It might be important to seperate the issues of formal recruitment for men and formal recruitment for women. They seem to be very different and have different reasons for existing.
It might be nice to have some history here . . . maybe some of the formal recruitment gurus among the ladies could tell us how and when the NPC rules first came about? And their reasoning?
Without that information let me take a risk of putting my foot in my mouth.
I would think many of the more formalized rules came out for the women first. Looking at the situation from the outside it seems that the NPC rules are designed as much for the protection of weaker chapters as some conception of fairness.
If this wasn't true then after a girl went through the process of formal Recruitment she would still be able to join the sorority of her choice. It still boggles my mind that you might want to be a Chi Omega or DElta Zeta and even if they want you also, the rules can almost force you to become a XYZ.
So anyway the no contact rules seem designed to increase the probability that less popular houses will get more girls.
All the other reasons just seem like rationalizations of this.
Formal recruitment as a model for men seems designed primarily to limit the competition for new recruits to a specific time period and within certain limits. Given how much money some chapters spend to vie for a pool of applicants I can see some people viewing this with relief.
Here I think the no contact rules are somewhat designed for protection of smaller chapters, but they probably primarily just evolved (its the nature of the beast to evolve more and more rules in an organized system), and was copied from the NPC model. The big difference here is that male Fraternities don't, for the most part, have quotas or Total, so the impact is going to be very different.
I am not sure what I think about the way the women do it . . . I kind of like competition and it occurs to me if you can't compete . . . you can't.
Do you think this kind of protection is intrinsically a good thing ladies?
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