Very few people would be able to succeed at UVa by putting in as little academic effort as some of these women are portrayed as putting in. I’m not sure it would be comparable.
I absolutely believe that a group of mean girls can set the tone for the floor and make other girls unhappy in that setting. That doesn’t surprise me at all. They can do the same in an elementary school class or in an EC. I think you said that only 16 of the girls on the floor took the party path (about 1/3) of which 4 were “low SES”. When you get to numbers that low, the possibility of bias in the sample becomes pretty large. I think of each my kid’s elementary school grades when I volunteered a lot and had a pretty good (not perfect) read on the make up of the grade. The numbers of kids were about the same, but the social make-up of each grade (nice, mean, difficult, athletic, involved, super smart) varied significantly. One of them had a group of mean girls that totally ran the social scene and made the left out girls pretty miserable. The other two had a much smaller contingent of mean girls and much less drama.
The same has been true for sports teams or musical groups - some gel, some don’t.
It seemed to me that some on this thread were extending the findings of the book to IU in general, that their advising or integration of lower SES kids into the school is lacking.
185, PG wrote: [quote] You keep coming around to "top sorority." If the function of a sorority is to make a big university smaller, to have a social group to coalesce around, to have friends (especially if you don't naturally have any EC's that lend themselves to bonding and friendships, like being in theater), then it doesn't matter if it's a "top" sorority or not.
[/quote]
Let’s just talk about sororities making a big university smaller. On another thread I shared that my very shy niece benefited immensely from sorority membership. She would have been miserable in that dorm, without sorority membership, and not made friends. You have discussed how brutal rush is at Indiana. The shy girls, the socially inept girls, and others who are left out of sororities don’t have these ready made groups and may be the ones most disadvantaged by that fact. Thoughts?
mom2and: I started with almost exactly your response but after considering it, woke up this morning and wrote #156
As i said alh,
And I would add that sometimes all is takes is one very mean girl with a very forceful personality.
Yet does that mean that every freshman floor in every party dorm has a Whitney and that the other girls cede the same level of power to the Whitney? Does it mean that every freshman dorm in a non-party dorm does not? Most of us will encounter a Whitney at some point in time.
We have to empower women to ignore the Whitneys and seek out other social groups. RAs absolutely should be looking for this kind of overtly mean behavior with some idea of how to assist the girls in getting along and when to call in the administration.
It is not clear to me how that is connected to SES group or major?
You may have misunderstood, or perhaps I misstated the situation. None of the women on the party path were low SES: none were working class, and none were lower middle class.
On the other hand, every single one of the fifteen working class and lower middle class women were social isolates.
^exactly. That is what becomes disturbing.
Thanks for bringing up the book. Will be reading it.
I can tell you that there really is no way of maintaining socio-econ equality at college when there is a mixed batch of students there. The best that happens is that students get a better look and understanding of the differences. I remember coming from a middle income family on full scholarship to my school, and the realizing that I came from one of the poorest families when it came to my floor. Not that they were a “rich kids” in that they had trust funds and their parents did not work. Not the case at all . In fact the vast majority of them came from families that felt that college payment, and those kids were going to have to work for a living. About half were on some form of financial aid and or scholarship, but just not as much as I was.
I ended up best friends with someone from a very wealthy family, and another whose father was a well paid executive… I also met students who came from families that were truly needy, which mine was not. My father was a college grad and I came from a fiancially stable home. Just not one that paid for private schools including college. I met kids who were first genearation and whose families were in trouble financially. Sadly, most of them did not make through colege. That was where the heavy drop out rate was.
But that first year in the dorm was probably the one where we were all most “equal”. We all were stuck in the same cinderblock doubles with the built in furniture. We al were on the meal plan. School did not allow cars for freshmen and there weren’t the outside eateries there are these days.
That all changed sophomore year when most of us went off campus. Many of us, self included, looked for cheap student digs which were very different from the mainline apartments that cost much more with all sorts of amenities. Very, very different life styles. I ate ramen and rice. They didn’t have to stint for food. We fought the roaches and slumlords, they lived in luxury, and some had maid service. This still occurs today, and around schools like Indiana.
210
Yet the mean girls exist in all three groups. The startling realization for me was that mean girls may exist in every setting and I’m just not recognizing them because they don’t impact me personally.
