emb021,

It's great that your org hasn't crossed those negative lines...but a successful program isn't all about the bad things you are NOT doing, but also has to be about the postive things you ARE doing.

Any chapter can create a program that doesn't do x, y, or z that has been considered hazing or negative...but a program like that will spend to much time and energy watching out for what not to do and forget to create new ideas that the can do that serve to instil a, b, or c in new members that we all agree is necessary to their development in the organization and its future.

NO is only half of the situation...what are somethings that we can say YES to that help us to create better "new member" or "pledge programs"?

Understood.

In my org, we have our national pledging standards. It sets down the 20 elements that should be part of any pledge program to make it a worthwhile and positive experience (and explains the importance of them). I can't speak for other organizations, but am sure many have done something similiar.

The main point of my posting was to point out what I feel to be a poor comparision chart between good/bad practices in pledge/pnm programs, which is based on some faulty premises. While I think most will agree that hazing is bad, and many of these negative practices need to end, I think too often some have gone overboard and now banned things that did have a positive and worthwhile value.

Please understand also, that APO does not have selective membership in the way that NIC and NPC groups do. Anyone can pursue membership, but not everyone will be successful in that pursuit...any more than everyone who goes through rush recieves a bid. Ergo, we need to determine fitness for membership in some way.

We also have a "What makes New Member Education successful" That the New Member Educator follows. After looking at that chart, I can honestly say (as New Member Educator) That maybe the only thing that would fall under the right column is that Pledge class unity is stressed, through things like a retreat, etc... but Chapter unity is also stressed.

Excellent point.

Education. It seems to many times forgoten.:(

Unity is what Brother/Sisterhood Hopefully are all about.:)

Therein lies the reason that people Join Certain GLOs. They want to be part of something that will make them belong.

See, I always just thought of "pledging" as what goes on during the actual pledging ceremony, where you officially become a new member of your organization. We were encouraged not to say, "I'm pledging AZD," but rather to say, "I am an AZD new member" (though we often slipped and said "AZD pledge" to clarify that while we had joined and pledged during the ceremony, we were not initiated yet).

And since NPC went all PC on everyone, I always heard about my "new member period," not my "pledgeship." It was stressed to us that while we might not yet be initiated, we were becoming sisters with the women of the chapter and learning about what set Alpha Xi Delta apart from other sororities. It's still kind of a hold-over that girls don't really refer to themselves as "sisters" until initiation, just to keep things clear. We did refer to our NM class as our pledge class and our pledge sisters, but if we were somewhere with a group of NMs and initiates, we usually just let them call themselves sisters and called ourselves NMs/pledges.

It's kind of confusing when you've got girls that have heard the "old" terms like rush, pledges, etc. (like myself) all their lives and then come to school and the "new"ones are used (not to mention the girls that come through practically expecting to be hazed! Good Lord, I must have told a hundred girls last fall that no, we do not haze!), plus a fraternity system that still hasn't made a cohesive effort to change their terminology to something more similar. Even though the signs up for fraternity recruitment advertise "formal fraternity recruitment," no fraternity guy (except those on IFC) calls it anything but rush, and the guys will still call themselves pledges. It's almost like most of the fraternity guys I know are making an effort not to change their way of thinking about it.

Why on earth should they?

Just because NPC does something, doesn't mean NIC, NPHC or any of the other conferences have to follow suit.

I understand where bekibug is coming from...the terminology on GC is really crazy for me.

"Pledge/Pledging/Pledge Class/Pledgeship"- all used for the 6week or 8 week process of becoming a...
"new member"- someone who has not celebrated 1 full year of initiation. To me, "new member education" is the real-life learning that takes place when you're an initiated member. It's a lot of calling, interviewing, and asking questions of older sisters and alums on how to do x, y, and z successfuly. You're being "fully" educated in stuff that you couldn't possibly have learned during your pledgeship...the stuff that requires that you *do* things with your appointed office.

Really, the semantics of things bother me sometimes. The chart makes it sound as if they are comparing two separate things, but in my eyes, it's the same *process*, just taken horribly awry. "New Member Education" can be hazing just as well as "Pledging" can be non hazing. It's a label, not a definition. As we say in communication theory...words don't have meaning, people assign meaning to words".

Recruitment has been part of fraternity jargon well before the NPC switched from rush to recruitment. As such, most fraternities (chapters) use both terms interchangeably.

The NIC did proposed to change the terminology exclusively from rush to recruitment a few years back. As such, IFCs are moving toward the use of recruitment exclusively. My guess is that chapters, and perhaps even some/many/most (inter)national HQs, will continue to use both terms.

Here is a typical example where both rush and recruitment are used. From the web site of the Lambda Lambda Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity at The University of Kentucky. (With rush coming up, have to get that plug in somehow!)

From the side menu, if you click Recruitment you open a dialog box that offers Fall Rush 2005 as an option. If you select that, the Fall 2005 Rush Information section opens with the following.

ETA: As far as I can tell, the term *pledge* is still used by many fraternities as well.

Ditto. :D

see above post

I totally agree

LXA I beleive was the first to outlaw "Pledges" and used the term "New Associates". We also were the first to outlaw Hazing.

But, the problem is that some Chapters were still under the old stereotype of using Pledge and Hazing.

For PC the names were changed to make Greeks Not Look so bad. There is also usage when it comes to Insurance Rates which really didnt make a bit of difference.

So, I guess We are at about the same place we were some years ago.:(