let me get this straight-the sorority set up a group on facebook like: fall rush 2006 or are you rushing this fall, and pnms joined the group? wow! i have known of some campuses where the rho gammas or panhellenic hosted a facebook group like that.

that sorority should have suffered some major fines for that and the pre rush party.

Oh my god, facebook makes my blood boil for this reason. Good topic, OP. I'm curious to know how college panhellenics can combat this problem. Because seriously - you cant see what goes on behind the scenes. Sure, you might see a wall post - but you can only make wall posts if you're friends. And even if you make a rule about you cant be friends with freshmen girls, you can STILL talk to them through private messages and dirty rush them that way.

Our panhellenic, still under construction, has decided that the Panhellenic president and VP will have to dissafiliate this year. So how does that work? Do those members have to temporarily remove all their sisters from their friends list so that a PNM cant look at their friends list and say "my my, this person sure does have alot of XYZs on her friends list"....and are pictures of that person with XYZ letters in the background - do they have to be removed?" How does a college panhelleic association force all the members of the sororities to remove pictures of disaffiliated women? How can you enforce that each sorority member HAS to make her profile viewable by only her current friends?

Seriously, it's such crap. There's no way to effectively monitor it. And you cant tell me that all sororities on every campus are going to promise to play fair and not private message girls where the public cant see you've been talking to them.

Is there anybody from GA State on here? Some of the AZDs from there told me that the panhellenic there had some pretty strict rules - I'm curious as to how you guys made it work.

A few comments from one of the old fogies here who rushed before the internet existed...

1) Our whole Panhellenic Council Exec Board and our Recruitment Counselors all disaffiliated, but the school library still had yearbooks in it and if someone was determined, they could find out which sorority they belonged in. They also only had to ask a fraternity guy. It's not that big a deal. The big deal is that the women in those positions are objective and unbiased in their dealings with potential new members. I think the bigger deal you make out of it, the more it becomes a game with the PNMs and they are focused more on that than on recruitment.

2) Telling members of sororities that they cannot befriend any freshman women simply leads to the appearance that sorority women are stuck up snobs. That is why the Green Book says that silence should be the period between Pref and Bid Day. What kind of impression does it make if no sorority women will speak to the freshman?

3) In many cases, dirty rushing occurs because Total is not set appropriately, leaving too many open spaces in chapters. The worst dirty rushing I've seen was on a campus where quota is 7-9 each year but Total is 45 and none of the chapters are at Total. This is a total set up for chapters to encourage women to drop out of recruitment and accept a bid through COR because every chapter KNOWS they will have empty spaces after formal recruitment.

Panhellenic unity and the understanding that if all the chapters are strong, the greek system is strong is tough to achieve, but that should be the focus, rather than worrying about who is friends with who on Facebook.

They told us at our first GIANT recruitment meetings with all of the Gamma Chi groups that all of the sorority members had to set their facebooks to private, and were strongly encouraged to not use them at all during rush. (this was also in fall)

most chapters are (or should) be self policing. executive officers of the chapter i advise, divide up the membership list and look at their assigned members facebook accounts. the chapter is also told to make their accounts private. less than tasteful photos are blocked.exec. makes sure that they do.

i thought it was a rule that panhellenic officers disaffiliated during the recruitment process.

WORD, WORD, WORD, WORD to this whole post. Especially #2. College Panhells, get your act together!!! Silence or disaffiliation is not supposed to last an entire summer or worse, if you have deferred, an entire semester - this is one of the things that gives deferred rush a bad name because PEOPLE GET IT COMPLETELY WRONG. I think the max for disaffiliation is 30 days, and even then you don't HAVE to do it that long.

Honestly, if you can't carry on a conversation with someone without talking about your sorority, that's a problem in itself. You're not very well rounded.

And I don't know where Dee is talking about w/ #3, but I can name two more just off the top of my head. Lots of groups say their nationals tell them not to vote to lower total - if that's the case, tell them exactly what's going on and explain that until the dirty rushing can be curtailed, NO ONE is going to grow and it's going to make all the sororities look bad. Not to mention the money wasted on formal rush parties that yield 2.5 new members...

My sister was VP the first year facebook was around and instead of removing all her friends and whatnot, she just changed her name to something completely random and removed her pictures. She had to let everyone know she did this so we all didn't think we had a random friend, but it also prevented PNMs from knowing which sorority she was in without completely removing all her info and friends.

When I was a Recruitment Counselor, we were disaffiliated over the summer which included the highest settings of privacy on facebook - meaning no one could search for us, or befriend us. We also removed any reference to affiliation in our profiles, but kept our friends. No active was allowed to befriend an incoming freshman during disaffiliation and if they were friends beforehand (on facebook) then walls were monitored. Basically, we don't have a huge problem with dirty rushing (with a few exceptions) and while facebook might make it easier to do so, we hope that the majority of the women participating are adult enough to follow the rules. So it works pretty well for us.

Don't you only have like 6 girls in your sorority? Hypothetically speaking, it would be very possible for a Gamma Phi to be friends with every AXiD in that case.

On the topic of number 3... I heard something that I was just appalled at this past week. One of my co-workers is greek and at her school they have chapters that will approach girls after they pledge other groups and will get them to drop that group... telling them that they will be XYZ next year. WHAT THE CR%%%%P!

That is dirty rushing at its worst... if you weren't good enough the first year for them, why would you want to take a chance on them every again.

As to the Gamma Chis or whatever... having just had Spring Recruitment... ours took their letters off and groups off and tried to diversify their friends. They didn't make a big deal of being a Gamma Chi, that way the freshman didn't get curious last fall. They disaffliate around Homecoming every year, so about 2 months. The PNMs can still figure out who they are and what not... it really is so that the GX can mentally get away from their letters and start to think more about just getting the girls to go greek in the Spring. Since recruitment starts the Wednesday after classes start, they aren't dissaffilated for too long.

...in a perfect world....

Actually, we have 10 actives. They have 11. And yes, while thats possible, they've been on campus for 26(?) years and we've been on for 3. They have MUCH more alumnae than we do, who still participate on facebook. I was speaking more generally for larger campuses... I can imagine a campus where total is in the 80s or more, and you have all (or most) of your sisters as friends, and only a handful of girls from other sororities on your friends list. I think I only have 3 or 4 of them on my list. Just the onesI am actually friends with - I'm not a friends number booster kinda person. Hah.

If there are only 21 girls in both sororities at your school, I'm assuming it would be pretty easy to figure out who the rho chi/rho gam/gamma chi/whatever the new PC for it term now is for your sorority.

Maybe so. PNMs arent stupid, most of them will probably figure it out on a campus with only 2 sororities. But the point of dissafiliated panhellenic officers is not to recruit for their organization, but rather to encourage girls to come to recruitment period. It's panhellenic's job to get girls in the door. It's the individual's sororities job to convince them to join that sorority.

I know that OUR panhellenic officer has been taught very well how to be unbiased all around, and will continue to work with the greek advisor to get panhellenic more well established the way it is meant to be. We told her that during the disaffiliation time period, that she cant act any more friendly with us than she would with another sorority member. That she wasnt allowed to show favoritism towards us, that if a PNM confides in her that she really likes one sorority over the other thats she's supposed to be excited and encouraging the whole way. She knows she's not allowed to recruit for AZD. She's supposed to recruit for greek life.

What makes you think that the other sorority's panhellenic officer hasn't?