Facebook... "Dirty Rushing"?
 

Do you consider Facebook to be a tool for dirty rushing?

How are panhells combating Facebook/Myspace dirty rushing? Can they do anything about it?

Just wondering?

If I understand dirty rushing correctly, couldn't it potentially occur in any situation where members intact with non-members?

Help me understand how online methods encourage or facilitate it.

(Because I really want help understanding, not because I am judging it one way or the other.) :D

I know dirty rushing occurs over Instant Messenger and email. Facebook just makes it even more accessible, although it has can be easily seen by others.
In particular facebook gives the sororities access to your contact info.

it makes it easy for members to find the PNMs and message them, which breaks the NPC contact rules. basically, it's a lot easier and sneakier to contact them online, especially on facebook where they just have to enter their name and can find them, rather than finding a girl you want to join your sorority out at a club or in a dorm, where you could be seen by other people.


i know my old school started dealing with the whole facebook issue by requiring that the PNMs make their profiles private so no non-friends could look at them/message them. and i think they may have had a rule about not friending/contacting PNMs for the sorority members.

i guess the minifeed would make it a lot easier to catch someone friending a PNM when they're not supposed to.:p

Thanks ladies!








<------ So glad I'm a man sometimes.

do the college panhellenics police facebook & myspace? How would they be able to enforce those and/or police those if the pages are private?

I'm so glad I had just graduated when the whole facebook thing started in my area.

dirty rushing can occur anytime up to and including the actual recruitment. as soon as the pnm gets her facebook notification from her (soon-to-be) college, she can go on and start accepting people as friends.

it is not "illegal" for a sorority member to be in contact with a pnm until the designated "silence period", when sorority members and pnms are not to converse with or contact one another. often this occurs at the end of the spring semester and carries thru to bid day in the fall(or thru fall until the actual bid day spring semester for those with deferred rush).

one problem that can occur is when either the member or the pnm contact the other during the silence period. a virtual friendship can develop, which might give that sorority an edge with the pnm. it might also backfire on the pnm-she might feel that her "friendship" with the sorority member might give her an edge over the other pnms. pin all her hopes on joining that group and then might not receive a bid from them.

quite a few sororities ask their members to make their profiles inaccessible during the silence period to safeguard against this.

you would be surprised how many times a sorority member gets caught contacting a pnm during recruitment-some people don't think to make it private!!

I know a lot of the girls who have rushed since Facebook has existed have either a)have very high privacy settings b)waited until rush is over to add friends that were already in sororities (and vice versa) c)not change privacy settings but "cleaned up" their profiles and pics before rush in case sorority members were looking. I have had several friends who are now new members or were in Fall of '06 tell me that they knew hands down that current sorority members were looking them up on Facebook.

I'm thinking about the campus' with spring rush... these girls have had a full semester to get to know people and befriend them. I would think that it would be easy to dirty rush now a days (not to say it wasn't totally easy to do before the internet) to drop a note of "great to see you tonight, there was great buzz about you." OR "great time with you tonight, see you tomorrow". And these things don't always show up in the feeds and headlines.

I'm also thankful I am not in college, going through rush, now. It would be very hard.

We had to make our profiles on Facebook AND Myspace friends only and if we were friends with any PNM (excepting those that were already students at the school the semester before, I think) we had to de-friend them. You can actually still send messages, though...there's probably no good way to avoid all that. If people really want to make contact online and dirty rush they will. You just have to hope that both the other GLOs and your own girls will step up to the plate and be honest. We mostly do it just to keep the identity of Rho Chis private. I went through Fall 2005 and we figured out affiliations based on what was written on peoples' facebook walls.

That's just a technologically updated version of telling a rushee the same thing when you see her in the dorm. It happened then, it's going to happen now.

Also I think there's something now that silence/disaffiliation for Rho Chis isn't supposed to be more than 30 days? So you couldn't say someone is "off limits" from spring until rush week, or all of the fall if you have spring rush.

panhellenics can make whatever rules they want-if they want to make silence from the last day of the spring semester until bid day in the fall, they can do it. some panhellenic rules get veryspecific about suitable contact between a pnm and a sorority member.

I recall a sorority on my campus (won't say which one) that made a rush group for their sorority on facebook. They also had an informational party before rush started which is against the rules at my school. Most sororities got in a tizzy about that group on facebook though...they felt like it was dirty rushing bc it was before anyone even got to speak to these girls *shrugs* Facebook and myspace cause a number of problems and unfortunately they are just too hard to monitor sometimes.

I think I even saw that group on facebook, and I didn't go to your school. One of my high school classmates was a member. I thought it was kind of strange when I first saw it, and I was suprised that it remained up for as long as it did. (I have no idea if it is up there at present)

let me get this straight-the sorority set up a group on facebook like: fall rush 2006 or are you rushing this fall, and pnms joined the group? wow! i have known of some campuses where the rho gammas or panhellenic hosted a facebook group like that.

that sorority should have suffered some major fines for that and the pre rush party.

