Well, and it’s not as though 95% of the 40-thousand students are sorority girls. At a large school there are plenty of other groups and friend circles and whatnot. And, some of them think the sorority girls are silly. Shocking. I know.
CF: It sounds like the school is completely at fault for creating a negative living situation that the RA should have controlled. Kids should not be making noise in the halls at 3am ever, let alone on a regular basis. You can’t force kids to be friends, but the school certainly can make sure they are not bullied on the hall.
I think the RA was a junior, from the same less privileged background as the isolates. She, being low status, would have been ignored by the social group. I agree that the school should have stepped in. Does IU give support to RAs who continually call security to shut up drunk loudmouths at 3 am? I suspect security is busy doing other things at that point. And remember, the RA is a student too. She can’t be staying up every night to 3 or 5 am to summon security to shut up the loudmouths. She has class the next day. Her power and ability to control the disturbances is limited.
The university is at fault for allowing this situation to continue. And there’s every reason to believe it’s the same on other party floors, of which there are many. The less privileged students don’t realize that they are entitled to better treatment, so they don’t seek it. It’s heartbreaking. I wonder how the isolates would have done if they’d been in different, non-party dorms.
CF - my son is an RA at a fairly social dorm (by NU standards which are not IU standards, lol). It is absolutely part of his job to ensure students are not repeatedly disruptive at 3 am, and he gets full support from the university in doing so. That’s why he gets “paid” (in room and board). It is unclear to me whether this was one or a few isolated incidents, which can get chalked up to life in a dorm, or whether this was constant, egregious behavior.
I still maintain that the author biases would have led them to characterize it a different way if the striver girls had come home loudly at 3 am and the rich girls had shushed them. It would have been taken as assertion of class privilege and entitlement to assume that everyone else should tiptoe for their precious comfort in a shared environment.
I also maintain that there is no “status” except that which one ascribes to something, if I don’t care about the sorority system, then there is no status in my eyes. It’s the tree falling in the forest.
Bullying is bullying, PG. Bailey’s friends discussed how much they disliked her roommate Linda, in Linda’s room while Linda was there. Whitney and her friends sneeringly referred to the “Dark Side,” a group of socially isolated floormates. Meanness is meanness, and the high status people deliberately treated the low status people badly. Mean girls pretend there is no such thing as mean girls, but everyone else rolls their eyes when they hear that nonsense.
Pizzagirl, in previous threads, you have persistently maintained these claims, which are laughably untrue:
(1) There is no generally agreed-upon status hierarchy for sororities at a given school. Different sororities merely appeal to women with different interests.
(2) Sororities don’t choose members based in considerable part on appearance.
(3) Sororities are not composed mostly of affluent women; they are representative of their colleges as a whole.
Who am I going to believe, you or my lying eyes? If we ask all the sorority and fraternity members at a given college to rank the Greek organizations, they’re going to give similar answers. There’s a hierarchy and everyone knows it. Sororities choose members based on looks, and everyone knows it. Sorority members are richer on average than other students, and everyone knows it.
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PG, let’s say you had been doing this ethnographic study instead of the authors. Imagine you had been seeing and writing about the events they saw. What would you have concluded? Would you have said that the women they call socially isolated weren’t actually socially isolated? They were socially isolated, but they would have been equally isolated in another dorm? It’s less interesting to speculate about what the authors would have said in another situation, than what other authors would have said in the same situation.
Not clear that mean girl behavior is limited to high SES girls. I think it happens across the socio-economic spectrum. It may take different forms, but it is there. Although some kids make their best friends on their floor freshman year, not everyone does. Many kids find their people outside of their freshman floor. It may make first semester freshman year very tough, but all is not lost at that point.
All these things are true, but they’re beside the point. Because some students recover from a bad freshman year does not absolve the college from preventing bad freshman years, if they can.
