Quote:
Originally posted by carnation
On the other hand, there is just no way to select members from hundreds of PNMs in one week if you don't use recs. Been there, done that at 3 SEC schools and if you haven't been involved with recruitment at a big Greek school, don't tell me how it should be run.
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We manage to get good pledge classes without relying on recs -- and we do it well. (Recs aren't unknown up here, but they're pretty scarce -- this year we got about 15 recs and one list of 45 names of recommended girls from an alum group in Illinois.) I imagine there are quite a few big Northern schools that don't use recs. And, not to be dismissive of the "Southern way of life" but as far as I can tell we do it just as well or better. For our last three pledge classes we've retained at least 90 percent of each one to initiation. I can't speak for the other sororities on campus, but I'm pretty sure that for all but a couple, this is the rule and not the exception. Meanwhile, I've heard of Southern campuses where retaining 2/3 of your pledge class is considered "good." Of course part of that is the pure size, but I'm sure there are other factors that play into it.
It can be done.
I don't have a problem with recommendations. Who would? I think they're great and they give people a chance to recommend girls that they think would be a good fit with the chapter (if they know the chapter).
The problems?
(1) The stupid business with "It's not your job to get recs, the sorority will get them for you" when that's blatantly not true. I'm sure we all agree that this is psychotic.
(2) As valkyrie said, "the old girls' network." When I decided to rush, I tried to familiarize myself with what I would need to do to prepare. There isn't a whole lot of information out there, especially not around here where, growing up, I didn't really know anyone who went Greek, and my only college friend who joined a sorority did it at an extremely atypical Greek campus. I didn't hear anything about recommendations until I visited GC in late July, which was hardly enough time to get at least 11 recommendations in time for late July (work week) when I didn't know a single sorority member except my DG friend, who probably didn't have a clue what recs were anyway.
Not having a rec doesn't say anything about whether or not a girl would make a bad sorority member. Maybe it means she's a lazy bum who doesn't want to go to the trouble of preparing for rush. Or maybe she didn't know about recommendations. Or maybe she didn't know anybody in your sorority and there was no alum group anyway near her. But like valkyrie said, the "required rec" system punishes first generation rushees who don't have a mom or an aunt or a grandma coaching them through what they're supposed to be doing.
(3) In the South, it can also end up punishing girls not from the South, when a rec from somebody the chapter knows is treated with more respect than a rec from somebody they don't. I'm not arguing with this -- it makes sense to put more trust in people you know and, well, trust -- but it also means that when there is a girl who is from New York but her Mom was a Kappa at Texas and knows you need recs so the girl spent her entire spring running around getting them only to get cut during rush because the sorority women at Auburn don't know her recommender from Adam, she might be just as screwed as the girls who didn't get recs.
Plus, it can hamper the geographic diversity of your chapter. The impression that I get is that in the South, certain chapters tend to be composed of "all the girls from Northern Georgia" or "all the New Orleans girls" in part because they relied on recs from people they knew and so forth -- as opposed to up North, where even the smallest chapter on my campus probably represents at least 5 different states and the larger groups all have women from 10-20 different states.
(4) When you require everyone to have a recommendation, does the rec really MEAN anything anymore? I mean, at my school where only around 15 girls bother to find someone to send them in, you really know that these are girls to watch out for. But if everybody has recs, they don't really tell you much about a girl. It can be hard to tell the girl whose next door neighbor has been clamoring to write a rec for her since she was 2 years old because she thought she would make such a great XYZ from the girl who talked to some alum online and faxed her a list of her high school accomplishments, unless the alum comes out and says so, which they won't always do.
(5) Unless you know the alum doing the recommending very well, you don't have a clue whether or not you can trust what she says. I know we'd all like to believe that they're trustworthy, but I'm sure there have been women out there who gave a girl a no-rec because her daughter accused this girl of stealing her boyfriend when in reality her boyfriend broke up with her daughter, then started dating the other girl. I'm sure there have been women out there who gave a girl a no-rec because of things she heard from the rumor mill that weren't necessarily true. And I'm sure that there have been gross, tacky, skanky girls who have gotten recommendation anyway simply because their recommender didn't know.
Even the most wonderful girls in the universe probably have at least one person that hates them. And even the most terrible girls in the world could find one person to write them a nice rec.
The thing is that, despite its shallowness and opinions based on first sight, sorority rush works. It means that more often than not, the mutual decision process is based on personality. I think that throwing the required rec system in there muddles things up and makes them unnecessarily complicated -- there's almost nothing you can put in a rec that can't be said during rush, except a rec ensures that it's said by somebody else who may or may not be trustworthy.
And throwing recs in there adds another whole degree of shallowness to the picture, where somebody can write "Hey, it would be great if you could get Susie because her dad's a U.S. Congressman" etc., which would probably NOT come up during rush unless Susie brought it up herself . . . which would be kind of tacky.
P.S. I'm sorry I turned into decadence for a while here. Anyway, to sum up: recs = good, requiring recs = no good.