Greek life activities cancelled at Tufts amid hazing reports
 

Does Tufts still do that "everyone who wants to be Greek gets a bid" BS? Because this would be a really spectacular way to show that everyone who wants to be Greek is NOT cut out for it.

Yes, they do. But it only affects sororities. Fraternities don't have to follow this policy.

The rule is that the PNMs are guaranteed a bid as long as they maximize their options. The fraternities schedule their recruitment events at the same times, and therefore don't have to follow the policy because it's not possible for fraternity PNMs to maximize their options in the same way it is for sororities.

NO!!! The "maximizing your options" is NOT a guarantee that everyone who wants to be Greek gets a bid!

PNMs can and are dropped from recruitment on every campus. Just because you sign up for rush is not a guarantee of a bid. Going to all parties that you receive invitations to and IF you make it to pref round IS a guarantee of a bid. It is part of the standard RFM policies that virtually every campus follows.

At this campus, that is how sorority recruitment works. It's a mandate from the university president that every woman who signs up for recruitment receives a bid, regardless of whether the chapters want to give her one or not. With the exception of GPA cuts, no woman can entirely be released from recruitment at this school. They are a private institution and this is a condition of having a chapter at this campus.

Without having any inside information whatsoever, I would imagine that this was part of why AGD chose not to colonize there this fall.

To me this also equals no quota at all. If every woman on campus signs up, then the size of the sororities gets insane.

Note, the Sorority Life page at tufts.edu lists 5 sororities including the non-NPC Lambda Pi Chi, but I don't know if Lambda Pi Chi is treated as an equal in this. The page for the Panhellenic council OTOH says there are 5 NPC sororities.

For a little more context, this was taken from Tufts' Greek Life policies webpage: "Generally Assured bids: By mandate of the Board of Trustees of the university, all eligible Tufts students seeking to join a fraternity or sorority and participates in the entire recruitment process (attending all scheduled events to which they are invited) are generally assured a bid from at least one of the social fraternities or sororities on campus. This system does not guarantee an invitation to join a particular chapter of a student’s choice."

Kappa Alpha Theta came on a couple years ago and was allowed to be selective (i.e. not extend bids to potential new members) for only their charter class, then they had to fall in line with Tufts' mandate.

There is no need to be aggressive toward me. You are wrong. It is clear that you don't understand how recruitment works at Tufts. I was in a sorority there a number of years ago and helped plan recruitment for my chapter while I was a student there. I am familiar with this system, and it is unique.

It is called generally assured bidding and it DOES mean that the PNM is guaranteed a bid as long as she maximizes her options. The university mandates that as long as a PNM maximizes all of her options during Formal Panhellenic Recruitment, she must be given a bid at the end of the process. The only exception is if the girl does not have the requisite GPA (I believe this is a 2.5+ GPA). However, low GPA girls can still be given bids if the chapter CHOOSES to do so despite the GPA.

For example, if a PNM who is above the GPA threshold is released from all of the houses during recruitment, she goes back to the ones she ranked more highly. If this PNM we are talking about (who is released from all houses during a particular round) ranked her houses A, B, C, D and can go back to 2 houses the next round, she will be invited back to A and B as long as she maximized her options. As long as she keeps maximizing her options, she will receive a bid from A or B at the end of the process, even if A and B don't want her at all.

Yes, this causes chapters to take girls that they do not want to take, but the fact remains that this is the system Tufts has and no one will be released from Tufts' Panhellenic Formal Recruitment as long as they maximize their options (unless their GPA is low).

When I was at Tufts, I talked to some faculty about the possibility of changing the system, and was told that this simply wasn't going to happen. It is still in place.

AGD was not able to garner enough interest when they tried unsuccessfully to colonize in Fall 2015, which is why they postponed their colonization to Fall 2016.

I do not definitively know what their ultimate reasoning was for choosing not to colonize, but I imagine that they would not have put forth an application let alone a full colonization push in Fall 2015 if they had a problem with how the system at Tufts works.

No, this does not mean no quota. Quota is still determined in the normal way during formal recruitment. It also does not mean that you can simply join the organization that you want to join and they are forced to accept you. It just means that you will get a bid somewhere if you participate in formal sorority recruitment and maximize your options, though it may be at your last choice.

At Tufts, a minority of the student population goes Greek. The sororities are not insanely large. When recruitment numbers went up, Tufts opened for expansion.

