It's a local rule. We weren't supposed to be drinking in our letters at all on my campus. But there's nothing 'wrong' with it.

I remember going up to a (newly initiated) sister of XYZ at a party right before break and saying "NICE CREST." She looked soooooooo scared. Oh the LOLZ memories.

We are not allowed to drink or smoke cigarettes in anything that identifies us as Greek at my chapter. No letters, crest, lavaliers, the words "alpha delta pi" spelled out, organization nicknames, ANYTHING. Personally, I like it this way, especially around Recruitment.

Yes, Frat guys get to do it, but they get to do a lot of things that we don't. It's not a big deal to me, Fraternities and Sororities are very different, and thank goodness!

I do think that it's silly that you can't even cook with wine in the house, or have a hard cider on movie night, but it's either all or nothing, the rules would be too hard to enforce if drinking was okay "sometimes".

Living in the house for soph--sr year was a privilege I now appreciate more than I did then. There are plenty of other places to drink--that is a non-issue for me. And how nice was it to hang out in pjs and not have to worry about men?
My chapter did a study about the cost of living in vs. apt living and it was cheaper to live in the house (IF you ate many of your meals at the house--since food costs are included in housebill). Why the rush to clean your own toilet and hassle with the one deadbeat roommie who won't pay her share of the cable bill?

I was thinking about when the "not in letters" trend started and I think it was a combination of two things. First, again, risk management insurance/policies. It's pretty hard to deny liability if someone was wearing their letters while doing it. The second big thing was the popularity of the Internet and World Wide Web when suddenly, pictures of this stuff were being broadcast for the world to see. It was one thing to have Suzy Sorority acting a fool among her peers when nobody else ever heard about it or saw it. Once we had easy ways to post pictures of her doing those things on the Intarwebz.. whole new ballgame.

The dry house stuff though.. that goes back way before my time. The more I think about that, the more I think it probably had to do with not wanting big parties at sorority houses because of damage to the house, etc.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:z...7099042_rs.jpg
vs.
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:p...de-toronto.jpg
?