There's a headline making the rounds from Student Life at Washington University in St. Louis, and it's framing fraternity expansion as some kind of red flag - a sign that the Abolish Greek Life movement is losing ground and that's somehow alarming. I've read it a few times now. And I get what the writers are going for. But I think they're reading the situation backwards.
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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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Many of the universities across the country hold their formal recruitment during the fall semester. There are schools, however, that wait until the spring semester to hold their formal recruitment (also call deferred recruitment). Some of the sororities at these deferred recruitment schools shouldn’t by any means be overshadowed by the fall recruitment season. Here are 5 sororities at these schools that are a must-rush this spring semester....
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Sororities are great at many things: hosting campus wide events, coming up with new and interesting t shirt ideas, and of course blowing glitter at cameras. However, the one thing that sororities do best is expand. They do this through recruitment, snapping up eager new freshman, promising and often delivering an amazing and friend-filled college experience. However, sororities also expand in other, more daring ways—one of which is colonizing new chapters. Here are 7 new chapters of 2016 who are poised to do great things....
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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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There's something about the University of Alabama's sorority recruitment that just hits different from anywhere else in the country. Every single year, without fail, you see the stories pop up - thousands of potential new members, houses that look like wedding venues, and a process so organized it could make a logistics company jealous. WVUA 23 is reporting that Alabama sororities are gearing up for another recruitment cycle, and honestly, watching this from the outside as an IFC guy, I have a lot of thoughts.
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I've sat through more Panhellenic council meetings than I can count, and if there's one thing I can tell you with full confidence, it's that the current sorority recruitment model is held together with duct tape and tradition. Not good tradition either. The kind of tradition that exists because nobody wanted to be the person who raised their hand and said this isn't working anymore.
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Everyone tells pledges the same thing: work hard, show up, be humble. And that advice isn't wrong exactly - it's just incomplete. Because there's a version of "being humble" that slowly turns you into someone who doesn't push back on anything, agrees with everyone, and spends an entire semester shrinking. That version doesn't make you a good pledge. It makes you invisible. And chapters don't actually respect invisible people.
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So apparently you can hire someone to coach you through sorority recruitment. Not a therapist, not a guidance counselor, not your mom who went through it herself decades ago - an actual paid coach whose whole job is to help you get into a sorority. The Clarion-Ledger ran a piece on this recently, specifically about Mississippi, where recruitment anxiety has gotten so intense that a cottage industry of rush coaches has popped up to meet the demand. And my first reaction was to laugh. My second reaction was to think about it for five minutes and realize this was probably inevitable.<
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Everyone outside Greek life has some version of what they think chapter meetings look like. Robes, candles, secret handshakes, maybe someone getting yelled at. And yeah, I get why people think that. The closed-door thing breeds speculation. But after sitting through three years of weekly meetings as an active and watching brothers go from nervous pledges to chapter officers, I can tell you the reality is messier, more human, and honestly more meaningful than whatever anyone's imagining from the outside.
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