Lambda Pi Chi would not be in the Panhellenic Council. They were not on campus when I was there, so I don't know anything about their recruitment, but from googling them you can see that they are a Latina sorority.

There are 4 Panhellenic Council sororities at Tufts: Alpha Omicron Pi, Alpha Phi, Chi Omega, and Kappa Alpha Theta. It is possible that the Sorority Life page has not been updated in a while. Alpha Gamma Delta was supposed to be the 5th Panhellenic Sorority and had several colonization events in 2015, but did not ultimately form a chapter.

I know that Tufts students also participate in NPHC organizations, but these are city-wide ones and don't have to adhere to the university rules.

This mandate only realistically applies during sorority formal recruitment where there are scheduled events that do not interfere with each other and it is possible to attend events from all the organizations and maximize options, so sororities are allowed to be selective during informal recruitment and colonization since these are times when not everyone else is recruiting. This is probably part of why the colonization recruitments have happened in the Fall, since Formal Recruitment is in the Spring.

That also explains why fraternities don't have to be bound to the mandate while recruiting, which is what I was referencing to 33girl in my original post. If it's not possible to attend all recruitment events from all houses and maximize options, the mandate doesn't realistically apply. So the Fraternities get to be selective about who they choose as members and therefore the fraternity hazing cannot be explained by an "everyone who wants to be Greek gets a bid" policy.

Everyone gets a trophy.

I apologize for assuming that Tufts follows the usual NPC recruitment structure. I have never heard of "generally assured bidding". That certainly is a unique situation, one that I am surprised that sororities are willing to accept. I cannot imagine being forced to give a bid to a woman that is not wanted by the chapter. Thank you for the education. I definitely stand corrected!

I concur. And I can see where this might actually promote a hazing culture if a group has members they don't actually want and might be looking to either drive them to quit or force them to prove their worth. Those primal instincts seem to take over when these mob mentality incidents take place. It seems like eliminating the forced bidding might be a good start

Also, what about risk management issues? I can't begin to imagine the problems of bidding a person who has drugs/alcohol/shadiness all over their social media or this is all they talk about during recruitment.

Yup....

Does anyone remember dzrose93's story about a terrible PNM in the Weird Rush Stories thread? I think of people like that when I think of forced bidding.

Update: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/12/0...t-allegations/

4 fraternities suspended, more GLOs being investigated.

Yup...back in the day it was part of the deal to get GLOs back on campus. The idea was to get rid of the exclusivity of Greek Life.

No worries. :) I hope I wasn't too aggressive toward you, and I apologize if I was. I didn't mean to be hostile.

Yes, I agree completely. Trust me, sororities at Tufts have been implicated in hazing. Evidence is only a google search away:

http://tuftsdaily.com/archives/2005/...academic-year/

http://ocm.auburn.edu/stop_hazing/ar...march%2013.pdf (not sure why this is saved at this website, and I wasn't on campus when this happened, but I did hear about it)

Once I started advising, the thing I noticed about hazing is it seems to be part of the culture of the northeast. It's shameful.

But an example is when Alpha Phi at Tufts was allowed to recruit again, they had a huge rush turnout despite the hazing that happened: http://tuftsdaily.com/news/2009/10/0...-rush-turnout/

That person would be appropriately reprimanded by the appropriate committee. In my experience, women who were cut from all houses were more likely cut for being awkward and not fitting in with Greek Life than being shady.

I could not agree more with this observation. The only campuses I can think of where hazing is so pervasive it's expected of both fraternities and sororities, the campuses where orgs won't colonize because they know their chapters will end up being involved, are schools in the north. I don't know why this is, especially since interest in Greek life in general is lower up north, but I have some guesses.

You know how some chapters have actually been disbanded by their nationals due to the actions of just a few people? (Like one strong group very near here.) That's why I would fight to keep a girl with a QR out.

ETA: I have seen horrible hazing by locals in Georgia (3 schools) and Hawaii.

I don't disagree with you that it could be horrific for the chapter and that a girl like that could do a whole lot of damage.

I can't speak to any group other than mine, but my group had a process if a member warranted it. I also can't speak to the years I wasn't on campus, but I did not see one girl triple-cut (since there were 3 sororities during my time) for QR while I was there. Part of it probably was because we didn't have Facebook.

It's horrible, especially at schools with such brilliant students.

If you would care to share your thoughts via PM, I'm all ears. :D

There was a freshman who was septuple-cut after first parties at MS State one year! She had had, um, a memorable summer beforehand when she came to visit friends. Her dad called up Panhellenic and wanted to know why she was cut and I don't remember what we told him.