Oh my god, facebook makes my blood boil for this reason. Good topic, OP. I'm curious to know how college panhellenics can combat this problem. Because seriously - you cant see what goes on behind the scenes. Sure, you might see a wall post - but you can only make wall posts if you're friends. And even if you make a rule about you cant be friends with freshmen girls, you can STILL talk to them through private messages and dirty rush them that way.

Our panhellenic, still under construction, has decided that the Panhellenic president and VP will have to dissafiliate this year. So how does that work? Do those members have to temporarily remove all their sisters from their friends list so that a PNM cant look at their friends list and say "my my, this person sure does have alot of XYZs on her friends list"....and are pictures of that person with XYZ letters in the background - do they have to be removed?" How does a college panhelleic association force all the members of the sororities to remove pictures of disaffiliated women? How can you enforce that each sorority member HAS to make her profile viewable by only her current friends?

Seriously, it's such crap. There's no way to effectively monitor it. And you cant tell me that all sororities on every campus are going to promise to play fair and not private message girls where the public cant see you've been talking to them.

Is there anybody from GA State on here? Some of the AZDs from there told me that the panhellenic there had some pretty strict rules - I'm curious as to how you guys made it work.

A few comments from one of the old fogies here who rushed before the internet existed...

1) Our whole Panhellenic Council Exec Board and our Recruitment Counselors all disaffiliated, but the school library still had yearbooks in it and if someone was determined, they could find out which sorority they belonged in. They also only had to ask a fraternity guy. It's not that big a deal. The big deal is that the women in those positions are objective and unbiased in their dealings with potential new members. I think the bigger deal you make out of it, the more it becomes a game with the PNMs and they are focused more on that than on recruitment.

2) Telling members of sororities that they cannot befriend any freshman women simply leads to the appearance that sorority women are stuck up snobs. That is why the Green Book says that silence should be the period between Pref and Bid Day. What kind of impression does it make if no sorority women will speak to the freshman?

3) In many cases, dirty rushing occurs because Total is not set appropriately, leaving too many open spaces in chapters. The worst dirty rushing I've seen was on a campus where quota is 7-9 each year but Total is 45 and none of the chapters are at Total. This is a total set up for chapters to encourage women to drop out of recruitment and accept a bid through COR because every chapter KNOWS they will have empty spaces after formal recruitment.

Panhellenic unity and the understanding that if all the chapters are strong, the greek system is strong is tough to achieve, but that should be the focus, rather than worrying about who is friends with who on Facebook.

They told us at our first GIANT recruitment meetings with all of the Gamma Chi groups that all of the sorority members had to set their facebooks to private, and were strongly encouraged to not use them at all during rush. (this was also in fall)

most chapters are (or should) be self policing. executive officers of the chapter i advise, divide up the membership list and look at their assigned members facebook accounts. the chapter is also told to make their accounts private. less than tasteful photos are blocked.exec. makes sure that they do.

i thought it was a rule that panhellenic officers disaffiliated during the recruitment process.

WORD, WORD, WORD, WORD to this whole post. Especially #2. College Panhells, get your act together!!! Silence or disaffiliation is not supposed to last an entire summer or worse, if you have deferred, an entire semester - this is one of the things that gives deferred rush a bad name because PEOPLE GET IT COMPLETELY WRONG. I think the max for disaffiliation is 30 days, and even then you don't HAVE to do it that long.

Honestly, if you can't carry on a conversation with someone without talking about your sorority, that's a problem in itself. You're not very well rounded.

And I don't know where Dee is talking about w/ #3, but I can name two more just off the top of my head. Lots of groups say their nationals tell them not to vote to lower total - if that's the case, tell them exactly what's going on and explain that until the dirty rushing can be curtailed, NO ONE is going to grow and it's going to make all the sororities look bad. Not to mention the money wasted on formal rush parties that yield 2.5 new members...

My sister was VP the first year facebook was around and instead of removing all her friends and whatnot, she just changed her name to something completely random and removed her pictures. She had to let everyone know she did this so we all didn't think we had a random friend, but it also prevented PNMs from knowing which sorority she was in without completely removing all her info and friends.

When I was a Recruitment Counselor, we were disaffiliated over the summer which included the highest settings of privacy on facebook - meaning no one could search for us, or befriend us. We also removed any reference to affiliation in our profiles, but kept our friends. No active was allowed to befriend an incoming freshman during disaffiliation and if they were friends beforehand (on facebook) then walls were monitored. Basically, we don't have a huge problem with dirty rushing (with a few exceptions) and while facebook might make it easier to do so, we hope that the majority of the women participating are adult enough to follow the rules. So it works pretty well for us.

Don't you only have like 6 girls in your sorority? Hypothetically speaking, it would be very possible for a Gamma Phi to be friends with every AXiD in that case.

On the topic of number 3... I heard something that I was just appalled at this past week. One of my co-workers is greek and at her school they have chapters that will approach girls after they pledge other groups and will get them to drop that group... telling them that they will be XYZ next year. WHAT THE CR%%%%P!

