“Once a Student, Always an Alumna” reads an ad on the back of the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, one of my favorite college magazines. Mount Holyoke College is a women’s college. It has only graduated women since its founding in 1837. Therefore, it does not have alumni. They are alumnae. The same can be said of Pi Phi or any women’s fraternity/sorority. They are women’s organizations. After graduation or withdrawal from college, one of their members is an alumna, two or more are alumnae. That is, unless there are one or more men in the membership.*
To explain why I cringe whenever I hear a fraternity woman talk about her chapter’s alumni, I am quoting Mary Lou Leslie who, many years ago, wrote this “Alumn-knee” explanation in The Angelos of Kappa Delta, “The men of the Greek World use their EYES to see the KNEES of the women of the Greek World. That’s an over-simplified way of remembering masculine and feminine Latin endings – a man is an alumnNUS of a college or fraternity and a woman is an alumnA. Are you with me so far? Then when we gather in associations or conventions, it is still a different story. Two, three or several hundred, the men are alumnI and the women are alumnAE. Now here’s the rub ‘I’ is just plain ‘I’ or ‘EYE’. ‘AE’ is NOT pronounced ‘I’ or ‘EYE’ but ‘EEE’ – long ‘E'”.
*Delta Gamma’s early growth was due, in part, to the efforts of Phi Delta Theta George Banta. He is the only male initiate of Delta Gamma. While it is an interesting footnote to note that the group has one male member, the Delta Gammas who have graduated or withdrawn from college are called alumnae, as noted on the Delta Gamma web-site, and well they should be.
