<p>If one chose not to participate in a frat or sorority, would they be ostracized? How much of the social scene revolves around Greek life?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Sent from my iPhone using CC</p>
<p>I am not a current student but decided to give something of a response rather than leave this question out there for much longer.</p>
<p>There are 6 fraternities and 3 sororities at Colgate for roughly 2850 students. Freshmen cannot join, sophomores can, and residence is limited to junior and senior years although I understand that 4 semesters of Greek house residence is rare given that over 65% of students participate in off-campus study. Also, apartment, townhouse and off campus housing is popular. If you assume that each of these 9 houses has 50 members then you will see that Greek membership is relatively limited. That said, the social and service aspects of Greek life are important components of campus life as are other Colgate administration-managed initiatives for the Colgate/Hamilton town community.</p>
<p>I suggest that you discuss all of this with current students online via the colgate.edu website facilities or during a campus visit. I am sure that your expectations for this magnificent college setting will be exceeded. </p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>This has been brought up before: </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/colgate-university/884678-greek-life.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/colgate-university/884678-greek-life.html</a></p>
<p>Looking just at the numbers, around 30% of the student body (about 840 students) is in a Greek society. Since you can’t rush until your Sophomore year, that translates to 40% of students that are eligible to join, so the majority of students are not involved. You are definitely not ostracized for not participating, especially since you don’t join until you’re a sophomore. Greek houses do host a lot of social events, but there’s plenty of other events on campus and parties in the apartments and townhouses.</p>
<p>My daughter is a junior at Colgate. She “kind of” thought about joining one of the three sororities when she was a sophomore, but realized she wasn’t really all that interested. This year she is very happily living in a college apartment with four roommates. </p>
<p>As a former Colgate fraternity member, myself, I’ll defend fraternities to those who have only an “Animal House” view of them. Often, you make your best friends there and sometimes you really do grow from the experiences you go through. Of course, that could happen just as easily in a dorm or apartment, and in fact in my junior year I dropped out of my fraternity because it seemed a little silly and chose, instead, to live in an apartment for a year, then a year in a rented house with five others near campus. So, I’d say my experience (and this was decades ago!) was that fraternities were fun and useful for me, but that I soon tired of them.</p>
<p>It’s most common at Colgate not to join a fraternity or sorority, but either way will be fine. They serve a purpose at colleges like Colgate which are a bit isolated (getting a ride somewhere, advice about which courses to take, cheap meals, some social life, etc.),but I’d just as soon see Colgate eliminate them. And I’m pretty pleased my daughter got over her “sorority moment” and chose to live in an apartment.</p>
<p>@ColgateDad~just out of curiosity, why would you like to see Greek life eliminated at Colgate?</p>
<p>I’m not much for ‘banning’ anything legal and acceptable, so I suppose if I were King of the World I’d leave them alone with supervison, of course. </p>
<p>To the extent that college kids drink too much and sometimes act like loud-mouthed idiots, I don’t like it. But, that’s not really a product of fraternities or sororities. It’s a product of youth and being on your own for the first time (and maybe being a little immature). Being an idiot and getting drunk and rowdy happens outside frats and sororities. Having said that, though, I’m not a big fan of fraternities and sororities since they can exude a kind of “us vs. them” elitism and closed-mindedness at times.</p>
<p>In my own fraternity at Colgate, I spent one year as Pledge Chairman (a weighty position!) when we adopted my idea of an “open housing” system: Anyone who wanted to join could join as long as they had one sponsor who was already a member. All they had to do was sign up alongside their sponsor’s name after having visited the house a few times. This way we weren’t tempted to “black ball” or otherwise trivialize people (a policy we already didn’t use, by the way). </p>
<p>We got a full pledge class of students who were at least as good as any other pledge class the fraternity had ever had – about 30 new members. Everyone was pleased and we didn’t have to go through interviews, endless visits, voting on new members, and so on. If you wanted to live with us and knew someone, you could just join. </p>
<p>Did we get a few marginal characters? I don’t recall, but I suppose so. But, we had always voted in a few people we later regretted, anyway. That’s the way I’d do it in every fraternity and sorority. Set up a simple membership system, let those who want to be members join (with a sponsor or two) and that way the frats and sororities would really just be “interest group” houses without all the silly and old-fashioned fraternity mumbo-jumbo. The interest group would be “people I want to live with,” I guess. </p>
<p>My fraternity was Phi Kappa Tau and we had the highest GPA of any living unit (fraternity or dorm) on campus, a Rhodes scholar included. So we weren’t hurting for excellent members, and many of my fraternity brothers went on to become lawyers, doctors, teachers, ministers, business owners, and so on. I still dropped out, though, because I wanted to live on my own. </p>
<p>So I think I have a more nuanced view than many people who see them only as cliches. If they were banned, I wouldn’t particularly object, I suppose. I thought Colgate’s previous President, Rebecca Chopp, was moving in that direction, and I wonder if one reason she left was all the opposition she received from “old boys” who romantacized their college days and fought to keep them? I don’t know. In either case, you get to choose how you want to live – and that should be part of the Colgate Spirit.</p>