I fail to understand how it is that people think it somehow makes something less bad that they did it for money. Doesn't the Bible say the love of money is the root of all evil, or something like that?

I mean, what, does racism have to be motivated by irrational, insurmountable hatred in order to be "real" racism? The problem IS that we think it's okay to do this when the almighty dollar comes a-knocking. I am simply dumbfounded and flabbergasted that this is couched in terms of "so, you see, it wasn't THAT bad..."

Um. No. No no NO. That's PRECISELY what's bad about it. At least if they were out-and-proud racist dickheads they'd be booed off campus. It's this insidious capitalist racism that's EXACTLY the thing we need to worry about!!! Hiding behind money doesn't make despicable actions better. If anything, it makes them worse -- not only are you racist, but you have no goddamn integrity to boot.

Plus, they lost the membership of all the decent women on campus (and probably around the country) who might otherwise join. Not only are they greedy and racist, they're stupid as well.

"not only are you racist, but you have no goddamn integrity to boot."

Exactly, TLF. Claiming that you only did it for the money just means that you're a spineless sell-out with no morality whatsoever. And somehow, that's supposed to be better?

Robbins is not a good source for info on sororities. She wrote a book on sororities, but the bias in it was astounding. She tried t o paint things like drug use, eating disorders, and cattiness off as a sorority thing, rather than a phenomena common among college women. I can honestly say she has no academic interest in sororities.

What, exactly, would you have the sorority do? Regardless of how nice/sweet/smart the women in the chapter were, the fact on the ground was that they were not attracting enough new members (for whatever reason). Those huge houses cost money to maintain. What should they have done? Let the numbers continue to dwindle until it was impossible to keep the house open, just so everybody could feel better about themselves?

What would I have them do? Hmm, let me think, what was it again, oh yes? I would have them behave with a modicum of human decency and actual sisterhood.

They're down to six members now, and they're the laughing-stock of the country, sorority-wise. How many new members do you really think they're going to attract now?

What, exactly, would you have the sorority do?

How about show some fucking moral backbone? These girls are fucking cowards. When you have a moral choice in front of you, you make the right decision or you make the wrong one, period. Guess what? Right decisions are very often HARD. Wrong ones are very often EASY. If right decisions were always easy, then there wouldn't be anything very special about making the right decision, now would there?

"Plus, they lost the membership of all the decent women on campus (and probably around the country) who might otherwise join. Not only are they greedy and racist, they're stupid as well."

That reminds me of when MetaFilter had a thread on it:

"...It also sounds like a classic marketing mistake. What do you do if your brand is faltering because your offbeat associations mean you're falling behind in the competition for the average, bland consumer? If your answer was, 'Imitate the leading brand,' you've just made the problem worse. The 'leading' sorority (skinniest, most popular, most exclusionary) is ahead because they're the best at it. You're not going to dislodge them by suddenly getting thin and nasty. You're just cutting out the strengths you do enjoy.

"The DePauw Delta Zeta chapter was building up a reputation as a good place for smarter and more interesting young women, and the best move would have been to embrace that reputation. By turning the tables and making a perceived weakness into a selling point, you carve out a healthy, stable niche. A more welcoming sorority that actually attracts members with ideas and values diversity and independence . . . that could work..."

I'm finding this situation really confusing for a number of reasons. There's a number of things that don't really add up.

1) Supposedly the sorority kicked their "less attractive" members out. I'm sorry, but I've looked at that picture of the ladies with their composite, and there are some DAMN attractive women there.
2) The media has been portraying this as the "brainy" sorority, when my visit to the university's website tells me that out of the seven sororities on campus, DZ's average GPA was ranked sixth. I'm not implying there's anything stupid about the women, but clearly high grades aren't hurting any of the other sororities.
3) According to the Facebook group, one of the twelve women asked to stay was one of the chapter's four minority members. Yeah, that's only one, but there were only four in the first place. It's like, 25%.
4) Apparently Delta Zeta's newest chapter is almost ENTIRELY made up of minorities. I find it remarkable that they would recruit and grant a charter to a diverse group of women on one campus and shut things down on another.

