This just in. Of course, plenty of discrimination for petty and superficial reasons still goes on in the world (see I hear this place is restricted, Wang, so don’t tell ‘em you’re a geek, okay?). And society still feels like it’s OK to comment on women’s appearances to a greater degree than they comment on men’s looks. But the self-immolation of this sorry sorority chapter gives some hope that we are yet moving in the right direction as a culture.
Sadly the only direction society is moving to perpetuate these ridiculous images of women. Contrary to glossy media reports, the sorority was not responsible for any of these lables and was the scapegoat of a nasty university culture. It was the other students on campus who caused this problem. The cruelty of the other students was so bad that when the sorority leadership did arrive to help the struggling chapter the members mistakenly assumed that too were evaluting them based on looks. It’s too bad the university doesn’t clean up the negative stereotyping by it’s own community. Instead they’ve banned a sorority and failed to address the real issue of the damage done by steretypes.
The more I contemplate this I hope the university is sued for their false allegations.
J.T. Grant,
Sure, the other students who called Delta Zeta the “dog house” did not help. But the national sorority leadership kicking out the women who were devoted to their chapter was pretty damn tacky, too. These women who were asked to leave loved being in a sorority and having sisters, and they got their letters kicking them out right before finals. I agree with the leadership of DePauw, who shouldn’t condone such shabby behavior.
I mean, I personally was never interested in going Greek. I went to a school that didn’t have fraternities and sororities. I wouldn’t have rushed a sorority even if I had gone to a school that had a Greek system. But I can understand that there are people who find community there, and these women at Delta Zeta were happy where they were and were devoted to keeping their sorority a welcoming place. I suspect that they were doomed to not getting enough pledges because there are all of these pressures to conform to correct gender roles of what makes a proper sorority girl, which includes appearance and behavior, that perhaps many of these women didn’t adhere to.
Well, at least the incident exposed how in many ways we have yet to transcend our caveman brains in terms of making judgements about superficial things. And here’s a chance for progress: the women kicked out of Delta Zeta should form their own sorority that operates according to the standards of sisterhood that they enjoyed. Time for a 21st century sorority rather than looking backwards!
OK, so now I’ve read Delta Zeta’s side of the story on their homepage. Fair enough, as far as it goes, saying that they asked the women who didn’t want to actively recruit more members to leave. But the national leaders did not handle this at all compassionately, and in expecting the women to devote more time to recruiting they may have been asking something unreasonable of women who were in demanding majors, with at least a couple in male-dominated science and technology subjects (CS, math) where they weren’t going to find as many potential sorority members (unless DePauw had some amazingly equitable gender ratios there). And this was on a campus where other students were shallow enough to call Delta Zeta the “dog house.” Maybe if all of these dismissed women had been communications majors that wouldn’t have been a tall order to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing rather than their studies, but it sounds like they may have had an uphill battle there anyway.
I dunno, sounds more and more like La Cosa Nostra to me…
I vowed I would never join a sorority either but when all nine of my dorm roommates rushed, I decided I’d check it out. I ended up pledging at Zeta Tau Alpha, called “Zits Tits and Armpits” around campus. Joining worked out well for me because I was in the engineering co-op program and I could move in and out of the sorority on alternating semesters which I could not do if I lived in the dorms or an apartment (unless I found someone on the opposite schedule to swap with). What didn’t work out well was the mandatory (and often unpleasant) social stuff which didn’t mesh with my studying. That and the fact we were under pressure to improve our sorority’s image on campus. It’s eerie that over two decades later, this stuff is still going on.
This is only vaguely related to this post, it’s more about your website…
You seem not to have a so Google tries to be clever and use the first heading on the page. This means that your search result entry curently has, as its title, “Delta Zeta sorority at DePauw now moved to alumna status” which isn’t as useful as it could be. Minor, but oh-so-easy to fix.
This entire fiasco really is a result of the university skapegoating its struggling sorority. Anywho who has been a student at De Pauw can tell you the extreme social pressure at the school – it is like Indiana 90210.
There was one sorority that didn’t fit in, and it was Delta Zeta. Instead, of helping them, or helping to change the university culture, the university has blamed the sorority that was a victim of this perverse culture.