Question About Old NPC Rules
 

Hi,

I'm part of a chapter which is only an associate member of my school's Panhellenic council. We've been told we can never be a full member/participate in formal recruitment (on our campus, let's not even consider national level here) because we double discriminate (meaning, we have major requirements for girls, other ones I know have religious requirements). Recently, I learned that Theta Phi Alpha, when it joined NPC, only allowed Catholic women. Does anyone know if Theta Phi Alpha was allowed to participate in formal recruitment before then? If so, did NPC not have the no double-discrimination rule back then? Does this rule even exist today?

Thank you! I'd be curious to see what any of you come up with.

Are you in a NPC group?

What are your requirements?

If the majority of women going through formal rush are not going to meet them, it would be a waste of both your and their time for your group to participate in the whole of formal rush. What's in or not in the rule books has very little to do with it.

I'm assuming she is in a group such as Alpha Delta Chi or Alpha Omega Epsilon (examples of religious/major requirements). At my campus the associate groups came to kickoff, but recruited separately after formal recruitment.

As far as TPA goes, I'm not sure what year you're basing the info on, but I believe almost all of the groups had religion restrictions at some point in their history (except for maybe DPhiE), though that has since fallen out of practice (essentially). If you're looking at info from the early 1900s or possibly even later, you have to remember it was a different time back then.

When I attended a Phi Sigma Simga extension presentation, the reps explained that their organization was founded by a group of women who would normally have had to rush separately due to their different religions. This is obviously not the case with NPC groups today. I believe Alpha Epsilon Phi and Sigma Delta Tau are the only ones which currently maintain an active religious identity (correct me if I'm wrong) although they still accept members of all religions. Based on your situation and like others have said, I wouldn't waste time participating fully in formal recruitment with NPC groups if the majority of PNMs are automatically ineligible for membership in your sorority.

If you are not an NPC group, NPC rules don't apply to you in any way. Some college panhellenics allow non-NPC groups to participate in recruitment in one way or another, and sometimes that is mandated by a greek life office, but there are pros and cons both for your group and the NPC chapters. Are you trying to participate like a full member? Or just trying to do an info session at some point?

Thank you for your responses! I know right when NPC was founded many sororities had religious restrictions, but Theta Phi Alpha didn't join NPC until the 50s and the restriction wasn't raised until the 60s. I was more wondering when NPC installed the double discrimination rule and where it is stated to fact-check our procedure. I expect the information we were told is correct, so I'm not really trying to change anything, but I do want to make sure this is the case. You're all right, in the case of major restriction (and religious, although that's less of an divisive factor at some schools) going through formal recruitment where many girls would be automatically cut doesn't really make sense. I was just surprised when I heard this about Theta Phi Alpha in relatively recent history.

Thank you!

Historically, recruitment was not always run the way it is today, with everyone attending the first round then the pool for each chapter getting narrowed in each invitation round after that. At many schools, parties were invitation-only from the start, with the rushee sending regrets if she had more invites than she could accept. Those who did not 'qualify' for membership due to a religious restriction would generally not receive an invitation at all to those sororities from the very start.

There are still campuses where the historically Jewish sororities maintain that identity with their membership even though at the national level they maintain open membership policies. In the situations I am aware of where this is the case, those chapters either participate in all rounds but winnow their invite list down dramatically by the first invitational round, or do not participate in recruitment at all (except possibly an infomational session during the first round or pre-recruitment tabling) then do informal after recruitment has ended. I also believe there might be some alternative membership sororities that are not religiously-based who participate at a similar level in formal recruitments. Perhaps the 4H sorority at Illinois?

As others have mentioned, it's a waste of time for both your members and the PNMs at your school for your organization to fully participate in recruitment. Perhaps your Greek Life office would be amenable to an information session or adding a page about you in the recruitment guide if they publish one?

What exactly do you mean by double discriminate?

No, 4H members are selected outside of the formal recruitment process, though they do have a full vote in the CPH for historical reasons.

Gender + something else.

Actually, NPC groups are double discriminating nowadays, because you have to be female, and a full time student. There are many other campus organizations that require neither.