Delta Zeta had a problem at this campus, with a failing chapter and a house that was half-empty. As a member of the Greek system, I can tell you for a fact that when someone ends up at the bottom, the other groups have a vested interest in keeping them there because it stops THEM from being at the bottom. (Personally, I don't know why anyone needs to be at the bottom, but I'm basically a socialist.)

Apparently, in the fall, the chapter had to vote on whether or not to hold recruitment. They were told that they could not do recruitment, save all the money from it, and close and the end of the year, or they could do recruitment and lie to the new women, saying that the chapter would not close, and if they couldn't meet a target number of women, they would have to close anyway. First there was a tie, and then the chapter very narrowly voted to close.

Then the people from Nationals came back and suddenly the options had changed, and they were going to do recruitment after all. Some of the women asked to leave were ones who during their interviews said that they would do absolutely anything to recruit, except lie. (Personally, I think it's more chilling if they were asked to leave because of that reason and not a more shallow one.)

Here's what I think happened:
-The least popular sorority ALWAYS gets the lowest numbers during formal recruitment.
-Ordinarily, that sorority then has a chance to recruit outside of formal recruitment, but DePauw is a majority-Greek campus, and after formal recruitment, most of the women not in sororities are anti-sorority.
-Women were actually dropping out of formal recruitment rather than join Delta Zeta, because it was considered such social suicide. The DZ women managed to bring some of them back out afterwards, and convince them that it wasn't so bad to be in Delta Zeta. It obviously wasn't working often enough, though.

I think this was a last-ditch effort on the part of Delta Zeta's Nationals to salvage this campus. I think that the women asked to leave WERE asked to leave for superficial reasons, but I think it had far less to do with DZ being shallow than them thinking that DEPAUW was shallow.

There is a precedent here: DePauw's chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi was once LESS popular than the Delta Zeta's, but they were forced to close a few years ago. All the pressure that they were feeling, and the vicious cycle that they were trapped in, just got shifted up the ladder to DZ. I'm sure that the students at DePauw can accurately predict who's next.

So there's blame to go all around, and the whole situation is rather sickening, but the real tragedy is that WOMEN wouldn't join a sorority that they thought was less than popular. But they don't exist in a vacuum: the other Greeks weren't even going to Delta Zeta's charity events. And now these women had their chapter ripped apart, and no one will give them a good reason why.

I graduated from DePauw in '02 (was one of the 25% that didn't go Greek), so a lot of this chicanery was wearily familiar. As for the folks defending DZ's actions. True, the house's numbers were low, and it's future was in doubt. How does that justify screwing over devoted members? If the house can't attract members it should close, not mistreat its members and attempt to recolonize with new "girls frat guys wanna do" image. To its credit, the DePauw administration has said it would not necessarily allow such a move, given how badly the sorority leadership has treated DePauw students.

As for prarielily's comments about how a negative image was hurting the house. It's true that the greek system at DePauw, and most other schools I imagine, is based on the dumbest, most shallow of stereotypes. That said, it's not the job of any non DZ to maintain the house's image, and I fail to see how there's lots of blame to go around. The greek system is shit in general, but this specific incident is all DZ national's fault.

I'm trying to give up blog commenting for Lent, but FWIW...

The main problem I have with this whole situation--and this shows, I think, that all is not well with the nationals--is that in the early press releases they kept citing Article III, Section 3 of the Delta Zeta Constitution stating that membership may not be denied on the basis of race or nationality, then made an equally strong point of saying that the folks kicked out of the sorority house were still active alumna members, and had therefore never technically had their membership denied.

I'm not saying that they actually argued that it's okay to redesignate members as alumnae based on race or nationality, but when I asked two different national DZ officials for clarification on this point (using my New York Times Company/media signature), I got no response of any kind. And my post was visibly Cc'd to the Cincinnati NAACP and several reporters in that part of Ohio.

We don't have much data to work with (only because DZ national officials have been cryptic), but something smells very bad to me.

Finally, as an anecdotal thing, I've had personal experiences in organizations where the leadership attempted to serve the cause of "growth" by getting rid of members who were not, for whatever reason, part of the new vision of the organization. In my experience, that approach doesn't really work. Course I've only seen it applied in cases where fewer than 20% of the members were excluded; I've never seen an organization try to ditch two-thirds of its membership before, but common sense would dictate that this would, at the very least, create problems with cohesion.