That is dirty rushing at its worst... if you weren't good enough the first year for them, why would you want to take a chance on them every again.

As to the Gamma Chis or whatever... having just had Spring Recruitment... ours took their letters off and groups off and tried to diversify their friends. They didn't make a big deal of being a Gamma Chi, that way the freshman didn't get curious last fall. They disaffliate around Homecoming every year, so about 2 months. The PNMs can still figure out who they are and what not... it really is so that the GX can mentally get away from their letters and start to think more about just getting the girls to go greek in the Spring. Since recruitment starts the Wednesday after classes start, they aren't dissaffilated for too long.

...in a perfect world....

Actually, we have 10 actives. They have 11. And yes, while thats possible, they've been on campus for 26(?) years and we've been on for 3. They have MUCH more alumnae than we do, who still participate on facebook. I was speaking more generally for larger campuses... I can imagine a campus where total is in the 80s or more, and you have all (or most) of your sisters as friends, and only a handful of girls from other sororities on your friends list. I think I only have 3 or 4 of them on my list. Just the onesI am actually friends with - I'm not a friends number booster kinda person. Hah.

If there are only 21 girls in both sororities at your school, I'm assuming it would be pretty easy to figure out who the rho chi/rho gam/gamma chi/whatever the new PC for it term now is for your sorority.

Maybe so. PNMs arent stupid, most of them will probably figure it out on a campus with only 2 sororities. But the point of dissafiliated panhellenic officers is not to recruit for their organization, but rather to encourage girls to come to recruitment period. It's panhellenic's job to get girls in the door. It's the individual's sororities job to convince them to join that sorority.

I know that OUR panhellenic officer has been taught very well how to be unbiased all around, and will continue to work with the greek advisor to get panhellenic more well established the way it is meant to be. We told her that during the disaffiliation time period, that she cant act any more friendly with us than she would with another sorority member. That she wasnt allowed to show favoritism towards us, that if a PNM confides in her that she really likes one sorority over the other thats she's supposed to be excited and encouraging the whole way. She knows she's not allowed to recruit for AZD. She's supposed to recruit for greek life.

What makes you think that the other sorority's panhellenic officer hasn't?

I seem to recall a thread by amanda6035 and the panhel issues at her school

ETA: Unless I'm confusing them with another campus, but the situation was almost identical.

OMFG, are you trying to get into a pissing contest or something? Did I ever say that they hadn't?

No. I didn't.

I don't know what they do. I don't know what their process on how they deal with things is. What I DO know is that because this is a new process, because panhellenic on my campus is still new, that it still has a tendency to be a great big cluster-you-know-what. Don't put words in my mouth, and try to find some underlying meaning behind my post. Believe me, if I wanted to imply something, I wouldn't imply it, I'd flat out say it, thanks. I cant speak for them. I was speaking for us.

You emphasized the word OUR in your original post. When people do that, they're trying to place blame on the other party. (ex. No Mrs. Smith, I didn't put a frog in Mary's lunch box.)

Whoa whoa... I don't know that that was actually a dig. Don't take it so personally.

well, I'm sorry you took the emphasis the wrong way. Emphasis can have many meanings. Again, I don't imply. I say. The emphasis showed that I was talking about us.

I didn't mean to de-rail the topic with my questions. Oops. now back to your regulary scheduled thread :D

Eh, it happens :p

amanda,

the disaffiliation requirements should be written into your schools recruitment rules. it should be spelled out in no uncertain terms. then if a panhellenic officer or a recruitment counselor does not comply with the disaffiliation requirements, the sorority chapter that they are a member of should suffer the repercussions(which should also be noted in the recruitment rules).

if they are not spelled out, the recruitment rules need to be amended asap.

Could you, or someone possibly send me some ideas on how these rules are specifically laid out in other campuses panhellenic agreements? What kind of disaffiliation rules you follow, and what the consequences are for breaking them?

Unfortunately, everything I found last year that I personally thought was a good idea, was shot down because of the "we're a small school" syndrome. I mean - there were NO REPERCUSSIONS put in place last year, for breaking a spoken upon agreement - so even if someone broke the rules, what was going to happen to them? Nothing. I think I said this in the thread Drolefille mentioned back then - I'm hard core about rules and structures, and without it in place, it drives me nuts. I like to be able to know EXACTLY what I'm allowed to do, and what I'm NOT allowed to do...

I hope things get settled this year. It's a whole new breed of people now....we actually have better relations now, so I hope it stays that way, rather than the cattyness (yes, from both sides, I'm not pointing fingers at them) that it used to be.

At our school, panhellenic created a group on facebook for '06 formal recruitment. It was a private group and only girls who were rushing were allowed in it. No current sorority members were in it except of Panhellenic officers. They used it as an additional method to get information regarding rush out there. Such as events, what to wear etc. It was also a great way to meet the girls you would be rushing with.

I thought it was effective and classy.