Sorority Recruitment Will Be Deferred at U. of Colorado
 

The Monday, Dec. 10 Denver Post reports that the chancellor and a vice-chancellor of the University of Colorado have determined that sororities will have deferred (i.e., "spring") recruitment. No word yet about fraternity recruitment. See

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...644634,00.html

There are references to some other universities that have deferred sorority recruitment (Indiana, Virginia, etc.). Of course, just a glance at polarpi's calendar here on GC will confirm that deferred recruitment is not all that uncommon. I'll bet it will take some adjustment for the chapters at Colorado, and change isn't always easy.

They should fight it now.

They shouldn't make a huge deal of it, but a quiet message that says that they will continue to recruit in the Fall seems appropriate.

ITs technically ilegal for the univesity to do that.

Since I'm involved with a chapter at this school, deferred recruitment could be an important development for me. Would you please point me to the statute that makes this illegal so I can look it up and see what if anything we can do?

Since I'm not a lawyer and have no time to look up any statutes on this subject, I'm not going to pass judgement on whether it's legal or not. HOWEVER, if it WAS illegal I would guess that the GLO's would have fought it a LONG time ago. My school's been doing it since I was there in 1990 and there are many others who do deferred as well.

The school isn't telling them thay can't do it, they are simply setting the schedule..........and contrary to some opinions on the subject, moving to deferred doesn't really hurt the GLO's as much as they scream that it will beforehand.

I "think" that the Freedom of Association Act doesn't allow the school to discriminate against people that would like to associate with Greek organizations versus something else.

In this case the administration is singling out Greeks and not other organizations in delaying their right to associate.

Or at least thats the argument that the Executive Director of DKE was making when I spoke to him. He had something to do with the Act's passage.

Also related is the Supreme Court Case: Healey versus James
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/script...=408&invol=169

In this case the Supreme Court upheld the government's tendency to rule to not limit rights of association as applied to "unpopular organizations."

In this case these organiztions are already recognized but the administration is seeking to restrict the student's ability to associate because Greek life is currently unpopular.

One semester doesn't seem bad, but extended into a llogical absurdity the college could then defer Rush to sophomore year or even senior year.

Everyone needs to step up and just say . . thank you for the input but no.

Not that I expect the organizations in question to have the courage to do so.

They will probably release some statement about how eager they are to work with the administration and in a semester or two have some rationalization about how they are better off with deferred recruitment.

In other words they will just keep their heads down and hope someone else gets chopped.

I'm just confused as to if FRATERNITY recruitment would be delayed, or just sorority recruitment. I think it would be unwise or perhaps unfair to allow one to recruit in fall and the other wait till spring/winter.

We just won this battle with our university. However, we did need to go above it to pass it through. With full knowledge of mandated university deferred recruitment being in violation of a supreme court rulling that stated somewhere to the effect of WE, AS PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS, HAVE THE RIGHT TO DISCRIMINATE MEMBERSHIP, contacted national IFC and PHC. With the help of a strong alum support from most chapters as well as IFC we brought the case to the Attourney General which ruled that the university was in violation of the court ruling. Good thing too! Deferred recruitment was killing our chapters. Our numbers as a greek community as a whole had been cut in half since the implementation of deferred recruitment.

I would be more than happy to put you in contact with the person who helped push it for our campus. With the dynamic of college campuses changing the way that it is deferred recruitment is a killer to greek communities.

ok, so a fraternity pledge dies of alcohol poisoning....and the sororities have to have deferred recruitement, but not the fraternities. that is messed up.

There have been other stiuations there with alcohol this past year... Such as this article http://www.westword.com/issues/2004-...feature_1.html

This in my opinion would be one of the reasons why the university wants defered recruitment for the sororities....

The only relationship between deferred Rush and alcohol problems is to discourage people from joining Greek Life.

Can anyone see a different reason?

I actually do see a different reason for deferred rush. I go to a school which has 15 different locals on campus, and if you are a freshman, you are not allowed to rush until second semester. I know for me, as well as many other people this was a great benefit, as it allowed us to get to know members of different sororities, as well as find a place where we would fit in, and feel at home.

