This is actually my first post on Greek Chat in a LONG time (I was an active poster a couple years back, but I've forgotten my login info
), but I've been a lurker for a while. Some of the recruitment stories have prompted me to reply.
I went to a school with sororities that were polarized numbers-wise. Unfortunately, it is extremely challenging for the smallest chapter to do well on a campus where the other sororities are so much bigger. Once this cycle is started, it's hard to get out. In the case of my school, one of our eight sororities was forced to leave campus (after only being there for around five years) just because their small numbers hurt them each year during rush.
From my experience, here's what often happens: PNMs are overwhelmed during the first round of parties and look for all kinds of reasons to order and eliminate sororities. One of the easiest ways for them to do this is by judging on chapter size. If they go into a room that is only half as full as the last house they were at, they often make a snap judgement on the quality of that chapter. Unfortunately, those chapters often don't get a fair shake - even if qualities of the chapter and its members are "superior" to much larger groups. As someone that was on Panhellenic exec. and a Rho Chi two years, I cannot tell you how painful it was to hear the same thing over and over from PNMs ("That's the small sorority, right?" or "Something must be wrong with them, because they're so much smaller than XYZ.")
I wish there was an easy way to remedy this problem on campuses. COR is of course an option that most small chapters work very hard at, but c'mon, you're not going to COR 60 women. I wish more Panhellenics saw these types of situations as a danger to their whole council, but not all of them do. Not until all the smaller houses are gone and the big ones are left to cannibalize each other do they sit up and take notice.
