[FuzzieAlum]

The reason sororities are all fighting for the same 150 girls is the same reason the rushees are all fighting for the same few houses! We pick on them a little for being poor, gullible freshmen, blinded by the glamour of the "top" houses, but we turn around and do the same thing right back to them.

I think part of the problem is that because we do formal rush en masse it leads to a herd mentality ... "all the girls in my group like Psi, so I should, too." "They say Mu Mu sucks .... what do they know that I don't?"

That's one place where the men have an edge (or informal rush does, too). Yeah, there are other people rushing with you, but the peer-to-peer pressure and competition is lessened. And spreading rush out over a couple of weeks gives you more time to think about your choices. The one advantage formal rush has is that is forces women to look at all their choices. I mean, our campus had 17 fraternities, and no man went to more than a couple of houses during rush. The upperclassmen had the excuse of knowing guys in most of the houses, but not the freshman.

So if Panhel let me redesign rush (when pigs have wings!), I'd start off rush with something similar to first party. Girls are required to go to all houses for tours or something similar. But after that, they go back to where they want to over a period of two weeks. The houses have events, not "parties." (When you have a choice of going to turkey bowling vs. rock climbing, the personality of the house shows a lot more than in a "Grease" vs. a "TRL" skit!) Let them have an invite-only event at the end where they do preference. Go to as many as you want, but naturally time will put a limit on how many you go to. And then, let houses give out bids to whomever they want. So yes, you can get multiple bids, like in informal. No one gets cross-cut, and if you didn't get a bid, it really means something - it's not a problem in the system. (Either Greek life isn't for you, or you had no idea where you really fit in.)

The immediate objection is that everyone will go Pi Pi and no one will join Du Du. One could put a cap on the number of bids given out, I suppose. But the guys seem to manage fine with houses of varying sizes. And because of that, the stigma of being *slightly* smaller disappears. Sure, being a house of 12 when the others have 50 is noticed, but having 40, who cares?

The biggest thing I can say to recommend this is - at almost every campus I know of, except women's colleges, there are more fraternities than sororities, and more Greek men than women. How many women do you know who hated formal rush and took their chances on COB? Or who don't go Greek at all because the thought of formal terrifies them? So - what is it they are doing better than us, especially given that there are slightly more college women then men?