Funny thing about freshman year dormitory halls these days: they’re often nicer than anything you can find off-campus or in the Greek village. Which schools are worth attending just for their swanky student housing?...
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Sorority life has not always been Lululemon and bid day YouTube videos. Take a trip back in time through this photo gallery that includes photos of sorority chapters from each decade since 1880. It's fascinating to see how not only how fashion changed throughout the decades, but also the changes of the poses and general mood of the photos. Apparently, the first time a sorority girl smiled in a photo was in ...
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As the weather begins to get a little warmer and there's no snow in sight, it is easy to forget the treacherous winter conditions that many of us were dealing with on our campuses just a few short weeks ago. This winter was definitely one for the books, and some locations throughout the United States got hit with snow especially hard this season. Here is a list of ten campuses that experienced some of the snowiest 2014-2015 winter seasons....
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You have made one of the biggest decisions of your life to go to college. Congratulations! However, that’s not the only decision that you’ll have to make when it comes to college life. Another important decision that you’ll probably make is the decision to go Greek in college.
Greek life has lots of benefits to offer to its members – opportunities to build a network, social/community activities to participate in, a strong brotherhood bond to maintain, and many more! However, one of the biggest challenges college guys face at the beginning of their Greek life is choosing the right fraternity for themselves....
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The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week that a lot of people in Greek life governance have been quietly dreading. A rape case at Cornell. A university that had recently softened its stance toward fraternities. And a story that asks, out loud, whether colleges made a mistake by pulling back from the harder line on Greek organizations. If you've sat on a Panhellenic council or watched an IFC try to self-govern, you already know where this is headed.
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Nobody told me that the GPA you earn in your first semester follows you around like a shadow for the next four years. I mean, people say stuff like "work hard" and "don't fall behind" during orientation week, but that's not the same thing as actually understanding what a 2.6 in your first semester costs you two years later. I found out the hard way, and then I found out again when I joined a chapter as a sophomore and watched the same thing play out for a bunch of new members who had no idea what they were walking into.
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Recruitment chairs are great at a lot of things. Giving you a realistic budget breakdown before you sign your bid card is not one of them. I found out what my fraternity actually cost me around three weeks into pledging, when I opened my member portal for the first time and sat with my jaw on the floor staring at a number I had not mentally prepared for. Nobody lied to me exactly. They just... didn't volunteer the full picture.
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There's an opinion piece running in USA Today right now about Cornell University and a student identified only as Jane Doe, and it's the kind of article that should make every Greek life member uncomfortable - not because it's unfair, but because it isn't. The argument is straightforward: Cornell failed her, and Greek life needs to change from within. I'm not here to pick apart the editorial. I'm here to say that the from within part is where most chapters are quietly failing, and they don't even realize it.
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Every recruitment chair I've ever worked with on council has some version of the same complaint going into formal: actives go on autopilot. You spend months training your chapter on values-based recruitment, you write the talking points, you do the mock conversations in chapter meeting, and then the moment a potential new member walks through the door, someone asks where she's from and what she's studying and whether she's looked at any clubs yet. Same rotation. Every round. Every house.
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West Virginia's Panhellenic recruitment just hit its highest participation numbers since 2014. Let that settle for a second - because that's not a small thing. That's a decade of declining or stagnant numbers finally reversing course, and it happened at a school where Greek life has faced the same headwinds every other campus has dealt with. This matters. A lot.
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