It really helps eliminate the number of people that go through rush, get a bid, and end up depledging because they realized later that they weren't in the right place. For me, when it came time to rush, I pretty much knew which sororities would be the ones I would want to join, and I'm now a very active member in my number one choice.

We do have fall rush, but it is for upperclassmen only, and is generally more low key than spring rush.

According to a story on the news tonight, they're still in the process of deciding what to do with fraternity rush.

Am I the only one who really doesn't see this as a big deal? I mean, yeah, it kind of sucks and I don't think it serves much of a valid purpose, but why not just deal with it, move on and figure out how to make it work? There are plenty of other schools with deferred recruitment, so it's not the end of the world.

Perhaps it's because you joined as an alumni and not an undergraduate and thus did not experience Greek life as an undergrad, but this is not something I would have wanted to experience as an undergraduate. I joined our Greek community in fighting back our administration in controlling us and I strongly believe many fraternities across the country will resist it strongly.

-Rudey

I would have fought it as an undergrad - I never really saw the point of deferred rush overall, for either sororities or fraternities. If someone wants to make the choice to go Greek as a 1st semester freshman, more power to them, give them the chance.

If they had tried to pull that at Boston U, I would have been at the first meeting to voice my protest.

The University of Michigan administration has dropped it's push to move to deferred recruitment after a huge backlash from alumnae (big donators!).

I think how much it hurts the chapters depends on the campus. At the U of Mich, for example, chapters would have a very hard time filling their houses if they had deferred recruitment. Leases are signed in January and February for the following academic year for all of the housing in the area. Therefore, if a freshman was going through recruitment in January and February, they wouldn't be sure whether they would get in and be initiated, so they would sign leases for off campus housing for the following fall before they knew what their Greek affiliation would be, if any. That would mean that you would have no sophomores or freshman living in the GLO houses. That would hurt a lot financially.

Dee

i don't think it's a big deal either. we had deferred recruitment at my school, and while i don't know what it's like ot go through recruitment that's not, i preferred it. it gave me a semester to get used to my surrounding, get settled in classes, meet people, without having the pressures of a competitive rush put on me all at once.

I think the major issue is the housing factor. I think that it's very hard to make the switch from fall rush to deferred unless your school does not have houses. Here, the majority of leases are signed in November-January. If rush is in January and girls aren't initiated until March, you will lose out on sophomores being able to live in. In a school where chapters have a hundred women (after rush) and the house holds 30, this may not be so bad. If the houses hold 50, it could be another story. I remember reading an article about Northwestern where the sororities were forcing these girls to break their apartment leases so they could fill the house. I know you sign a contract saying you'll live in if you have to, but I don't think that's very fair.

That said, I don't really think that deferring rush will do ANYTHING to stop the alcohol problems that Colorado has been having. I spoke to one of the Colorado Tri Delts, and from what I've heard, it sounds less like hazing than just stupidity on the part of the new member ed and the pledges in question. I don't really see that being solved by deferred rush. Maturity does not increase that much in one semester. Even if it was hazing, I don't really see that being solved by deferred rush either. In my opinion, using deferred rush is a punishment* and not a proactive measure to counteract the risk management violations that are happening. It's an easy solution for the school to look like it's doing something when really it's not going to change anything.

* I realize that deferred rush is not necessarily a punishment and that many of you who experienced it liked it -- just saying that schools often attempt to use it as a punishment, as in "You were bad, so now we're not letting you rush until second semester."

Our deffered recruitment is for everyone. We run on a trimester year though (they call it quarters, but whatever). So everyone rushes/pledges through winter quarter (most go active the weekend before finals week). Girls sign their housing forms in spring quarter, so the houses are filled that way (except for the positions that are required to live in the house). My chapter only has 5 spots for the house, but others here have 19. What might be easier would be changing the housing cycle if deffered rush was implemented.

