Quote:
Originally posted by Lady Pi Phi
The book is a fluff piece. She wrote it to make money.
My problem with her and her book is she appears to be selling it as an academic/journalistic piece.
Her book as no journalistic/academic integrity whatsoever. Her sources cannot be verfied and her research is flawed. She tries to pass herself off as an academic and she is not.
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Agreed.
This book caused an uproar among collegiate Greeks last summer-- when it was published. The book asserts that NPC collegiate chapters encourage a culture of drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, promiscuity and hazing-- and that their alumna advisers cover it up.
I feel the book is representative of COLLEGE LIFE these days, and not necessary sorority women-- the methods by which the author obtained her sources are sketchy at best, and she cites old out-of-date texts and "anonymous" sources to depict a year in the life of a small set of sorority women at an unidentified southern campus (some believe it is SMU).
The author intended this book to be a journalistic work that exposes sorority life as an obsolete social outlet that has been overtaken by modern problems that go unaddressed by national officers. It is instead a salacious novel and a page-turner. Collegians I have spoken to have been very passionate about the book and feel its depiction is unfair. There were fears the book would affect recruitment numbers this past school year, but it doesn't seem they did.
I do enourage everyone to read the book, too. Problems, on various levels, exist in all of our sororities' local chapters (again, at varying levels) but I feel this author didn't really do a adaquate job of exposing anything but her ability to compile a bunch of Spring Break stories and hazing urban legends.
Take this book with a grain of salt... I hope it will open a good dialogue among collegians and alumnae who attend these forums, but I'm not 100 percent certain that this book (which has been found in the non-fiction AND women's literature section of bookstores) has any real academic merit as a treatise on modern sorority life and I am surprised that the GMU Greek Adviser would support Alexandra Robbins on campus when she used some very unethical methods to go "behind the scenes" of Greek Life at another campus.
I guess it could be worse... they could have scheduled it during recruitment or before recruitment began... This way at GMU it is the day AFTER Bid Day and one good thing that could come out of it is that any suspicious behaviors are under tighter scruitiny by the chapter Exec Boards and Panhellenic....