I hope that the nationals, upset as they were that there were only 35 members sleeping in this 70-bed sorority house, are more pleased with the prospect of six elite members sleeping in a 70-bed sorority house. They will be lucky if they ever have 35 members in that sorority house again.

This is, at best, the most laughably incompetent membership drive I have ever seen and a great cautionary tale for us all. I won't speculate on what it is at worst, but the lack of details from DZ national officials does not encourage me.

Cheers,

TH

By the way, Cognitive Dissonance 'r' Us over there. Go to the main page and you'll find a non-apology apology at the top:

Delta Zeta National apologizes to any of our women at DePauw who felt personally hurt by our actions. It was never our intention to disparage or hurt any of our members during this chapter reorganization process.

All well and good. Now scroll down to the first link under "Postings," titled "Letter to the Editor/The DePauw," a nasty letter by some guy named Robert Till. Among the choice quotes:

"The reason that the chapter is still having trouble with recruitment is because of the actions of the alumnae and many of the faculty ... [T]he alumnae girls also had a hand in the low recruitment numbers by constantly berating the sorority which they were so 'devastated' over and by posting demeaning flyers and spreading vicious rumors around campus to sabotage the recruitment of new women ... If these women were so devoted to the well being and success of this chapter, why would they go through so much trouble to see it fail?"

So that's a pretty neat trick, really: Apologize to the DePauw alumnae, say it "was never our intention to disparage [them]," and then immediately below link to a piece where you disparage them.

Lovely.

Cheers,

TH

"I fail to understand how it is that people think it somehow makes something less bad that they did it for money."-The Law Fairy

Wow! If this isn't fascist thinking then I don't know what is. Look, the Constitution guarantees certain rights and the members of this sorority are simply exercising those rights. You, or anyone else, don't have the right to march in there and tell these people how to live their lives or run their organization. It's bad enough we have Affirmative Action in place; we should "cut our loses" and preserve what freedom remains.

Seriously, where does this line of thinking end? Perhaps with the abolition of feministing.com?

The reason it is "ok" for this sorority to prune members is because it's their right. The house, money, and membership are the property of the sorority. They can do with that money what you wish. It's classified as private property! Unless you want to argue that the government, or anyone, has the right to come into your home and tell you what you can do with your furniture, then you have no right to declare their actions immoral or "wrong". As I've stated before, we all have freedoms and we should preserve them, not demolish them in the name of "the public good." This is the kind of rhetoric which rationalized the passage of the Patriot Act.

Law Fairy said I fail to understand how it is that people think it somehow makes something less bad that they did it for money.

If money always trumps decency, then the key to ending sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of bigotry must be to make them less profitable than equality. Anything for a dollar, indeed.

Tom Head said I'm trying to give up blog commenting for Lent

I wondered what had become of you! Is it horrible of me to undermine your resolution by saying your comments have been missed?

Ivy said The reason it is "ok" for this sorority to prune members is because it's their right.

Whereas the members have no human rights whatsoever? I think our current crappy state of affairs in the US is due largely to this kind of thinking--the philosophy that whoever has the most money gets to make all the decisions. And those of us with less money have to trust that they'll decide to do what's in our best interest over their own. Riiiight. Because that's worked so well for the victims of Katrina, US citizens in general, our soldiers, the Constitution, and the environment. Oh...wait.

Ivy also said Unless you want to argue that the government, or anyone, has the right to come into your home and tell you what you can do with your furniture, then you have no right to declare their actions immoral or "wrong".

Last I checked, people are not furniture. Furniture has no feelings, autonomy, or rights. People do. Or at least they should. Whether they own lots of furniture, or just a little.

Justin K,

I said there was lots of blame to go around because didn't everyone who ever said something negative about the Delta Zeta chapter contribute to this? Didn't the refusal to go to their charity events contribute to this? Didn't the general UNNECESSARY shallowness of the Greek system contribute to this? Would it be so bad if people didn't NEED to talk shit about others?

I'm not saying that other people had to promote Delta Zeta. But does anyone really need to call someone they don't really know socially awkward or ugly?