There is a great deal of discussion among university adminstrators (in general) that deferred recruitment allows freshman to get aquinted with college life before they jump into any time commitments.

As a Greek Life person I'm annoyed that they don't defer other groups from also allowing people to join. To me it seems as they they are sectioning out Greeks and saying only this subset of university life has to follow this rule.

In the mean time Frannie Freshman gets involved in Camera Club and Habitat for Humanity and other worthy time consuming organizations and by December / January / Febuary is all tapped out for time - because they've also taken this new required class called Freshman Seminar that tells them that they should limit their non-study/class time to x-amount of time per week. And then they hear that that a fraternity or sorority will take 5 - 10 hours a week and they've been turned away. The prime people we want are those that are joining Habitat and getting good grades and understand time managment.

But let us not forget that administrators have to report back to a board of trustees that want to see their grades improve and no other "college-aged" fun happening. So they push for deferred recruitment and who cares what happens to our organizations.

So what does that mean? It means that every sister and brother fulfill their outside activity requirement and join these non-deferred activities and become fun and happy and show that you can be a Greek and be involved in something else and recruit from those groups.

This is how it works for us as well. The fraternities are the week after sorority recruitment.

Camera Club is not a lifetime commitment.

Habitat for Humanity is not a lifetime commitment.

That's the difference. I would rather someone wait for a semester or a year and make a better decision, rather than join a semester early and get so burnt out or disillusioned that they want nothing to do with Greek life by their senior year, let alone as an alum. I'm not saying that's the norm, but it certainly seems to happen quite a bit (from a female perspective - I think for guys it's not quite as bad).

If they're taking courses that say you should only have x amount of hours spent on outside activities - that's stupid not just for Greek life reasons. That sounds like a power play by the athletic department to make sure athletes don't join any other groups.

As I said in the other thread, if that's how you feel, and your feeling is the feeling of the chapter, then your chapter should do that. It is wrong for an administration to force it or even try and push it onto you.

I have a feeling most sororities would downright accept any campus regulation like this but fraternities would put up a fight.

-Rudey

I'm just saying that freshment TYPICALLY get involved in other things fall quarter and are involved in them when January rolls around.

Why shouldn't Greek Life have the same opportunities as other campus organizations to recruitment members as those groups do? I think it should be an all or nothing deal.

If you're going to hold Greek Life accountable and hold them off until January, why not every organization?

i don't have as much of a problem with deferred recruitment, as much as i have a problem with fraternity and sorority rushes occuring at different times.

I agree with you SnowLady.

Administrators know that if they move to deferred recruitment more people will enter school and develop other time consuming first semester activities instead of joining greek life.

If that happens those people are less likely to join a sorority.

So in a sense it adresses Greek drinking by making less people drink.

When we had Spring recruitment on our campus (Minnesota State), multipul positives....

1.) Grades as a whole (for pledges and chapters) went up and stayed up.

2.) We had better retention rates.

3.) The ratio of those who had been pinned in to those who had gone through to initiation increased.

The one major downfall of Spring recruitment we faced was that it killed our overall greek population on campus. Our numbers across the board were cut in half in some cases. Fall is the best time for numbers.

Thats the whole point of why administrators like deferred Rush.

It hasn't hurt the numbers on my campus much at all, for the men or the women. We are a small campus, with a large percentage of Greeks.

Good point. We recently changed back to fall rush shortly after we got a new university president who happens to be greek. Pretty sure a Phi Psi... not 100%.

Our administration is slowly becoming more greek friendly

Um... Boston has deferred recruitment for sororities already...

We have deferred recruitment. I see benefits of both types of recruitment. Likely, I would not be in a sorority at all if we had first semester recruitment. However, joining was one of the best decisions I have ever made, and I am sorry that I missed out on being a part of such an awesome thing. My school has only 4 sororities, so by having Spring recruitment, we really get to see how the sororities really are before jumping into anything. This is also a disadvantage, because there is a potential for things to get really ugly between the sororities, but luckly, we are civil. I don't really know how deferred recruitment would work at a larger school...
Also, our fraternities rush the week after the sororities.

