After leaving campus in 2004, Sigma Nu fraternity is recolonizing at Northwestern this winter.

The national fraternity finalized plans to come back to campus the week before Thanksgiving, said Sigma Nu leadership consultant Spencer Montgomery. He said he has been working on bringing the Gamma Beta chapter back to campus for a couple of years and has collaborated with Patricia Telles-Irvin, vice president for student affairs, and Dominic Greene, director of fraternity and sorority life.

Montgomery added although Sigma Nu is returning in January, the chapter will not be participating in formal recruitment and will have its own recruitment process.

“We’re going to start the day after (formal recruitment),” he said. “We’re sending three representatives from a national organization to recruit for six weeks. Then they’re going to live there for six months to do recruiting and training.”

Nationals are in conversations with student groups and with the University to find the optimal men to join Sigma Nu.

“We focus on people who wouldn’t normally join a fraternity,” he said. “It especially helps the community to have a larger market than fraternities already on campus.”

Montgomery said he wasn’t sure when exactly the conversation began between the University and chapter alumni to bring Sigma Nu back but said they finally decided “the best timetable would be to comeback this winter.”

New chapter members will be able to move back to Sigma Nu’s currently abandoned house on North Campus. Montgomery said the chapter will use $800,000 of a $1.5 million fund donated by alumni to renovate the house and get it running by next school year.

“I’ve been doing this for a couple of years and I’ve seen a lot of great campuses,” Montgomery said. “But the caliber of students that go here, that’s what I’m excited about. This is somewhere our fraternity can be very successful. We want to have a positive impact and make fraternity and sorority life better and be a complement to what’s already here.”

— Paulina Firozi