"Non-Greek" Greek
 

Hello, everyone!
I am an alumna of a GLO. My society was founded almost 100 years ago as a "secret & selective sorority". We have a badge,song, prayer, motto, flower, mascot, coat of arms and secret sign and password. We hold candlelight ceremonies for our Founder's Day celebration, our initiations and when one of our sisters becomes lavaliered or pinned. I received a bid to join my sorority, and as a pledge, went through a lengthy preparation period prior to being initiated; required to throughly understand the meaning, ideals, structure, history, traditions and organization of my sorority. I had a Big Sis, was a Big Sis, and as an officer, was chosen to be pledge mistress for the new pledge class for whom I had to prepare a Pledge Examination. My sisters & I are expected to remain loyal and active in our group for life. We had a social chair and an active social calendar, holding mixers and other events on campus with other GLOs. We participated in Greek Week and dedicated ourselves to philanthropy, service to our community and scholarship. We are not an honor society.
Recently, while wearing my lavalier, I received a comment that I "wasn't really Greek." Why? Because all of the women in my GLO pursue a particular field of study; we belong to a "professional fraternity" and are members of the PFA, formerly, the Professional Panhellenic Association.
I'm apologize for the "long read", but I was curious and would like your opinions. How do you feel? Am I a "Non-Greek", Greek?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Diane

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it must be a duck.

If you’re portraying Greek unity, values and traditions, if you have the positions and perform the procedures of a Greek organization, and if you’re wearing Greek letters, then you must be Greek.

Tell anyone who doesn’t think so that they clearly don’t know what it means to be Greek.

I'm in the same boat. Just because your sorority is based on a field of study and is not a member of the National Panhellenic Council does not make you not a Greek.

Considering that many of the NPCs started as professional organizations then changed to social organizations, anyone claiming that NPC is more "Greek" than your group is ridiculous!

Varies from campus to campus.

What you described...greek. But considering you're not a member of a "social" sorority, I can definitely understand where the person was coming from. At my alma mater, there was an extremely large divide between what the professional organizations did and what the social organizations did (and there were a lot of social organization members who were making up the membership of the professional organizations). No one would have ever confused the two.

However, I fully recognize that other campuses are different and it's not your fault that your organization at other campuses isn't as active. Your chapter provided everything that a social group at my school provided, so you didn't need a social group...probably didn't even make the distinction between the two.

There's no "right" answer here. Was the person wrong to criticize your greek experience? yes, but only because your experience was just as fulfilling as theirs was. But you also have to realize what their experiences with your organization might have been.

So wait.....

Are we talking "Non-Greek" as in Ceres or something?

Something. Ceres is too young. I'd guess more like Delta Omicron or SAI.

^^ Okay.

Well I guess it would make a difference whether it was exclusive or non-exclusive. Like, with DO or SAI, you can pledge other things, right?

Completely swerving out of my lane but oh well. I would say that it completely depends on the nature of the campus and the chapters. I do have sisters who are also members of SAI but that is OK for our campus. I know of certain other campuses where this would not be OK because it is not the nature of the campus. I'll have to PM you tomorrow.

Good point.

I don't know the experiences of the person who made the comment, but like BigRedBeta said, not every campus has PFA GLOs that function like social GLOs, so that may be the source of the comment. At some schools, PFA GLOs are associate members of Panhellenic, and at others they are separate, or not even recognized as part of [social] Greek life. I'm not defending the comment; I went to a school that has PFA GLOs, but they are not associate members of Panhellenic; I just chose to make myself aware of other GLOs on my campus, so I wouldn't make a comment like that unless I knew what I was talking about. :)

Regardless, don't let anyone make you feel less Greek just because you are not in an NPC sorority.

Regardless of what campus culture is at any campus, that kind of comment is ignorant of the fact that "greek" means different things to different people.

I was going to use AOE as an example. We had AOE on campus, and while they are a professional engineering sorority, they still participated in Greek Week and the all Greek council or whatever my campus has now (didn't have while I was active).

Now there's Phi Alpha Delta or whatever the professional law fraternity is. They're Greek, but I wouldn't consider them Greek like us.

It's true. I'm a member of Beta Beta Beta, but they're a biological honor society, so no, I wouldn't consider them to be Greek. We have meetings and socials for them, but it's 100% different than a sorority.

Whereas with A.O.E., we're associate members of our Panhellenic Council, have initiation, do recruitment, do not allow multiple GLO memberships, etc...

Sure, it's different than being in an NPC sorority, but (like everyone else has said) it doesn't make you any less greek.

There was a thread on this some years ago: Non-social GLOs...do you honestly consider us fellow Greeks?. The ultimate conclusion reached by most, I think, of the posters in that 13-page thread was that it varies with the culture of the campus and chapter in question and, sometimes, with the particular GLO in question.

And as long as I am risking the resurrection of that thread, in which the last post was posted in December 2002, I'll point out that since that time, Phi Mu Alpha has withdrawn from the PFA. We currently are not affiliated with any umbrella organization such as the PFA or the NIC.