I advised there for a time over 10 years ago, and I saw a couple PNMs triple cut. They would attend parties at their top two sororities.

This is true and has been for a while - in the eighties, a few years after I graduated, one of our sororities at UMaine was kicked off campus for branding their pledges. There were rumors about others on campus, too. As an AOII, I wasn't hazed as you would have defined it back then, but it would definitely be considered hazing now. I'm not sure why it's such a Northeast thing but I'd love to know.

Or share them here so GC is interesting again!

Smaller chapters? Unofficial housing? Less emphasis on and attention paid to those chapters by the higher-ups of the (inter)national orgs?

I'm in the middle of writing a history paper for finals (about sororities, of course) so I'll expand more tomorrow, but I definitely agree that smaller chapters play a part. It's much easier to haze a pledge class of 20 than a pledge class of 150.

-hypercompetitiveness at elite schools, as in "if it's hard to get in to this school, it should be just as hard to get in to this fraternity/sorority".

-a tradition of groups coming from locals/reverting to locals/operating off campus with no official recognition. All of these seem to be more common up north, especially in the SUNY system where all organizations were local for the better part of 30 years. Or schools along the line of Harvard/Brandeis/Princeton where the administration would prefer to stick their heads in the sand rather than have oversight of the organizations.

-administrators with less knowledge of Greek life in general. I'm thinking of one specific school that shall stay unnamed that doesn't recognize Greek life even though a good portion of their campus is Greek, and they have one employee with Greek experience that they've designated as the go-between for administration and the groups because he's the only one who has any first-hand Greek knowledge.

-less emphasis on being Southern women (with all that entails-feminine, religious, proper)-the kind of direct, aggressive hazing just doesn't seem in line with the culture of the women at those campuses.

-at some schools, a lack of other things to do. If your state school is in the middle of nowhere and you need rides to and from off-campus parties and there's no public transportation, you're going to make the pledges drive you. I'll never forget my friend from high school who was in a sorority at one of those schools telling me not to bring my car to campus my sophomore year because the sororities were going to make me drive as a pledge, and my utter confusion until I explained to her that our sororities didn't do that at Clemson. Did the fraternities make their pledges drive for a while? Yes, they did, but now only initiated members drive and that actually seems to have worked well.

Obviously, not all of these apply to all schools everywhere, but they're some generalizations I've seen borne out in being from the north and moving to the south for my undergraduate experience.

This tangent is the definition of "self fulfilling prophecy." If you keep saying the northeast is hazing central, people who are afraid of that culture won't pledge and people who are in favor of it will.

The rigid social mores and structures in the South seem like hazing to me, to be honest - and that's not for 7 weeks, that's for your whole college career (and beyond). No I am not saying it's the same as physical hazing, but the emotional and psychological pressure is something worse IMO. I mean hell - why would you feel a need to "test" someone when she's gotten through an extremely high pressure rush with 2000 other girls? That's, like, test enough.

Also I can only assume it's sororities we're talking about because there are tons of hazing incidents reported from southern fraternity chapters.

And more news from Tufts...

Former sorority sisters urge eradication of Greek life at Tufts

Geez. I mean, most of it sounds like members who joined as freshmen, thinking that's what they wanted, and then a few years later, realized it wasn't really their thing.

But if that part about the chapter advisor making them take down a Pride flag is true, that's not cool at all.

I take issue with this quote from the article:

“Greek life at Tufts is responsible for pain,” they wrote. “Greek life nationally is, too, and our dues support the perpetuation and further embedment of this pain.”

Talk about logical fallacies? Hyperbole, much? This is coming from college educated women? Yikes. Tufts is an odd duck IMO and it wouldn't break my heart to see NPC sororities (my own included) leave. That's my opinion only, I do not speak with any authority whatsoever. Just my opinion.

Whatever.

She didn't make them take the flag down, she just said she was glad it wasn't hanging. While this sounds bad, we have no idea of the context. As for a rapist being at the formal, they need to take that up with the individual sister who asked him to be her date.

I completely agree that NPC and IFC need to pull up stakes here and run like the wind. Then when the new local "non exclusionary" system that springs up has all these same problems and a few others, they can laugh hard.

Perhaps as AGD introduced their on-campus colonization team to Greek and non-Greek Tufts women they smelled some of the over-ripe apples (students) a mile away.