There’s a school of thought which believes sometimes such forced association such as Gen Ed/distribution requirements, random first year dorm assignments or admitting a diverse student body is part of a given educational institution’s mission to broaden a given student’s horizons beyond his/her comfort zone/personal preferences.
When I went to college, there was a historically Asian fraternity that was founded mainly because of anti-Asian housing discrimination (including, but not limited to, other fraternities). However, it was open to non-Asian pledges and members, and some non-Asian guys did join it back then. Oddly, it seems to have gotten more “narrow” in its appeal recently, based on recent photos on its web site (now looks 100% Asian, none of whom are South Asian, a population that has significantly increased since then).
Hi @Pizzagirl - those legacies are general-mom, sister or grandma could have gone anywhere. But that’s how they are counted, so most NPC groups must recognize them as legacies and follow their legacy policy.
I agree with you the ties are questionable. For instance, my daughter will be a legacy to my mom and grandma’s houses, but both died before she was born. (And I love my daughter, dearly, but there is NO chance she is getting into either of the schools they attended).
IMO, a mom wants her daughter to have a chance at the house she was in if she likes it, whether it’s at her same school or not. It’s a tradition. I don’t think it’s deeply rooted in what school mom went to. Heck, my sorority at my campus are now the hottest chicks on campus, with a few celebrities’ daughters to boot. In my day, we were the “cute” girls you brought home to mom. I would not fit the house as it is today.
However, this year I had 4 pledge sisters whose daughters went through rush. 1 at our alma mater and 3 others. The alma mater girl would die if she wasn’t in that house, and did indeed pledge. Two actually went to the same northern school and also really wanted their moms’ house- and pledged it. The last liked another sorority better, and pledged that one. What’s the common denominator? I think it’s that we all were very close (even long distance) out of school, our families all heard about mom’s sorority experiences, and, frankly, some of my pledge sisters probably pushed it hard.
I definitely don’t believe houses have similar “personalities” between schools, do you? I think every chapter is different, and I live that daily with my two sons in the same fraternity at different schools. The sororities that are considered “top tier” at their schools (I hate that word) are totally different. My house at one son’s school is similar to mine- the wholesome cute girls you bring home to mom. At the other son’s school, he says they are snotty and full of themselves and wants nothing to do with them.
I know I’ll never win the battle of “Why Greek is good.” I’m not sure why I try, other than we’re 8 for 8 on lifelong friends, leadership development, charitable contributions and involvement (my one son’s fraternity just raised 60k for the school’s cancer center) and an overall terrific college experience.
Was it all wine and roses? No, there was bad with the good. Being on the other side of rush devastated me, which is why I joined Panhellenic. There was of course constant girl drama. I might have missed a few classes due to a few fraternity parties.
But I wouldn’t change a single minute.
“Even if there is a quota system where the leftover girls are assigned to sororities that don’t make capacity”
This isn’t the system. If a girl doesn’t want to return to what she sees as an unpopular house, she doesn’t have to. It is always the girl’s choice to attend a party or not. No one is assigned except in C. Fang’s system (and that’s no one’s system).
I had two daughters pledge last fall, one to my same house, one to another. They are both happy, but I will say that some things were just more fun with the daughter who pledged my house. One, I could go to her initiation. Two, my pledge mom could go to her initiation. We can give her all the old pins and rings and jewelry we all still have (I gave some to my niece, who was also in my house). I buy stuff for the other daughter, but it’s not as fun.
I think pledging the same house (different school or decades later) a parent was in or a sibling is just a bonus, but a minor one. I happen to stay in touch with a lot of my sorority sisters. Two of them are godparents to my kids. My kids have been exposed to it all their lives, gone to parties and lunches with me and these women. My father’s fraternity group is the same. He’s 80 and has attended the same party in August with these same men for 50+ years. We grew up vacationing with these families. None of my brothers or nephews chose to pledge that fraternity. It’s fine, but they don’t get 60 years of t-shirts and mugs an trinkets.
