Not sure. The grand statement "chapters will not accept letters or recs anymore" will bite their butts harder than the legacy policy will, because if chapters want to keep inviting certain legacies back, they will. The statement loftily says that chapters may do that, lol, like they weren't going to.

These recs did not keep unknown girls out, rather they got them in by making them known. Do you know how hard it is to get a girl noticed in UGa recruitment? I've had all these fabulous rural students who had everything going for them--except nobody knew them. Kiss of death in Athens.

By refusing to take recs, Pi Phi, and other groups, also seem to be urging chapters to pledge women nobody knows. That's a great way to pledge someone who'll be the one to make your chapter go viral because she makes a drunk or naked or racist video. If people didn't want recommendations, they wouldn't use Consumer Reports or other ratings on various sites.

So a PNM is cute and has a 4.0? Let's pledge her, without any knowledge of her character! Let's turn down letters that tell about what she's like! Let's go into this blind and shoot ourselves in the foot!

All of this! What about the girl that every adult knows cheated on her SATs but that's not exactly something that shows up on the Panhellenic form? Or is cute and smart but a total jackhole to people she thinks are beneath her?

Sometimes these are the exact people that recommendation letters serve to benefit though so I’m not sure that’s a strong enough argument for me to want to defend them.

LOL - Fair enough, but I do think there are esoteric reasons for a recommendation (or non-recommendation).

By esoteric, you mean something in the Ritual of a particular GLO?

My exact thoughts.

AND this is on top of the almost instant Initiation.

If they really, truly want to do away with recs but know the women they extend bids to, one solution would be Spring Recruitment with several pre-Recruitment gatherings in the first semester. But, Lolol, right?

No, more like things that aren't on the resume/panhellenic form (which will only include stats/numbers) that will be the only information a Pi Phi chapter would be allowed to review if they're not allowed any sort of outside input. Things like "she's a drunk", "I watched her help a homeless man cross the street without anyone knowing she was doing it", "She backed into a parked car and and drove away without leaving a note". Character traits that can't be seen in an application that's full of grade stats and activities.

You know that most chapters are going to take to their phones to learn inside stuff about the PNMs, so that's another reason that banning recs is useless. True example: a woman from another sorority called me and said that "Annie Smith", a PNM, had made it to the third parties of my sorority and she thought I'd like to know that Annie had a big photo of herself on social media peeing on the main street of our town on New Years Eve. I checked and astonishingly, it was still there. I called the chapter's recruitment chair and told her to check it out and let the chapter vote. The girl was gone from our parties after that and didn't even make it a semester at the college. We could have had this real gem and all the problems that went with her in our new member class...because there had been no rec, negative or positive.

Someone from my sorority tried to feed me a story that they were getting rid of recs to even the playing field. Are you kidding? A) This will cause chapters to be even more insistent about only pledging girls that someone knows, and B) Big chapters don't have enough time to find out great things about an unknown girl--how many PNMs does Bama have every year? Nor do they have time to find out if a girl is a chapter-destroying drama queen or someone who will break every rule of the chapter within 2 weeks.

I could go on for hours about how this will negatively affect sororities and PNMs.

What if they opened up the recommendation process to non-members. Like, if a woman doesn't know anyone who is greek or has no family members who are, they could have their High School teachers/pastor/Principal/whomever write the rec for them. If the objective is to even the playing field for women who aren't already plugged into the system, this would seem to address that and still allow the chapter to learn something about the PNMs. Or even if say she only knows someone in XYZ sorority, let that recommendation be accepted by everyone.

A problem there might be that non-members can write a positive rec about a terrible girl (maybe due to pressure from a relative or neighbor?) with no problems to them if the girl pledges and wrecks the chapter.

We still got positive recs for terrible women from members. The person writing the rec only knew what the woman presented, and didn't know that underneath she was a verbally abusive, manipulative narcissist. Or didn't know that the woman did a pretty good job of hiding her cocaine habit...until she didn't. Or that another was dealing ecstasy under the table. On the surface, especially to alums, these women would look great...but not once you dug deeper. Some of them we may not have offered bids to without the positive recs, but all of them became standards nightmares.

Recommendation letters are a sticky thing, with no right answer, and not universally helpful (or unhelpful - I no rec'd my brother's cheating, controlling ex with zero regrets over it - and then she ended up expelled from the university in her 2nd semester)

Exactly. It could go either way. Because many of these women are getting recs to simply check a checkbox. We actually encourage it, telling them to tap into their local panhellenic group or to ask anyone and everyone they've ever known in their entire lives if they are a sorority member or know a sorority member who can get them a rec. So perhaps they got their seventh grade English teacher who's an ABC to write them a rec, but hey, that PNM has changed quite a bit since seventh grade. And when considering some young women aim to have two recs to every sorority at schools with 15+ chapters, it stands to reason that some of those are of the "I got my friend's stepsister's aunt to write this" variety.

Oh, I realize that. Where they're valuable is if we're trying to find out about unknown girls, like those from small schools, or if we're trying to find out about girls who would rip up a chapter.

I was asked to write several recs who needed them at the last minute for an SEC school. National would send me their contact into since I was the President of our local AC. I met each of the women at a Starbucks and talked to them, asked questions based of their rsume. When I wrote the final copy of the rec, I made sure that the chapter knew that I was basing my remarks on a 10 minute conversation and would not guarantee the veracity of what they had to say. One girl joined a chapter that was not from my sorority and the others never let me know where or if they ended up somewhere. Recs are useless in my opinion when they are written by some random someone who has no real information on the PNM.

DaffyKD