Hey guys
Sorry I've been non-existent and haven't replied in a while .. between finals, end of the semester and insanity and getting sick AGAIN I haven't had a lot of free time lately.
Psi U - we do have a petition that was submitted when we gave a presentation. It had about 165 students on it, which is roughly 10% of our undergraduate population. Getting in touch with local groups is definitely a good idea - we have a lot of friends in an NIC at a school nearby and we were also offer a lot of help and support from people we met at our Meet the Greeks - which was AWESOME, by the way. We had almost 100 students show up, which is impressive for the Monday before Thanksgiving break! I met SO many people who were a lot of fun and thought what we were doing was awesome. I even met a woman who's a theo student at my school who was just initiated into a grad chapter!
We've been pursuing a meeting with the president and have summarily gotten ignored thus far. However, we have a rep from the student government who's interested in sponsoring us for the SGA and trying to get the SGA to support our proposal (which should be interesting, since our SGA has a ... fragile reputation on campus as it is), and come the New Year we will be continuing to call, stop in, etc and request a meeting. It's just not good manners to harrass anyone over the holidays and I don't want to give a negative impression to anyone, but I will be right back up here smiling and refusing to take no for an answer come January 2!
Our school newspaper did a piece on the issue - and understandably, the campus is pretty divided on this issue. Surprisingly, though, the people who seem most against the idea are either on the cusp of graduating or are alumni who no longer attend the school at all. I think people are just very resistant to change, which disheartens me. I heard a girl at an academic department part say to her friends something along the lines of "Did you see the paper? I hate Greeks, I came here because they don't have them! All they do is drink .. don't we have enough a*ssholes here already?" Made ironic by the beer in her hand (yes, we have alcohol at department events, lol), of course, and so closeminded in my eyes. I've never understood that viewpoint of going somewhere because of what they don't have. I chose my school for what it DOES have - small classes, amazing professors and a good reputation & graduate program. Why would you choose for what they don't have? No one forces you to participate in anything you don't want to, and in our campus climate there is no one group that dominates the social scene at all. I truly couldn't see Greek life somehow completely altering the campus atmospere and pushing out every uninterested student.
Of course, there are also a lot of people here who think we should get rid of athletics entirely as well .. so for all we're "liberal" we're kind of closed off to new ideas that don't mesh with our own.
Sorry for the rant .. but again, I'm not giving up at all. I'm going to keep working on this until we are at least given the courtesy of a hearing. We pay tuition, we're told to pursue the activities and communities we want to see on campus, and then are told no when we attempt it? Sorry, that's not acceptable to me, and until I get a more logical and well-reasoned answer you're going to continue to get phone call and personal visits from me! Hopefully the SGA will be willing to work with us (and I'm optimistic - while they may not all be interested personally, in general they've always been very receptive to supporting the need for administration to listen to student proposals).