Vervain said I wondered what had become of you! Is it horrible of me to undermine your resolution by saying your comments have been missed?

I figured the KKK in Mississippi got him. From what I know, they are equal opportunity sexists and racists.

"The reason it is "ok" for this sorority to prune members is because it's their right."

Don't be silly. Something being a right doesn't mean it's immune to judgment. Freedom of speech is a right; that doesn't mean that I can't say it's immoral to advocate racism. It just means that I wouldn't try to make it illegal to advocate racism. So unless someone is claiming that the government should step in and arrest or fine the sorority leadership (which is a nice image--surely the government's done many sillier things lately), talk about rights is irrelevant.

okay- Ivy expresses distaste for affirmative action; and then speaks of perhaps doing away with feministing. Hmm...
Ivy, are you lost? How did you get here?

"I fail to understand how it is that people think it somehow makes something less bad that they did it for money."-The Law Fairy

Wow! If this isn't fascist thinking then I don't know what is.

Actually, Ivy, it's from the Bible:

"For the love of money is the root of all evil," I Timothy 6:10

There are lots of things I could say about St. Paul, but it would never have occurred to me to call him a fascist.

Have fun at those pearly gates!

Unless you want to argue that the government, or anyone, has the right to come into your home and tell you what you can do with your furniture, then you have no right to declare their actions immoral or "wrong".

Actually, Ivy, the government does tell you what to do with your furniture. You're not allowed to throw it at people walking on the sidewalk.

Libertarians have a saying that does a decent job of capturing some of the underlying principles of our freedom: Your right to swing your fist ends at my face. For the most part (ideally at least -- the government mucks this up with things like the War on Drugs), people have the right to do anything they want, until their actions infringe on the rights of others. When one person's exercise of his or her rights infringes on another person's rights, the government has to balance the two and determine who gets to exercise their rights, or who gets more rights.

Here, the chapter had a right to make membership decisions. This isn't the end of the story, because the sisters also had a right not to be treated unfairly or to be discriminated against. So we have to figure out where the balance of equities suggests the rights should go. Most of us here think the sisters' rights are more compelling. You appear to disagree. That's fine, but coming in here and saying "the chapter has rights" is meaningless and distracting. We aren't contending it doesn't; we're saying those rights are outweighed.

Ivy is trolling, but FWIW...

There is nothing preventing anyone from starting a white supremacist sorority, or a sorority that doesn't admit overweight members. It wouldn't be given any charters (except maybe at Bob Jones U), but it would be perfectly legal.

Nobody is suggesting that Delta Zeta be prosecuted by the federal government. The worst anyone can do to it is make sure the public is aware of what it has done, make sure university officials know what it has done, get charters revoked, and persuade people to stop donating to it. And personally, I don't even necessarily want to see that happen--but the risk of that would be what would encourage the sorority to revise its constitution to prevent this kind of situation from happening again, and/or shake up its leadership. Just because we can't throw people in jail for something doesn't mean that we can't pressure them to behave, or risk losing money and/or prestige and/or access, all privately-owned resources that we the American people can choose to stop providing to a nonprofit at any time.

That's the American way of dealing with unjust nonprofits.

Cheers,

TH

Just today I was wondering whatever happened to Tom Head! Long time no see!

"Wow! If this isn't fascist thinking then I don't know what is."

I do love it when people talk about fascism without knowing one bit about it. Ivy, honey, aside from the fact that you're lost, you're dead wrong. Fascism is about putting profit first. It is, by definition, the collusion of government and private interests to screw the public out of their rights. If the government does not punish DZ for this violation, then they are being fascist. Hitler and Mussolini were big on property rights, not so big on human rights.

I feel that quoting Alexandra Robbins here doesn't help your argument. What happened at DePauw is a real shame, but Robbins is not known within the Greek community as being an expert. Because she interviewed 4 Greek women does not mean she knows what she is talking about. I've read her book and spoken to many many Greeks from many different campuses and types of Greek communities, and a very very small minority identify with anything she wrote about.

That being said, I highly doubt this type of recolonization will occur in the future. This has shown to everyone that it's important to make the current sisters feel welcomed and involved in their groups, not women who are not yet affiliated.