I hope that bodes well for all the houses! I know my daughter is ready to go!

Thanks hon! I'm pretty new to the Midwest. I was used to West Coast

Many years ago, someone published an editorial like this in the Daily Illini. The Greeks subsequently put the DI out of business, forcing the University to step in and fund it. The OU Daily's editors would be wise to watch it.

SMH. I'm so sure someone would have made that comment to her during recruitment. Whatevs. Yes, our NSU and OU chapters are very different. I'm sorry she didn't find a place at the AOII chapter at OU. If she had gotten initiated at NSU, she could have just transferred. Odd that they didn't initiate her.

agreed! we definitely don't have the whole story on this one! i also find it fascinating that all the chapter but AOII dropped her after the first round, yet she focuses on AOII.

and you get suggestions for appropriate attire and choose to wear combat boots? puh-lease!

This whole thing (both the other article and this one) just makes me very sad for the OU Greek Community.

Yea, I call bull on this article. She participated in formal recruitment in the fall, pledged AOPi, but by the fall of next year, had still not initiated? We know it wasn't a grade issue...hmmmm. Somethin' ain't right here, and it may be the author.

Of course, she IS right about one thing... everyone in sororities in the large Oklahoma schools is blonde and tan. No brunettes allowed. That's why I dyed my own hair, so I could pledge at OSU. We did allow light brown at Ok State, because we were a landgrant school, but that was as far as we were willing to bend.

It sounds like they didn't initiate her because they knew she was transferring and didn't want her to be stuck at a chapter she may have not liked or wanted to affiliate into, and spend the rest of her college years unhappy. Which is an absolutely exceptionally nice and mature thing for them to do. I mean - they lost a person from their year's quota. They could have just said "hey, go ahead and initiate!" and what happened after she transferred was her problem. I know that your policy might be that you *can* transfer directly into the chapter, but I'm guessing they've had enough interaction with the OU chapter to know some of them wouldn't have fit in well there, either.

I would hope any sorority chapter who had a NM who realized she was in that position (imminent transfer) would give her the same option and consideration.

Still, the timing is weird...If it's fall recruitment and a six-week NM period, would you know you were transferring in October of the previous year?

I thought she was still in HS when she "pledged" the NSU group? So she may not have pledged at all, but rather been taken on as a kind of mascot?

I call shenanigans - a family member of mine likes to say she "Didn't initiate because she didn't like the way the chapter had treated her" when in fact - she didn't make her grades and could not have initiated even had she wanted to. I am always suspicious of excuses for not initiating.

^^ This is what I think. She couldn't be a full-time college student if she was still a full-time high school student, right?

That's what I think. I'm glad she had a good experience at our chapter. Apparently it set her up with expectations at the next school. I hope she finds peace with this time in her life.

Ugh. I hope that if one Greek circulated something nasty about the newspaper, the newspaper wouldn't try to get the chapter shut down. If it did, people would rightly judge the newspaper for pursuing a vendetta based on one person's opinion.

Here's the difference - a newspaper has to maintain an audience for its product. If it doesn't, it will go out of business. Any newspaper which alienates a major portion of its readership brings about its own difficulties. It isn't an individual - it is a business (even on the college level) and it needs to make its editorial choices based on that. That doesn't mean it shouldn't run individual opinion pieces - I am a newspaper columnist for a commercial paper and my raison d'etre is putting forth my opinon - but it should try to address both sides of purely subjective topics. If you are going to have an article slamming the sorority system it would behoove you to get another viewpoint in there, or understand you may be undermining your business.

At the time, you had to subscribe to the DI, on paper. More than 75% of the subscriptions went to Greek Houses. Um, duh?

Isn't this true of a Greek system, and an individual chapter, as well? Hundreds of chapters have gone under due to unpopularity with their target audience. It behooves them just as much to be careful how the actions of one member may alienate another group of students.

At any rate, I wasn't arguing that the paper shouldn't have seen it coming, nor that the Greeks at UIUC didn't have a right to boycott the paper if they wanted to. I'm arguing that if they exercised that right based on one editorial, that was an ugly decision and reflects poorly on the system.

Oh, is this one of those threads where you, the wise non-Greek, tell Greeks what we should or should not have done?

No - it is not true of the Greek system. "Hundreds of chapters" have not gone under because of the actions of ONE member. A few dozen have lost charters because of the stupid actions of members which had legal/moral consequences. Other chapters have gone under due to campus culture, and some have because of an inability to effectively recruit which you may call "unpopularity". But to make an analogy between a newspaper's need to not tick off its readership and the fact that a chapter might not be popular with every possible pnm is ridiculous. Chapters' popularity is much more nuanced than the situation with an overtly hostile editorial.

"Reflects poorly on the system"? Really? Choosing not to support a business which is obviously biased against you reflects poorly on you?

HYPERBOLE IS THE BEST THING EVER!

Both of these editorials could have been edited in a way that would have made them less offensive. Leaving out the names of the "Bible beating" etc sororities in the first editorial, for one. It was completely unnecessary for those groups to be named. It did NOTHING other than upset women who should be happy and enjoying their new sisters.

This might seem random and a bit out of line as I am not a Greek (yet, hopefully), but it's articles like these that really screw with future PNM's. It gets wrong ideas in our heads about which sororities are "bad".

The actions of GLO members alienate people all the time. Just the idea of exclusive groups winds a lot of people up, with no particular actions ever required. I think the best that most of us can hope for is that the positive things that GLO members do outweighs the negative.

