It will take us a few years to analyze data to determine if we need additional sororities at Cornell.”