At Alabama, there is a $150 fee, plus and entire week of time. Not everyone can afford to do that or wants to do it. Plus there is the ‘prep’ of filling out the application, providing transcripts and letters of recommendation, photos, etc. I know girls who have gone through Rush just to get to move into the dorms early! The minorities who do decide to go through rush and pledge are making a big commitment in both time and money just to Rush.
As far as living in the house for sophomore year, not all the girls who pledged get to do that. Most of the sorority houses hold 50-80 students, so these big ‘old row’ chapters can’t even hold all the sophomores. I think members often rent another house to live in an eat at the chapter house.
National Panhellenic does suggest that Rush take place in the spring, not the fall, but that doesn’t work for a lot of schools for a lot of reasons, including weather. My niece did rush in the spring but her school is in San Diego. It’s a lot easier to have groups of 500-1000 girls walking around in San Diego in January than in Minneapolis. Some schools start the spring semester right in January, so that would mean at some schools that rush prep week would be immediately after Christmas. Some schools have a January ‘mini-mester’. One of DD’s schools does rush about 2 weeks after school starts, others have to do it before classes begin. I think Rush at Alabama is just too big to do it during a semester as it involves 2500 freshmen, but also 6000+ other undergrads.
This is juxtaposed against the fac, that the state of Alabama is almost 28% black. So, those young black woman who did apply in previous years, despite history and reputation should be commended for their integrity to rely on courage that the system would treat them better. It did not, but change is frequently slow…
I commend Loukydad for his reflection, and will admit I can come off as pedantic in my ramblings…
Why? They are an exclusive club. They are allowed to do whatever they want. They can market themselves however they want. They are marketing themselves to the majority of girls rushing, which is the average white girl. At Alabama the quota this year for new members was roughly 140, and if you don’t meet your quota, you are viewed as a “lesser sorority”. It’s a cutthroat game trying to get and keep 140 girls. It’s all about marketing and numbers.
Maybe they should do more to diversify, but they definitely don’t have to.
There is an overall minimum number for each sorority’s pledge class??? All the more reason they should make every effort to be more inclusive. This is unbelievable.
@IvyGreekLife You sound like a real renaissance man with an earnest interest in social change and contribution. You do know that in less than 30 years minorities will be the majority, and every type of mainstream marketing will have them as their primary consumer group…but enough with all the facts.
Quota is the maximum number each sorority is allowed to pledge. A group that doesn’t pledge quota is disadvantaged going forward.
In some systems, there aren’t enough spaces for all the women who wish to pledge. For example, at Indiana University, profiled in Paying for the Party, there isn’t room for everyone who wants to participate. When we discussed the book on a recent thread, someone linked to a blog with really heartbreaking stories of those left out.
Apologies if I’m posting what everyone on this thread already understands.
No minimum, but a maximum called a quota. It is usually calculated by taking the number of girls going through Rush at a certain point (usually after the second round of parties) and dividing it by the number of houses. Just using the 2400 who participated (some will have dropped out after the first day, some never showed up) divided by 17 houses = 141 as the max any house can take (the number was probably a little lower, like 135). Alabama uses a ‘quota plus’ system, and basically guarantees any girl who has accepted the maximum number of invitations back to houses, has been invited to 3 final parties and who lists all the houses on her bid card will get an invitation, so some houses have ‘quota plus’ as they add these girls on to the maximum.
93% of those going through Rush pledged. That is an amazing number at any school.
I always find it interesting when someone posts to question why others are posting. If you are uninterested or find the thread pointless, move along. It is that easy. You are not required to participate.
“Why? They are an exclusive club. They are allowed to do whatever they want. Maybe they should do more to diversify, but they definitely don’t have to.”
I wouldn’t be so sure of that, IGL.
Augusta National Golf Club can certainly do whatever it wants in terms of its membership. But since UA is run by the State of Alabama, that pesky U.S. Constitution (including the 14th Amendment) applies. So do the federal civil rights laws. And maybe federal fair housing laws too.
As we saw with the SAE broes at OU, racially discriminatory practices by a greek organization affiliated with a state university raise a murky mix of anti-discrimination, free speech and free association legal issues. Local chapters “doing whatever they want” will perhaps have to justify their actions to their university, to their national office, and also the feds at DOJ and DOEd.
I hadn’t focused on the fact that less than 1% of women getting bids ae African American, and that the issue seems to be with persuading African American women to rush in the first place. In any other institutional system, with those sorts of numbers, the organizations would be highly focused on outreach efforts to members of the underrepresented communities. If improving the numbers were actually a priority, you’d think that all marketing materials would be reviewed with a critical eye toward evaluating whether they conveyed the message that the targeted minority groups would be welcomed and would feel comfortable in the organization. If increasing minority membership were a priority, You’d expect them to at least make an effort to highlight whatever little diversity they may have – even if the best they can do is to highlight olive-skinned brunettes in the marketing instead of the blondest of the blonds.
