Alabama recruitment fall-out

[AOII Angel]

In other parts of the country, my experience from advising in Maryland, AZ and CA is that chapters are NOT excluding women based on race. The chapters I have advised are ethnically diverse, including the one I advise currently, which is majority Latina. The chapters that are STRONG recruiting chapters will have diversity completely dependent on the mix of women who apply for formal recruitment. They may not have as many non-White candidates as the process can be more daunting. All of the African American PNMs in those recruitments are offered bids, however, so there is no issue of system wide exclusion. The weaker recruiting chapters I have worked with tend to have more diverse memberships as they pull their members from a cross section of the university and find women of all backgrounds as they participate in COB. The South is definitely behind the times, but to say ALL are the same as Bama is ridiculous. As a Southern alumna, I am embarrassed by the lack of diversity in the Southern chapters, but have been pleasantly surprised many times in the past few years when chapter pictures are displayed on FB from our smaller chapters in the South which show increasingly diverse groups which include African American women. Older, more established chapters at bigger schools seem to be the biggest hold outs, so don't generalize. There is much work to do, but all is not lost.