Alh, do you believe houses have consistent “personalities”/types across campuses? Do they in the SEC?
PG: I have no idea. I believe that is what others believe. Basically I think women who choose to belong to sororities have more in common than not and differences between houses are fairly subtle. But what do I know? I haven’t been involved at the local or national level as an alum. I just know what I hear from family and and old friends and that is a pretty limited geographic group.
Osserpusser, I find your characterization of houses as: hottest chicks on campus; the wholesome cute girls you bring home to mom; those snotty and full of themselves… a little surprising. If chapters do self-select in this way, I would think it was a pretty good argument for random selection. I wouldn’t want to be in any of those groups.
I sort of imagined my own sorority as divided between wild women and good girls, but you could move back and forth between groups and it was all for one and one for all. Maybe it is looking at the past with rose colored spectacles but I never considered we might have had cliques. During the day I sat in the chapter room and drank tab and watched the soaps and helped plan weddings with the good girls who were dating, lavaliered, pinned, or engaged to fraternity boys. At night I went with the wild women to run the country roads, drink beer and flirt and dance with gorgeous farm boys at honky-tonks, howling out the car windows on our way home at dawn. No one made me choose one label over another. By the end of my sophomore year I had had enough of both types of experiences and left the house to live someplace else, but I enjoyed it for what it was while it lasted and I’m smiling just thinking of those wild women… we had such a good time.
Happy 2015 to all!!!
@alh Those descriptions are external-they are reputations the houses themselves have (correct or not) and not my personal or even the internal opinion of members. If we’re honest, we know every house has a perpetuated external reputation- the milk n cookies, the students, the jocks, etc. That has no bearing on internal recruiting to my knowledge. We didn’t go looking for “cute” girls, although I must say I think they do go looking for hot girls now!
We had a Greek newspaper that consistently referred to us as “The cuties,” and this is the same newspaper that now calls them the hotties. My son and his friends know them to be snotty on his campus- the girls certainly don’t call themselves that not do I know if they are aware of their reputation.
Happy New Year!
Osserpusser: Thank you for that explanation.
May I throw out a question for all the sorority women reading along? How are those of you describing sorority cliques as being almost inevitable, reconciling that with the ideal of sisterhood that is the basis for sororities?
I have posted a whole lot of sorority positives here. For me, this idea of sisterhood is very real and important. I will agree not everyone lives up to it. I sure don’t. I never have. I bailed.
I am asking this because so often over the last years PG and I have been miscommunicating about sororities. And I begin to wonder if we are approaching it from different premises. I really did believe when I pledged I was swearing sisterhood to girls everywhere, including at NU. (I don’t actually know if my sorority has a chapter there and am not going to look it up)
All this is a little saccharine and overly sentimental but this thread has me rocketing down memory lane.
@alh Why cliques? One word: GIRLS.
Before I get blasted, I would like anyone reading this to think of any all-girl group (political, social, charitable, musical, religious, whatever…) that doesn’t have cliques.
If we are 100% honest, it’s in our DNA. Not that cliques are meant to be or even are always exclusionary. But in my world and my daughter’s, every all-girl group has cliques.
one last question:
Cardinal Fang: Do you think if we had had random lottery selection you would have been interested in sorority membership?
There is no way that all the girls can be one big (BIG) happy family and hang out together all the time if there are 300 members in that sorority. They are going to break up by interests, age, area of the house where they live, times they eat lunch. Call them cliques if you want, but there are always going to be subsets. By the time I was a senior there were pledges I really knew nothing about, sometimes not even their names. Sometimes I ‘met’ these people later in life and discovered we did have a lot in common.
My daughter’s team only has 18 players this year, and it breaks into smaller groups all the time. My daughter was only 17 in the fall, and some of the girls are 22 or 23. They have things in common on the field, but not much off the field. In her sorority, there are about 50, but even they don’t travel in a pack, don’t all go to the movies together or study together. They break into interest groups and do things in pairs or quads or even 20’s depending on the event.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/clique
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clique
This is my understanding of what clique means.
