The mystery of Sesame Society

A funny thing happened in the late 1920s at Michigan State College, involving a local society and not one but two national sororities. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe there’s no real intrigue to it. But I haven’t found an explanation yet, and I’d like to put this out as an open mystery to be solved.

First, some background on how chapters of national fraternities and sororities came into existence at Michigan State in that era.

At American colleges and universities, fraternity and sorority chapters typically begin as a “colony”—a local group that forms for the purpose of petitioning a specific national organization for a charter. A colony spends a year or two getting organized, building its membership, and undergoing inspections by representatives of the national body. Assuming all goes well, it becomes a chapter of that organization through a formal installation ceremony. At Michigan State, this became the common method starting in the 1920s and remains the norm today.

But before that, there were the local societies—in effect, independent fraternities and sororities operating under a “faculty charter,” meaning they were sanctioned by a board of faculty members that governed student activities. Because of that board’s long-standing prohibition on national organizations—enforced since the 1890s—these societies were the only social-fraternal groups at the Michigan Agricultural College. That ban was officially lifted in 1920, and gradually the local societies were installed as chapters of national fraternal organizations—a process I refer to as “going national.”¹

But within this system of colonies and local societies, two types of groups with different origins but similar paths to national membership, Sesame’s history is unique.

The Sesame Literary Society was a women’s local society that received their charter in February 1911.^† Sesame was among the highest-scoring societies academically, at a time when Registrar Elida Yakeley published GPA rankings for all societies in the M.A.C. Record at the end of each term. They were one of seven sororities that took immediate advantage of the Board of Agriculture’s 1923 decision to allow sororities to live off campus, moving into a rented house at 319 Albert Street (no longer standing). A year later, Sesame moved to 445 Abbot Road, a large house built in 1907 for Elmer and Ida Baker; he was foreman of the M.A.C. foundry. This house is still standing today and has served for a century as home to many fraternities and sororities.²

Then in 1926, a strange thing happened: according to an article in the Lansing State Journal, Sesame “reorganized” as Alpha Chi, a colony of the national Alpha Chi Omega sorority. I call it strange because, as far as I can tell, no other local became a colony in order to go national—they all went directly into the process of inspection and installation. It’s not clear to me why Sesame would have been any different.³

In February 1928, right on schedule, the Alpha Chi colony was installed as the Beta Epsilon chapter of Alpha Chi Omega. By the end of that month, they had moved into 406 M.A.C. Avenue, a house built in 1925 that is notable today for it later being Rochdale House, one of the Women’s Cooperative Houses.^{†† 4}

And this is where the story gets even stranger, because more or less immediately—and certainly in time to appear in the Wolverine yearbook later that spring—Sesame regrouped at 445 Abbot, fully populated with twenty-one members and two pledges, and still claiming a founding year of 1909.⁵

Three years later, in October 1931, Sesame went national as they were installed as the Beta Phi chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha. Both chapters remain active at Michigan State University in 2025 and reside across Burcham Drive from each other at the north end of M.A.C. Avenue.⁶

How did this come about? It was not a schism—all the active members of Sesame in 1926 made the shift to Alpha Chi. And every one of Sesame’s “new” members who appear in the 1928 Wolverine had previously lived elsewhere and showed no visible affiliation with any society. So how is it that Sesame transmuted into a different group, went inactive for about a year and a half while Alpha Chi prepared for their installation, and then suddenly reappeared—fully formed in all their Athenian glory?^†††

A unique transition occurred, resulting in two separate sorority chapters springing from a single local society, yet I have found nothing in any of the articles about the groups that mentions why. To reiterate, there might be nothing to it—and in pondering this story I may have a simple and plausible explanation.

Perhaps the Lansing Alumnae chapter of Sesame sisters was instrumental in keeping the original organization alive, even as their faculty charter sat inactive. The alumnae group was clearly active and had philanthropic activities of its own. So perhaps—and everything to follow is a surmise—the current women of Sesame wanted to go national, but the alumnae did not. The alumnae might have stipulated that the transition happen as a colony and that the group move out of the Abbot Road house upon receiving their charter. Then, while Alpha Chi was preparing for that, the alumnae kept the seemingly inactive Sesame chapter going, continuing their usual activities while building a new membership. That way, Sesame was able to reactivate quickly in 1928.

One hole in this explanation is the question of why Sesame went national in 1931—essentially for the second time. If the 1926 reorganization as Alpha Chi was a sign that the alumnae wanted the society to remain independent, was five years enough time for them to change their minds and decide that a national affiliation was the right way to go? The answer to that is—probably. After Sesame was installed into Zeta Tau Alpha, only two local sororities remained: Ero Alphian, which joined Alpha Xi Delta in 1934; and Delta Alpha, a short-lived local founded in 1929 that appears to have quietly closed at the end of the 1937–38 school year without finding a national. By 1931, Sesame was very much on the tail end of the going-national trend.⁷

1. Minutes, 8 Dec 1920, p. 489. ↩︎
2. MAC Record, 22(1), 26 Sep 1916, p. 6. LSJ, 30 Aug 1924, p. 8; 20 Nov 1924, p. 11. ELHC Final Report (2008), p. 4, which erroneously lists the name as Edwin rather than Elmer Baker. ↩︎
3. LSJ, 27 Sep 1926, p. 11. ↩︎
4. LSJ, 10 Feb 1928, p. 13; 1 Mar 1928, p. 13. ↩︎
5. Wolverine (1928), pp. 298–299. ↩︎
6. LSJ, 19 Oct 1931, p. 11. ↩︎
7. MSC Record, 40(2), Oct 1934, p. 11. ↩︎

1. † The group organized in 1909 as “Sigma” but were initially refused a faculty charter. This was supposedly due to the ongoing ban on Greek-letter organizations—but I am doubtful, since the ban was against national affiliations, and the local Phi Delta Society shows that Greek-letter names per se were not forbidden. In any case, they reapplied as “Sesame” to receive their charter in 1911, but would claim 1909 as their founding year.↩︎
2. †† In 1929, Alpha Chi Omega moved up the street to 548 M.A.C., a new-built house they owned for the next thirty-five years.↩︎
3. ††† This was the opposite of the usual pattern, where local societies often merged to bolster their numbers before petitioning a national. For example: Olympic merged into Eunomian and Union Lit into Ae-Theon in 1933; Eunomian joined Sigma Nu in 1934, and Ae-Theon joined Delta Chi in 1935. In 1936, Trimoira and Phylean merged to form Tri-Phy, which joined Beta Kappa that year—then dropped that charter in 1942, merged with local Phi Chi Alpha, and affiliated with Sigma Chi.↩︎