Mixed reactions were reported in the Tuesday, Jan. 11 Denver Post.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...646197,00.html

An advisor to one sorority (the sorority was not named) expressed displeasure. (That advisor is also quoted as saying that the school has problems other than just the Greeks, and "I just terminated two members for having a single beer in the house.") A news release from another sorority's inter/national HQ expressed willingness to work with the university and Panhellenic on recruitment issues.

Contradiction
 

How much did your retention rate improve with spring recruitment? If you retain members for 4 years, it lessens the need to get huge fall pledge classes, half to two-thirds of whom will not be participating by their senior year.

Totals and quotas were set up when women routinely dropped out of college to get married. It was well known that women would not be around for four years so you needed to pledge them quickly - "retention" probably wasn't even in the vocabulary. That isn't the case anymore. I think there should still be a total/quota system to try and keep all the sororities on an even keel, but I don't see the point of crowing about making quota if you can't ever get to initiation with a complete NM class (let alone graduation).

This is really off the real topic - although I agree with deferred, I don't agree with the admin's means to achieve it.

Wait are you guys allowed to talk about rush being deferred and recruitment not happening right now?

I think that might be a private issue...recruitment and all. Y'all should respect that because perhaps talking about it openly is disrespect.

This thread and this whole forum needs to be erased or moved into the moderators forum so only the moderators can talk about it. At that point the moderators will be able to disrespect it!

-Rudey

Update Jan. 15 '05: Fraternity Rush to Be Deferred, Too

The Jan. 15 Denver Post reports that the U. of Colorado will require fraternities as well as sororities to have deferred (spring) rush for freshmen, starting with the 2005-06 academic year. The article lists the major points in what the university is proposing as a "contract," which would be required for university recognition.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...654723,00.html

(or go to www.denverpost.com and use their search tools for Jan. 15 articles)

Besides deferred rush for freshmen, the proposed contract requires a full-time live-in U. of Colorado staff member for every fraternity or sorority house.

Then there are four other requirements:

* Abide by federal, state and local laws and the U of Colorado's student code of conduct

* Meet their national organizations' academic standards

* Prohibit underage consumption of alcohol

* Prohibit hazing and the use of alcohol in new member programming

It should be interesting to see what happens as the GLOs discuss this and decide what stance to take. At least for the last four of the proposed requirements, it's hard for me to see how national officers could object (as long as there's a little leeway to allow chapters a bit of time to get their GPAs up if necessary). Deferred rush and live-in CU staff might be more of a concern, at least for some chapters on campus.

Do they have houseparents now? Would they be able to become staff members of the university? Or would this be in addition to a houseparent?

I think all the parents of prospective freshmen should be informed that if tuition is higher, it may have something to do with yet an extra layer of staff being added.

I HATE deferred recruitment. I unerstand it's strengths, but for selfish reasons, I resented it, and my university for continuing to use it.

Our school has deferred recruitment, student must have 12 credits completed before they are allowed to join a fraternity or sorority. I understand people being upset about not being able to take first semester freshmen, but I see the other side of it too.

Deferred recruitment can be seen as a good thing.. It gives new students a chance to adapt to being away at school before diving into something so time consuming, a chance to experience all the sororities and fraternities for an entire semester before choosing one, and makes them have put an effort into meeting people not necisarily in the greek community and not just join their respective GLO and possibly only meet people through that.

On the other hand, joining a sorority or fraternity right off the bat can teach them time management skills, have an automatic group of people to turn to, and have people to watch out for them so they don't make the mistakes that many freshman do concerning alcohol, drugs, and the like.

Sometimes I wish we were able to take first semester freshman, because there are so many great ones. But just because you can't offer them a bid until their second semester doesn't mean you can't introduce them to your GLO, invite them to events, and get to know them. Plus it gives you an entire semester to get to know them better before you do offer them a bid.

It all just depends on how you look at it..