I don’t know. My school had fraternities, but no sororities. And some of the things that some sorority women do-- the crafty things-- kinda scare me. I sometimes think about women’s colleges, because my sister is a Wellesley graduate, and I wonder if a women’s school would have worked for me.
I feel like a sorority would have expected things of me that I wouldn’t have been able to do. And that’s not a knock on sororities, but a knock on me.
"And some of the things that some sorority women do-- the crafty things-- kinda scare me. "
So if you didn’t see it up close and personal, where do you draw your impressions and perceptions from? I don’t remember any crafts. I did needlepoint a few things, but that was just something I liked to do at the time and it wasn’t part of anything “required.”
Re Wellesley, having a D there, I kind of thought the whole campus would have been one big sorority in a sense, but that really isn’t the case.
@twoinanddone referring to post #106, should the quota plus girl accept her bid, wouldn’t the house know that she w a a quota plus since her name wouldn’t appear on any of the bid sheets
I asked this question on a different thread, but after reading some of the posts here it seems relevant.
This is a topic I can never really find a lot of information on but I find it rather interesting.
I always hear on the news about the racial issues within the Greek system on college campuses.
For example:
NPC/NIC greeks not accepting a rushee solely because of race.
NPHC groups intentionally barring whites from attending or participating in campus wide step competitions.
Did you (or your DS or DD) notice this on campus?
Did the councils ever integrate with the other councils for campus functions, like greek week, or did the councils function entirely separate from the others.
Twoinanddone: You state that a girl does not have to attend a party if she chooses not to, but that is not true in most places that use RFM. In most places, she must attend each party, but you need not rank the house at the end. However, if you do not rank all houses after preference you are not eligible for quota additions. I can’t think of any system that uses RFM that allows a girl to skip house ABC because she doesn’t like them.
As to quota additions, the chapters do not know because they are added before the bid lists are sent to the chapters. If a house does not make quota the chapters can quickly call people that did not match anywhere in the process and offer them snap bids. The chapter knows but most of the pledge class may not know at all since they tend to call before the major festivities of bid night happen.
I never was the “crafty” type. If that is required for sorority membership, I missed the memo.
I can’t imagine a house with 300 girls. I attended a small college where sororities were relatively new. There were about 80 girls in our house. I knew everyone in the house and felt a bond of sisterhood with those girls. But I wasn’t best friends with everyone. There were definitely groups of friends within the house.
I remember visiting a chapter of my sorority at another campus. The girls were nice and all, but I would never have been in my sorority at that college. I didn’t feel any bond with those girls. Strange as this sounds, I think I get a bigger kick meeting other women in my sorority now that I’m older. Maybe it’s nostalgia.
“Twoinanddone: You state that a girl does not have to attend a party if she chooses not to, but that is not true in most places that use RFM. In most places, she must attend each party, but you need not rank the house at the end. However, if you do not rank all houses after preference you are not eligible for quota additions. I can’t think of any system that uses RFM that allows a girl to skip house ABC because she doesn’t like them.”
I’m a little confused here. Let’s say the system has 12 houses, and the winnowing goes as follows:
Round 1: 12 houses
Round 2: 8 houses
Round 3: 5 houses
Round 4 (preference): 3 houses
Let’s say in going from Round 1 to Round 2 you get invited to 9 houses. They can “make you fill your dance card” and have you pick 8 of the 9 to attend, but they can’t make you attend the 9th party - there isn’t room.
Or are you just talking about preference parties, in which case, if you rank all 3 houses you attend you are eligible for quota additions, but if you “suicide” at your favorite house, you’re out of luck if you don’t make the cut?
Cardinal Fang: I lack the crafty gene. I did think my sorority was crafty. They made floats, built sets for rush parties, etc. I just didn’t do those activities. I seem to remember Sally never pomped floats either.