We homeschooled until high school. There were no mean girls in our homeschool group. So I don’t accept their existence as a unavoidable, though unfortunate, part of life.
True! They only impact those who let themselves be impacted and it’s not SES. It may a confidence thing and related somehow, though. But. I don’t see how we can expect that level of hand holding at a large public university. No babysitting here was well known by my kid who chose that kind of educational setting at age 17 and values independence.
I’m psyched that more people are going to read this book and we can get more perspectives.
There are a couple of conclusions, almost the same, that we might draw here.
We might hypothesize that social isolation on this floor had nothing to do with SES status. We might think that the mean girls “only impact those who let themselves be impacted and it’s not SES.” This is an idea that should be rejected with extreme prejudice by anyone who has read the book and who has the tiniest scintilla of mathematical knowledge. About half the women on the floor (25 of 53) were social isolates, and that included all 15 of the less privileged. All of the less privileged women ending up as social isolates would happen by chance about once every 2^15 times in the most lenient analysis. So there’s a 1 in 32768 chance that it would happen just by chance. Yeah, right. Really, this hypothesis deserves a smackdown and nobody should entertain it for a millisecond.
We might hypothesize that this floor is (or is not) representative of all party floors in the social domination by richer women. Sadly, math can’t help us here; we have to go to domain knowledge, that is, knowledge about the situation. We have to appeal to our intuition about mean girls, their prevalence, and their effects, and look to other information about the school. What’s the graduation rate for low SES women? How many transfer out?
Do you have any a priori reason to believe that mean-girls are more prevalent at Indiana than any other comparably sized state university?
I might speculate that mean girls would be attracted to the competitive sorority rush at Indiana. Then again, mean girls might look to places with easier sorority rushes, in order to have more scope for their mean efforts.
tl;dr I have no idea whether mean girls are more prevalent at Indiana.
What happens to mean girls when they go to schools that don’t have sororities, CF? It would seem to me that they are still mean. Whose high school here didn’t have exclusive cliques and popular girls?
The relevant point about Indiana is that the savvy, more privileged women who know they want to party deliberately choose the party dorm, and the savvy more privileged women who know they don’t want to party deliberately choose not to be there. So there’s a lot of scope for Whitney’s mean efforts. If she had been on a dorm with other higher SES women who weren’t having any of her nonsense, things might have been different, but she was in a dorm with other status seekers, and other low status people to be snubbed, and not many others who would have felt they had the power and desire to call the mean girls on their mean behavior.
Also, remember the socialites chose to be at Indiana precisely because they wanted the sororities. If there had been no sororities, the socialites wouldn’t have been there.
In the book, was there a response from IU administration or info on their relationship with the Greek houses? I’m curious, especially because of a recent student scholarship day we attended. I think schools are trying to distance themselves, even when they’ve had a long-standing good relationship with the Greek community.
This was at a small LAC where ~50% of the on-campus students are Greek members and live in one of the 14 big, beautiful houses that line the main street through campus. 30 years ago, seemingly every festivity was somehow Greek related. As I recall, most of it open and inclusive, or at least it seemed so then. The red carpet was rolled out for this scholarship interview day and it was very nice. Yet…not a peep on Greek life from the admin/professors/etc. A potential student would’ve thought it barely existed from what was presented. I’m neutral on Greek life other than thinking frats contribute to excessive drinking, but I am still shaking my head over the non-presentation that day.
In the chapter on Greek Life, it talks about the Dean of Students being a former fraternity member and an enthusiastic supporter of the system. I wonder if CF remembers that section and could cut and past it here? I don’t have the skills.
Or maybe PG knows how to do that?
“So there’s a lot of scope for Whitney’s mean efforts. If she had been on a dorm with other higher SES women who weren’t having any of her nonsense, things might have been different, but she was in a dorm with other status seekers, and other low status people to be snubbed, and not many others who would have felt they had the power and desire to call the mean girls on their mean behavior.”
So we can conclude Whitney was a jerk.
Out of curiosity, you described your social isolation. Were there sororities at your college? Did you get rejected from them, or did you not try / rush?
I’ll type it. I have a paper book here, so cutting and pasting is not going to happen.