It's been my experience that the students drawn to campus papers seem to enjoy reporting on the foibles of the Greek system, and with reporting on more serious GLO issues, a sense of schadenfreude can creep in to the coverage. Once that adversarial dynamic gets started, I'm not sure why Greeks would have much interest in supporting the paper.

And on some level, this kind of issue might be one of the most important for a young journalist to face. How do you effectively cover misdeeds of the affluent or powerful* without alienating the people who keep you in business?

*Greeks didn't have that much influence the general campus community at my school at the time I attended, and never could have taken down the Red and Black, but if a Greek boycott put the paper out of business, that's a pretty influential group.

A more neutral/positive look at recruitment by a campus newspaper:

Sorority Recruitment has Record Numbers (TCU Daily Skiff)

I am confused by the writer's comments about the "optional parties." I think that she misunderstood the idea of having extra parties added to the day to spread out the number of PNMs in each one.

Much better article.

What is "pre-major"? Is that the new PC term for "undeclared"?

I agree, I think the writer was confused about the optional parties, but then the chapter president used the same term in her quote? That's where I got further confused...

Yes, pre-major is TCU's term for undecided, and it dates back to at least 1991.

I noted the president used the term too, but was wondering if the writer mixed up the quote? That would then have led to her mixed up explantion in the article? Who knows?

Could you imagine the chaos if you had open parties after that whole day? You'd never get the girls outta there! I've got nightmare visions going through my head just thinking of how that might go.

Pre-major is an undeclared major usually within a defined college or program. Someone could be pre-major health professions or pre-major College of Communications if they were accepted into that college but had not selected a specific program.

Schools do this because students change their majors a lot the first two years, and a lot of majors within a college might have the same course requirements at least for the freshman year. The college can have a counselor advise freshmen and then parcel them out to advising by faculty once they have a better idea of what they want to do.

Gotcha...just sounds like the writer left out a word (ie: was supposed to be "Pre-Med" or something).

I'm guessing that TCU Panhellenic had some "optional" time slots for parties in case they needed them due to large numbers. They ended up needing them, so that's probably what she's referring to & it just came out wrong. I know other schools do that "hold this time slot" plan, so that's why I'm guessing that. Either that, or she was flat-out misquoted.

This seems like a great advising model.

Students usually end up with an adviser-change with each major-change. Depending on the number of changes a student goes through, that could lead to seriously inconsistent and, at times, non-existent advising. With the system you've described, students receive consistent counseling with smooth transitions between the two advisers.

/random advising tangent

Oh, OU Daily. You could be so much more.

So the houses at OU are beautiful. The recruitment is competitive. The women in each and every house are A-MA-ZING.

Again, I think it comes down to a lack of editing, and perhaps a lack of creating a narrative that would be appealing to a wider audience. It didn't have to be "sorority life sucks, here's why you shouldn't do it" it could be a "I had this expectation, and it didn't come to life, so this is how I handled it" type of article.

Le sigh.

There are a lot of ways to tell the story of recruitment from both sides that would be neither a smear piece nor unicorns pooping rainbows. Frankly I think the part about wardrobe check might make some girls happy to know these beautiful perfect girls don't just show up one day looking like that automatically. It's all in the way you tell it. And we all know Spanx are our friend so get over yourself if you think it's appalling to suggest a smoother look is more attractive. If they'd only been invented when I was in college...

Oh, my little recruitment bit:

Otterbein has officially swapped to semesters (whoa). And this means that recruitment will be FIRST SEMESTER. Double WHOA. I wonder how it will work out, I'm especially curious about how it will impact my own chapter.

Nope. It's one where we're talking about a campus-wide conflict and the external appearance (ugliness, to my eyes) of an apparent Greek action. The chapters may well have been pursuing a wise course of action for their own best interests -- I didn't and wouldn't comment on that, because I can't know. But non-Greeks are in fact well qualified to describe what the action looks like from the outside.

Of course, you don't have to care about anyone else's perception, least of all mine. I'm just saying that the public is in a good position to call 'em like we see 'em when it comes to what GLOs do in public.

The Daily Illini wrote about the boycott recently, describing it as temporary, based on pulling ads rather than subscriptions, and saying that the Greek councils told the DI that the one obnoxious article wasn't the cause for the boycott. So it seems like different players in the story have different recollections of what happened. This DI version actually casts a more flattering light on the Greeks:

http://www.dailyillini.com/index.php..._greek_system#

Long time no GC!
 

It's been ages since I've logged in here, and I'm happy to see so many familiar user names!

My second cousin (first cousin's daughter) starts recruitment today at UC Berkeley. She's the closest thing I'll ever have to a legacy, and though I'm hoping she'll find a home that she loves, regardless of the letters, I'm still fantasizing about planning a trip to California for her initiation. Is that wrong? :p

Definitely not! :D

Telling her not to pledge that other loser house, THAT'S wrong.

Thanks for the reassurance! ;)

I just went and re-read my retro-recruitment thread -- can't believe how long ago it was that I wrote that. And what a coincidence that a current thread is using movies from the 80s as code names too!

Why don't you tell us what the Greeks should do when the DI publishes an editorial filled with untrue and nasty depictions?

(the link you posted actually does not mention the incident to which I am referring)

I'm going to be the substitute for honeychile here and point out that a first cousin's child is your first cousin once removed.

Your parent's cousin's child is of course your second cousin.