I agree the university was at fault if there was a lot of complaining to the university which I do not know since I haven’t read the book, yet. But, my perspective is shaped by experience, too. I have a kid at large university working in a job that is not quite an RA but close enough. She calls security when stuff happens and thinks the people causing the problems such as loud parties, drunken brawls, and naked swimming after hours are idiots. There’s one particular spoiled brat girl who is not in a sorority but definitely falls into the entitled camp has a dad who is very actively managing his kid’s college life as evidenced by a file full of daughter demands. Some fail. Some succeed. All get eye rolls from the rest of the students on campus. In other words, she probably thinks she’s a highly motivated high status young woman, but there are those very bright and insightful kids who recognize a spoiled brat when they see one. This has nothing to do with SES.
And sure, she’ll go on to success at something despite a lame major because her dad will be paying her post grad rent and making every phone call he can to call in favors to get her going somewhere. But, so what? That doesn’t directly impact anyone but her and it doesn’t really say anything positive about her, either.
“Who am I going to believe, you or my lying eyes? If we ask all the sorority and fraternity members at a given college to rank the Greek organizations, they’re going to give similar answers. There’s a hierarchy and everyone knows it. Sororities choose members based on looks, and everyone knows it. Sorority members are richer on average than other students, and everyone knows it.”
I want to mention that on the NU-specific threads, when someone comes in and offers a ranking of houses, other members of the community jump in and say - this is silly, meet the people yourself and form your own conclusions, and the people you like best are the people who are most right for you instead of being bound to some list.
Look, CF - hierarchy only matters if you give it power. This is a college board. We know that there are tons of dorky, pathetic students on this site who will argue passionately that Duke is better than Dartmouth because it’s #7 vs #10, and this huge, huge difference in status will matter greatly out in the real world where people will bow down to Duke graduates but hold their sides and laugh uproariously at Dartmouth graduates. That’s because they have an outsize view of how much hierarchy “matters” in the real world.
Normal people with normal social graces look at this and say - you’ve got to be kidding, these are all great schools, there are a lot of great schools out there, parsing the hierarchy between #7 and #10 is a pointless waste of time, whichever one you most prefer is the one that is right for you.
Don’t you get that this is pretty much the same thing? If you’re happy with the house you’re in and the people who are in it, it makes no difference what its “ranking” is. None whatsoever. Just like it fundamentally doesn’t make a whit of difference in the big picture if you go to Duke or Dartmouth.
As for the relative wealth - yes, there’s going to be some more wealth because it’s an extracurricular that costs money. Just like the sailing team or the ski team, because sailing and skiing aren’t free. What you continue to deliberately miss is that it’s not necessarily “all little rich girls.” You have been told time and time again that this may be true on some campuses, but most definitely not at all.
I was an assistant rush director and a rush counselor. We did not choose people based on looks. Sorry. We didn’t discuss looks one iota beyond placement (“she had long dark hair and was wearing glasses and red shirt”). We didn’t discuss what their daddies did (how the heck would we know?) or whether they had designer handbags or shoes. I’m just so sorry. We didn’t. You can ask the poster LINYMOM who was in my house - she is 2 years ahead of me. You can choose not to believe me, but that’s your problem.
Mean girl behavior is, of course, unacceptable, and so is repeated 3 am dorm disruption.
My heart breaks for girls who feel unloved and have a hard time finding friends.
But if the mean girls were mean girls and all of a sudden their sororities were taken away, guess what? They’d still be mean girls because that’s who they are. Maybe it was an unfortunate coincidence that a lot of them landed on this particular dorm that year. I don’t know.
How do they prevent bad freshman years though? Perhaps to avoid having party dorms or high SES dorms? But in this case, 50% of the girls were “social” and 50% were isolates. Seems like they mixed it up. The goal is to have kids mix and meet kids of varied backgrounds. Unfortunately, when that happens it doesn’t always mean that kids will bond. Some kids do not want to go outside their comfort zones - especially as freshman. I agree that if the bad behavior included bullying or disruption on the floor, it should have been stopped. I don’t think the college wants to say here is the party dorm - only pre-sorority girls live here!
