Articles About Rush
 

I'm a teacher, and I'm teaching a unit on documentary in a month or so. I want to use some newspaper and magazine articles (as well as films) to show how bias can affect the way facts are portrayed.

Since I've read Pledged and a couple of other biased articles about sorority rush, I was thinking that a couple of articles on this would be interesting for the kids (especially since I teach in a wealthy area where kids already know a lot about Greek life... and some of these 10th graders know where they want to pledge!).

Could y'all let me know about links to articles about rush? I'd really like the following breakdown:
- Articles written by people biased against sororities
- Articles written by people biased toward sororities
- The same two for fraternities.... I'd really love a piece on frat rush!

I already have the recent UT and GA State articles.

Thank you for your help!

Do you care if they're old? There was a discussion on here of various articles that have appeared in Sassy, Seventeen etc but some of them are ancient as far as high school age kids' thinking. :)

Ancient? I'm picturing the 90s. lol.

Seriously, any full copies of articles I can get my hands on would be great.

http://www.statehornet.com/vnews/dis...d?in_archive=1

http://www.statehornet.com/vnews/dis...0?in_archive=1

These were in Sac State's paper...

Thanks!!

Here's the one from Sassy that ran in 1993.

When I was at the University of Illinois a LONG time ago, I took a Humanities class and the professor had us read excerpts from a book on sororities. I never saw the actual book, because the prof just provided us with photocopies of the pages he wanted us to read. Does this sound familiar to anyone, because I would love to re-read it now:

If I recall correctly, it was written by a woman, and it was VERY critical, almost a satire, of sorority women. The pages often had text boxes off to the side with various lists or other "information." One that I remember vividly was a list of things a sorority girl would NOT put letters on. It included jeans, shoes (which is funny because now so many girls wear those letter flip flops), etc. Then there was another list of things a girl would put letters on and it was endless. It also had lists of activities that are acceptable and unacceptable. One that I remember was that all sorority girls should bake cookies to bring over to fraternity houses in order to get invited to parties.

This was back in 1987-1988, but if it rings a bell with anyone, I would love to know, and I think it would be perfect for someone trying to gather items written with a bias.

And by the way, in that Sassy article, I think it is funny that the author was prevented from using the sororities real names, but was able to show a picture of the AOII house - complete with a banner of a panda with roses, and at one point desribed the use of a kite in a ceremony. Not that she named AOII or KAT... :rolleyes:

I know there is a book called Torn Togas... sounds similar

I do believe that was Rush: The Girl's Guide to Social Success.

The lady who wrote it was Rush Captain for ZTA at UT.

UT as in Texas or Tennessee?

Texas

Yes yes yes 33girl! Thank you! That name rings a bell. That must be it. The Torn Togas book sounds interesting, but I looked on Amazon, and its publish date is 1996 - so it is too recent. Also, from the excerpt and reviews, it seems to actually be a serious book. The one I was thinking of is written more tongue-in-cheek. Like this:

All sorority houses have a powder room near the front door. This is to ensure that the members check their hair and make-up before leaving the house. It would be disastrous to the chapter's reputation if a non-member saw her without her lipstick blotted.

I just made that up, but if I remember correctly the tone of the book was like that.

I thought the exact same thing when she mentioned the kite :rolleyes:

Authors have a way of secretly naming the GLO's they are talking about. However, any person not familiar with sororities would probably not pick up on that.

In Alexandra Robbins book "Pledged"- as much as I was not thrilled by her perception of sororoties, she did a good job not revealing the groups she mentioned through out the book. (even though she bluntly said things about other sororities).