Oh, I agree it’s good for them to have something on hand to know that Susie is from Minneapolis and she studied abroad in France and she’s majoring in biology so they can match her with someone else who may be from Minneapolis, likes French and is studying biology. But it’s incumbent upon them to get to know her, not rely on the opinion of someone who’s essentially a stranger.
For the benefit of those who don’t know, I want to clarify that the rec process is not intended to be a big mystery (at least not with my sorority). We advertise it on the national and local alum web pages, and on our local alum FB page. We want women to join our house; we are not trying to throw up barriers to keep them away. We found tremendous value in our organization and are fighting against the tide of people like Southern Hope, boolahi and alh who would prefer to see our organizations fade into or be exploded into oblivion. I would be fine with the rec process disappearing; it is not required at many or most colleges including where I attended and I did not have any, but it could be a help to women who might not be as outgoing or popular as others who can rely on their 10-minute first impressions during rush week.
In my experience (not at the big southern schools that require recommendations) the letters are sort of ‘tie breakers’. They are a nice introduction, and if it comes down to a few girls and the house can’t really decide what order to list them on the bid sheet, one might get a small nudge because of the rec. May not make any difference at all.
I wrote one this year for my daughter’s friend. Never met her but she asked daughter to write one and there is a chapter of my sorority at the school so I asked if she wanted one. Pretty much just copied the info from my daughter’s letter.
Even being a legacy doesn’t mean what it once did. It is not an automatic bid. It is a little push, but there are so many legacies these days that houses can’t ask them all to join, and really, what does your grandmother having been a member at Nebraska in 1940 have to do with you fitting in with the girls at Florida in 2015? It’s a plus, a brownie point, but that’s about it.
I think part of the issue is that at schools with a national student body, the chances that your mother was there at the very same chapter is pretty remote. At schools like Alabama, however, there are a lot of girls who are legacies at that very same house, and there are high expectations that they join where their mother was.
I can only speak for my set of friends, but we didn’t particularly care if our daughters joined our house or not. It would have been mildly nice, but that’s about it, and certainly not worth having any expectations over. Ironically, my son joined my husband’s house - on the same campus no less - but that was solely and completely his choice, and we would have supported his joining wherever he wanted, or not joining at all.
I have two daughters, one joined my house, one didn’t. It is no big deal, although I will say it is easier for me to write the check for the house I belong to than for the other daughter. I feel a little sad for the second daughter only because my niece is also in the same house as me and daughter, but that’s such a minor thing.
This may have been raised before (sorry, life is too short for me to read this entire thread), but I also noticed none of the women in the video are as much as an ounce overweight or have short hair. Are there no members who fit those descriptions, or were they told to stay in their rooms on the day the video was made to preserve an image? Neither answer is appealing, is it? Better keep handing out those incredibly generous scholarships, Alabama. You still have a lot to overcome to persuade talented students from other parts of the country to venture into your territory.
Although for most of my life I have had long hair, and I graduated from HS in 1971 when long straight hair was the thing, I must say that I do find the uniformly-long hair thing kid of weird. 
Now, now. We had uniformly Shetland sweaters, popped collars and flipped bangs in our photos
If you look at the pictures of the new members running from the stadium to their new houses, many of them have (gasp) brown pony tails, or short hair, aren’t thin, and, gasp again, may even be wearing glasses. The are 18 year old globs of jello, waiting to be molded into young women.
We all changed a lot in college. I’d say in my day the hairstyle to copy was Farrah Fawcett, and I’d guess there was a time when 3/4 of the girls in the house had a Farrah.
Farrah was a Tri Delt at UT, and the Tri Delts never let us forget it!
My freshman roommate was a Chi Omega who tried to make me over, but I was hopeless.
Funny anecdote…I was discussing the video with my friend and he said that his son just added Bama to his list. It will be interesting to see if there is an up-tick in male applicants this year…
Perhaps all of their members are physically fit. Is that a crime? Have we now reached the point where one or two girls in a sorority has to shovel down food 24-7 in order to be really fat and create “diversity”?
What is this obsession with the Alpha Phi girls’ hair? I noticed the same thing that earlier posters noticed, in that half the girls in the video are actually brunettes. It’s funny that so many posters seem to have such strong negative feelings against blondes yet they can’t even see the brunettes who are very much present. FWIW, I can’t remember the last time I saw a college girl, Greek or otherwise, who wore her hair short. If they exist, there can’t be very many of them.
As for all the girls being slender, why is that a bad thing?
It’s not a bad thing but the video seems to rank the blonds as a bit higher on the hierarchy than the brunettes! I’m a blond myself who could have fit in with those girls in my youth but the blatant hierarchy is creepy!
@EarlVanDorn, congratulations on winning the crassness award for the day. There is such a thing as variety of body type that does not involve stuffing oneself 24/7…and slenderness does not equate to physically fit.
I have skimmed over all the pages, and just wanted to add that joining a sorority is expensive, especially at Alabama. I have heard they can cost an additional $2,000 to $8,000 per year depending on the sorority (although I do not know actual costs.) Many students who are taking out loans to go to school decide not to go Greek because they cannot afford it. Many cannot justify the cost, especially if joining is something that is not traditionally done by their families. I know I have not encouraged my sons to go Greek because of the costs. I believe that many students (white, african american, asian, etc.) do not join a sorority because it isn’t important enough for them to spend the money in that way.
I watched the video and many of the girls did look the same. However, isn’t it normal to want to fit in at that age? And isn’t it normal for those who do not feel like they would fit in to not join? The video showed the type of girl they wanted and I see nothing wrong with that. I know that my long-ago teenage self would definitely not have fit in with this group.
“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.”
I don’t think weather is a factor here. Dartmouth, Cornell, and Syracuse all rush in the “spring,” aka January with 10 degrees and snow. Conversely, at schools like LSU, Texas, Arizona, etc., the weather would be 100 times better for rush if they did it in the spring. It’s about campus and regional cultures.
I think this is an interesting question. If (for example) we learned that the girls in this sorority are all slender because the sorority draws primarily members of the swim team and other sports teams, we’d probably say, well, OK. There may be athlete-centric fraternities in which all the members are really fit.
But what one suspects is something different–that the members of this group are all slender and good-looking because they only want to extend membership to people who are slender and good-looking. And that seems pretty shallow. Should it be prohibited? No, not at all. But it is a social phenomenon on which one can comment.
As for why this thread has gone on so long–well, anthropology is interesting.
I don’t think choosing ones’ sorority sisters for reasons that might include certain physical attributes is any more shallow than the way one chooses whom they will go on a first date. Both probably include some decisions that appear “shallow” to others, but may have a logical basis in the mind of the chooser, or are simply subconscious sorting of people who look most like those whom they think they would enjoy spending time, when the decision must be made on limited information. For example, I had no interest in dating anyone who smoked, or had tattoos, was obese or had long stringy hair and a beard. Did I miss out on marrying the man of my dreams for having done so? No.
A sorority could be athlete-centric, or a sorority could have a high incidence of eating disorders. My group fell in the second category, an extremely negative response to the pressure to look the same. These days there are websites where anorexics and bulimics can congregate. We didn’t even know what to call it in the early 70s, but there was definitely a strong support system within the sorority for this potentially life-threatening behavior.