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?