And duhhhhh, I just realized that "major requirements" means what major they're in, not major as in enormous.

All that is true, and I don't deny that formal recruitment when you can only take 1/3 of the PNMs anyway is silly. Potentially they would be willing to help promote us with a page in a recruitment guide, and I guess that's a conversation for another thread, but I'm actually interested in the history: when did NPC establish the rule that no nationally-/offically-double discriminatory (let's just call it that and consider being female and fulltime to be a single requirement since it's the standard now) organization can participate in formal recruitment? I would have thought it would have been earlier than the 1960s, but I guess not.

Thank you!

^^^ why not contact NPC directly and ask? Go straight to the source.

Goat Brothers and Loose Change were books about, respectively, brothers of a fraternity and sisters of a Jewish sorority at Berkeley in the early 1960s. It's mentioned that only 3 sororities on campus accept Jewish women, and that there are 4 fraternities that still have "racial or creedal restrictions. "

But in answer to your question, I don't think there actually is such a rule passed by the NPC - that would be intruding on membership selection which is not what NPC is for. About the only things they agreed on were that members have to be female students of the college where the chapter is designated to exist. The sororities themselves are the ones who removed the religious clauses, probably because they realized it was hindering their progress. I think this no double discrimination business is solely a creation of your school.

I think the most telling statement in the Unanimous Agreements is the following

II Jurisdiction of Panhellenic Associations
...
1. College Panhellenic Associations ...
C. A College Panhellenic Council shall take no action that infringes on the sovereignty, rights or privileges of the individual NPC fraternities.

To me that means that should an NPC wish to have (not saying that they do or would) language that "double discriminates" in the membership selection criteria, that's their business and will not be regulated by NPC or by the CPC.

The only discrimination language in the Manual of Information is that which discusses remaining single sex organizations and Title IX.

Perhaps if you explained what you're trying to accomplish, we could give you a better answer.

Actually, this is a very good idea. I believe that the Alabama recruitment guide gives a two page spread to both Alpha Delta Chi and Sigma Delta Tau, neither of which participates in formal recruitment. I wouldn't see why the Panhellenic recruitment information couldn't include your chapter information and mention that you hold recruitment separately. Contact your school's Panhellenic and see if this is possible.

At Illinois, some of the non-NPC groups had info sessions during open houses. So, there were 20 chapters, but 23 rounds, and the last three rounds were info sessions for six chapters (they split them up) in rooms in the union. But that's a LOT of time to put into talking to women who are probably pretty set on NPC.

Theta Phi Alpha was the *last* of the NPC members to discriminate. (On non-Catholic campuses they only took Catholic Women). This was removed in 1968.

I'm not familiar with any NPC sororities that discriminated by Major.

You need to go way, way back (to the 1870-1900 years).

In 1963 AEPhi, DPhiE and SDT all had their own recruitments at Alabama. Everyone would go to all the houses on the first day and then all the Jewish women would go only to those 3 houses for the remainder of recruitment. I don't know when that changed but would imagine by 1970 or so

FYP.

Also, does that mean if a non-Catholic was attending a Catholic college, they could join?

How many officially discriminated? I know it wasn't uncommon among the fraternities, and many of them only removed discriminatory clauses within the last 50-75 years.

Did a Jewish woman have the option to go through "regular" recruitment at that time, or was that discouraged? Or was it something that just had never been done? Do you know of any Jewish women who may have attempted to go through "regular" rush and were/were not successful?

Only Catholic women were considered for membership, regardless of the college's religious affiliation.

Not sure in which way you fixed my post. Please explain further.

Theta Phi Alpha had a time where due to the President of Creighton University's insistence they allowed non-Catholic women at Catholic Universities and only Catholic women at non-Catholic Universities. So all women at Creighton and only Catholics at U of Michigan. This ended in 1968. I'm working from the Theta Phi Alpha history book here.

TPA may have been the last to have something in their policies but I'm sure there were chapters out there where it was an unwritten rule that this or that religion was not welcome long after that.