I think we’d all agree that the video would be extremely poor piece of marketing IF increasing minority membership were a priority. From that, we can draw one of two conclusions: (1) they’ve done a terrible job of marketing if recruiting minority members is the goal; or (2) minority outreach is not a priority. Given that seems like a pretty effective piece of marketing for appealing to new cookie-cutter members, I know what conclusion I’d draw.
Y’all made me have to go back and watch the video for a 5th time, to see if I could find any minority looking faces.
If you watch the full video (not the Today Show excerpts), which is still available on youtube, you will notice that while the blondes do tend to be highlighted in most of the scenes, the house is not populated solely by blond women (which btw, are probably bottle-blonds, since very few women over 20 have light blond hair, so many of them may actually be natural brunettes).
If you freeze-frame the opening scene where the women are lining the stairway up to the front door, you will see that about half of them are brunettes, and some even look like they may have minority features, but it is not easy to tell. The woman in the front row on the bottom right looks to me like she could even be part black, but of course it is impossible to know for sure unless someone here knows her.
And not wanting to jump too much into this conversation, but if I ruled the world, I’d talk less white girls into joining rather than persuade more black girls to jump in. Honestly, I’d like to see the whole system slowly fade away…
Post #371 - yes, if you watch the whole video, there definitely are plenty of brunettes.
The one scene that “blondes it up” is the one where the girls are wearing white dresses and chatting in the almost-all-white living room. For whatever reason, that scene - about 30 seconds in - features only blondes, and it leaves a very strong “blonde” impression.
Yes, the rec system has been discussed before, and I think it’s utterly and completely ridiculous and should be abolished. Here’s how it works: A girl is supposed to get a recommendation from an alum (can be from a completely different chapter / college).
In the systems like Alabama, these recs have Great Import and if a girl doesn’t have one, she’s at a disadvantage - which means that the system is inherently biased against internationals or girls who didn’t have mothers / older sisters / friends who went to college or were in sororities.
In systems such as the one I “grew up” in, it’s nice but by no means a necessity - which means that the international students or the first-gen students aren’t disadvantaged, which is of course how it should be.
As for recs in general, I write them for girls who I don’t know at all. As an example last year, one of my coworkers had a friend who had a daughter going to Alabama, and so those of us in our office who had been in Greek houses (Alpha Phi, Theta, A Chi O, Pi Phi and DG) all wrote recs for her even though we wouldn’t know her if we tripped over her. Of course we lie and say we’ve known her for years and she’s darling, yada yada. Because why should she be disadvantaged if we can help? It’s a really dumb formality, because they should be basing their assessment of the girl on meeting her live, not on what some middle-aged women 1000 miles away who’s never even set foot on Alabama campus thinks of a girl.
"Back when the whole thing blew up at AL a few years ago, let us recall that the girls in the house wanted to give a bid to the young woman, and the alumni advisor(s) nixed it, after which, IIRC, the rush chair and possibly some others resigned. So at least at that one house, it wasn’t the sisters’ fault.
I read a lot on the subject at that time, here, in the student newspaper–which I have to say was impressive–and on various sites devoted to sorority stuff. There was a lot of chat about the unlikelihood of any “Northern” girl getting into an “old row” house. There was a lot of talk about “The Machine” and about how the good frats would not want to socialize with a sorority that had black members, how taking that step would immediately tank the social status of the house, and on and on."
Boola - just so you know, we discussed this on a thread about a year or so ago when this story “hit”. Look, everyone was pretty much agreed that the concept of alumni advisors telling girls they couldn’t extend a bid to a black girl because oh-my-god-our-reputation-will-suffer was about as contemptible as it gets - and really, who are these women kidding, if you think like that, you don’t HAVE any social reputation worth preserving, except maybe in Nowheresville, Alabama at the coffee klatsch with other women who are living in the past. Please understand we were QUITE loud on the concept of how backward and behind the times this system was.
“So self-segregation seems to be a continuing phenomenon even among the current traditional college-age generation, and it is not exclusive to the south.”
Do you feel it’s “self-segregation” when people who are into, say, theater like to hang around with other people who are into theater? Or when, say, Korean students join the Korean Student Association? Or Catholic students join a Newman Center?
I am active in my local alum group, and we will provide a rec for any local woman who wants one. We will make an effort to find an alum who knows her personally, but if not, we will take the time to either interview her in person or not interview her at all, and simply have her fill out a written form with information about her background (like a resume) which we then forward on to the chapter of our sorority at the college they are attending.
It is somewhat of a pointless exercise, but it does provide the host chapter with advance information about women who are coming through for conversation purposes, and who have shown extra interest in the house. Of course, the PNM needs to know to ask for the rec, but we will give it if she does. We do check a box on the form that indicates whether we know her personally or not.