Structured IFC Rush

[Firehouse]

I respect the opinions of the posters here. It sounds like all of you are personally involved in helping your chapters rush, and everyone wants to do as well as possible. It looks that I am the ONLY ONE who sees it the way I do. I recognize that I'm in the minority (in fact, it appears that I AM the minority), but please let me lay out my perspective one last time, just to see if there's anyone who might agree with any part of it.
Here it is: fraternity formal rush does two things. It guarantees every chapter a pledge class, and it makes everyone lazy. The pledge classes are composed almost entirely of men who come through rush, and not men the chapters have actively recruited on campus. Inevitably, even though you can get some top quality guys through formal rush, this leads to smaller numbers, and a kind of 'in-breeding' when the chapters are made up of just those types who come through formal rush.
The harder you make it to complete the rush process prior to pledging, the smaller the number of men who will come out. However, the more competitive you make it by dropping all the rules, the harder and more aggressive the fraternities will be, and the better the pledge classes.
KTSnake, a Sigma Nu who offers us a lot of excellent posts on this forum, used a car dealership analogy to illustrate the majority side. He asked, "Would you rather go to a dealership that carries all lines of cars, or the one that carries just one brand?" Well, with respect, the answer is that I probably want to go only to those dealers I want to go to. If I know I want either a Mercedes or a Jag or a Corvette or a BMW, I already know don't want to be forced to hang out at the Kia or Saturn dealership all afternoon. Now, let's say I hadn't made up mu mind yet that I wanted a new car at all, and I hadn't been to any dealerships. And, let's say the Saturn salesman approached me and made me his friend and asked me to come over the the dealership. I probably would go, and they might make a sale that they surely would NOT make if I was forced to go see all the dealers. Also, if all the dealers agreed to close on Saturday, I'd be resentful that I had that Staurday option taken away from me, the customer.
Look, here's the real heart of all this. Do you want your fraternity system to grow and prosper much moreso than it's doing now? Then turn loose the power of the entrepreneur. Free the creative and ambitious men to go out and get the best guys. Free the aggressive men to create a fraternity that is so powerful and strong thatr it WILL FORCE the competition to get better just to keep up.
I was a member of a chapter that was right in the middle of a strong system, and we had full, formal rush. The system was set up to benefit the strong, and hurt the weak. We had a much better chance of getting top guys if we could go out and rush and pledge them before the Sigma Nus or Phi Delts and SAEs or whoever was on top had the chance to just stand there in formal rush and cherry-pick guys that we never really had a shot at if the rushee got to comparison shop. We overcame it by being super-aggressive in open rush, and IFC got out of the formal rush business. I'm hearing a lot of talk about 'fairness' in this thread. Formal rush is never fair to the weaker houses, just like it's not fair to the weaker sororities when they have their formal rush. What's 'fair' is to give everyone the same opportunity to either succeed or fail on their own. If everyone has 40 members and the Lambda Chis suddenly grow to 100 and they're a quality chapter and they dominate sports and social and leadership, then Lambda Chi's rivals (hating to take a back seat) will work harder to grow to meet LXA'a threat of dominating the system. yes, some fraternities are going to go out of business, but men, that is always because they just don't have enough to offer to attract enough members. Or, it's because they don't know how to rush. And there are enough of us out there who DO know how to rush, in every national, that no one should ever find themselves without that good advice.
Thanks for listening. I really enjoy reading the comments on this board.

[Kevin]

Some excellent points Firehouse. Thanks for the kind words!

Anything that adds to the number of men and women in GLO's in my opinion is good! If just one of us grows we ALL become more visible. Your average non-affiliated kid doesn't know one greek letter or one house from another in most cases.

If IFC rush does bring guys out and lets you sign a few then what harm has it done? None.

The IFC at our school (I may have already said this in this thread) has a provision that effects chapters that are below the IFC average. Anyone below average in size can participate in informal recruitmen -- ie. stage events outside of "formal rush."

This allows groups that are in trouble to catch up after a (usually) poor rush. Some groups are the exception to the rule though. Kappa Sigma after getting all but around 6 members thrown out by their alums were able to put together a GREAT rush and signed one of the biggest classes on campus last Fall. This is because they did a great deal of work with potential new members and alums over the Summer.

Rush is always something where you'll get as much out of it as you put into it.

[slamit93]

my problem with formal rush (which we have) is that it in my experience encourages dirty rushing... In our system, every fraternity has one 2 hour event each day for 4 days, and the 5th is bid day... before formal rush, we aren't supposed to advertise the fraternity, and we aren't allowed to give bids until bid day... from that point on, it is a free for all... now, the problem I see with this is that the fraternities that follow the rules take the shaft, because they are doing what they are told, and the rest of the fraternities see who can throw the biggest and best parties, thereby drawing many prospects away from everyone else... To complicate the whole system, we don't have greek housing, so the parties are all off campus, and hard to monitor... every semester gets worse than the last... if it were just open rush from day one, every fraternity would stand on the same ground, and it would be those who most actively recruit that would get the most and best guys... not the chapters that break the rules and throw the best parties in the first week of school.