My nephew had a great freshman floor and they are all friends. That wasn’t my experience or my kid’s (I still have one very good friend from my hall but 6 or so others that I did not live with and were met in other ways). My kids made friends through activities they pursued in college, not their floor mates, as they are not typical party hearty types and their floors seemed to be.
The book claims that 50% were isolates because the other 50% were socialites. That is, there are undoubtedly some women (raises hand) who would be isolated anywhere. But the book says that the 50% were not all abnormally asocial. They’d been normally social in high school. They made the normal kinds of social outreach that, in other dorms, would have resulted in social connections, but in this dorm resulted in snubs.
Would that have been the case for your freshman dorm? It certainly wouldn’t have been said about mine. People in general were open about meeting new people.
“That is, there are undoubtedly some women (raises hand) who would be isolated anywhere. But the book says that the 50% were not all abnormally asocial. They’d been normally social in high school. They made the normal kinds of social outreach that, in other dorms, would have resulted in social connections, but in this dorm resulted in snubs.”
I wasn’t “normally social” in high school, but was in college, precisely because I was in a sorority that expanded my universe beyond just the people who were in my dorm.
I don’t know what you think can be done about rude people who snub others, though. Fine them? What?
I have no information about your sorority. But look, I’ve read Greek Chat. I’ve looked at the pictures of pledge classes. I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck. You can say that sororities in general don’t pick based on looks, and I will never believe you. Is it just a coincidence that the “Top” sorority house in the USC thesis was also the thinnest? Yeah, sure.
Get rid of the sororities. But that’s not going to happen.
Failing that, I’d say that this problem was created because the social women knew they were getting into a status contest, but the less privileged women didn’t: they were unwittingly thrown into a nest of poisonous vipers. IU should openly advertise that the party dorms are party dorms, rather than allowing it to be a secret that some know and some don’t. And it should charge more for them.
As described in the book, the design of that dorm is terrible. A better, more open design would have allowed the less social women to connect, and realize their number. Design matters.
Cool! I know an AChiO and Theta at USC (both of whom are in their twenties). I’ll put you in contact with them and you can ask them if they picked based on looks.
Greekchat and TFM bear only a minor passing resemblance to my experience. They’re extremely Southern-based in their worldview. So no, you don’t get to claim expertise based on Greekchat.
CF wrote:
Linda is the one going door to door with a pack of cards trying to make a connection early on in the dorm. And she was uniformly rejected. That just absolutely blew me away. Cards are a pretty universally shared activity. She isn’t interested in the party culture and tries to suggest a different activity and is just shot down. It wasn’t like they all said, “cards aren’t our thing but let’s watch a movie or reality show or go to the coffee shop or something instead.”
Once I went door to door in my sorority house trying to find anyone wiling to go to a campus film festival with me, back in the days when the only way to even see movies was on a big screen of some sort. No one was willing to go, but at least half invited me to do an alternate activity. Still it was one of the deciding factors in my deciding to move out of that house. It was one of several examples I gave in explaining to my disbelieving parents that I didn’t really have enough in common with my sorority sisters to continue living with them. They were concerned I only wanted to spend time with boyfriends not girlfriends, but the boyfriends were interested in the film festivals. The boyfriends were not fraternity boys.
I didn’t necessarily see Hannah as a mean girl in her treatment of Alyssa, more as an ignorant girl, though seemingly a willfully ignorant girl based on the descriptions of the authors. Hannah can’t get it through her head that Alyssa doesn’t have the financial resources to join her in the activities she suggests. She blames Alyssa for not being friendly and a “good roommate.”
My favorite college tour with my kids was to a small LAC where the talk they gave focused on efforts by the school to minimize the negative impact of widely varying SES levels among the student population. All college activities were paid for and available to all students. They were making an effort to eliminate SES distinctions among students. The college in the book emphasizes those distinctions.
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