She added the word "officially," meaning that discrimination in many organizations went on past the point where official clauses were removed. (I know that a former poster here talked about a family friend who was African-American and pledged an organization in the early '70s where there was pressure from nationals to depledge her, for example.) For some organizations, there's a difference between the years when organizations removed their discriminatory clauses and the years where the national board actually stopped trying to enforce it.

I've been trying to find this information for years, and it's surprisingly hard to dig up unless you've got access to all the official documents at headquarters. I know that in the book Bound by a Mighty Vow, the author said that Theta didn't have any written policies (but of course they had unwritten ones). She also cited a 1926 survey of the 17 NPC members stated that 5 of them had official Protestants-only policies. She even mentions that a few chapters kept non-Christians to a percentage of the chapter or even an actual number limit! And information on which organizations had official race-related discrimination policies is even harder to find.

I think a lot of the sororities have refused to confess their previous whites-only/Protestants-only policies out of embarrassment. And they should be embarrassed about it--but I don't think there's any reason why they should be more embarrassed than the organizations who didn't have written policies but did have unwritten ones. (Which, uh, is basically all of them.) Nobody's hands are clean in this--even the historically Jewish groups tended to discriminate against less assimilated, more "foreign" Jewish girls. I don't think that the existence of official policies signifies much--I'm just interested in it from the standpoint of historical curiosity. I wish the groups would put it out there.

I would guess that many organizations don't reveal past membership criteria because, even if it is in the past, it is still membership selection information. This would have been shared only with initiated sisters then, and would most likely only be shared with initiates now.

No, not at that time. Only the Jewish women went thru theirs and none went thru ours. I don't know if it was a written rule. It's just the way it happened - at least while I was there in the mid 60's...

Typically, the German Jews thought they were better than the Eastern European Jews. On some campuses, there were two historically Jewish groups, and there was a stark divide in their memberships.

OK, I missed the word officially in the FYP.

Note:
I personally group the historical membership requirements into two different categories. The "Dominant" ones (Anglo-Saxon, White, Protestant, Christian) and "Non-Dominant" ones (Black, Hispanic, Asian, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim). I *guess* it would be possible for a group to flip from "Non-Dominant" to "Dominant" if a Catholic group changed to allow all Christians, or a Hispanic group to allow all Whites, but I'm not aware of it. And yes, subsets of groups as well, "More and less foreign looking Jews" and the entire concept of the "Gamma Rays" in School Daze.

I'm curious as to whether any of these membership requirements were written into their national bylaws and then the national bylaws being kept private...

Alpha Phi Omega actually had a *very* different problem in terms of discrimination which local chapters imposed. From its founding until 1967, Alpha Phi Omega required that a brother have been a member of Scouting (boy scouting since we were all-male until 1976). At least 3 times, reminders were placed into the national magazine that chapters were *not* allowed to require that brother reach a specific rank (Become an Eagle scout, reach "First Class" etc.)

Wow, this blows my mind!


I went to Pitt in the 1970s, when the student population was roughly one-third Catholic, one-third Jewish, and one-third "other" (I was an "other"). I mentioned in my recruitment thread how sororities managed to discriminate by asking, "my fiance gave me a Sedar Plate, would you like to see it?"; "Which mass do you prefer?"; or "do you need tickets for the High Holy Days?" This happened during the Open Houses/chat-dating part of rush. Depending on your response, you were either cut or given a pass to the next round.

While I was an active, I don't think I ever saw a non-Jewish woman pledge a Jewish sorority, nor a non-Catholic pledge TPA. That said, they had a very large pool of interested parties who met their standards available to them.

Another poster here once said that sororities' racial/religious restrictions were printed in some copies of Baird's Manual, which, if true, makes this theory unlikely. But I admit I've never seen a Baird's in which this was the case, at least for the Protestant-only groups. (A number of Bairds list membership restrictions for Jewish-only or Catholic-only groups.) Granted, I've never seen a Baird's from the '30s or '40s, which is when I'm guessing this stuff would have been most explicitly spelled out.

Unlikely, remember Baird's was written from the inside of the fraternal movement.