During the following weeks, however, Caitlin and her Little Sister hardly had time to see each other. They settled for catching up online whenever they could. With her lacrosse schedule, her obligations as Alpha Rho vice president, and a heavy course load, Caitlin wasn’t even able to make much time for Chris. Despite his distaste for Greek life, Chris, who understood that Alpha Rho had given Caitlin both a support system and a leadership role, hadn’t complained in recent months. In fact, he had treated Caitlin on more equal terms since December’s fight.
When Caitlin did manage to find spare time, inevitably she spent it with Sabrina. Now that Sabrina was no longer dating the professor, she and Caitlin were constantly together. When Caitlin had lacrosse practice, Sabrina watched or read at the field beneath rows of Bradford pear trees so white and puffed they looked like clouds. When Sabrina crammed for a biology exam or worked the late shift at the restaurant, Caitlin studied alongside her. When Caitlin prepared to give a presentation on rape to the sisterhood, Sabrina helped her rehearse. Sabrina introduced Caitlin to her non-Greek friends, who welcomed her into their group and provided free marijuana when they got together several times a week. Sabrina and Caitlin smoked much more than they had the previous semester. It was tough to turn down free weed.
By the end of March, Sabrina and Caitlin were spending so much time together and talking so frequently that they joked they were dating. When anyone asked either of them to do something, they checked on plans with the other first. A non-Greek friend remarked to them that they had become a collective unit. “You two make group decisions,” he told them. “You have a hive mentality.” Caitlin and Sabrina knew this observation was true. They reasoned that because they preferred a few close friends to many acquaintances, it made more sense to spend time with each other than to nourish relationships with other sisters who weren’t as much fun.
This included Amy. Caitlin had been impressed with Amy’s continued cordiality toward Chris, but increasingly she was coming to the conclusion that she and Amy had completely different personalities. Amy exuded so much energy that sometimes it made Caitlin tired simply to be with her. Nearly every morning, Caitlin woke up early to the sounds of Amy laughing loudly as she told some sister a story. Her mother considered Amy a bad influence anyway, because she shopped more than she studied. As much as she still occasionally enjoyed Amy’s company, Caitlin thought, it wouldn’t be terrible if they began to drift apart.
The Pledging Paradox
IN THE 1990S, NATIONAL GREEK ORGANIZATIONS AND SCHOOL administrators, facing threats of civil lawsuits, cracked down hard on hazing, to which several dozen Greek deaths had been attributed. In May 2002, Alfred University banned Greek life from the school following an investigation of the February death of a fraternity brother that allegedly was because of a beating during pledging. Other schools, including Bowdoin and Colby, had previously also terminated their Greek systems because of hazing violations. By mid-2003, forty-three states had passed antihazing laws that rendered hazing a crime. In March 2003, congressional lawmakers, supposedly sparked by the September Alpha Kappa Alpha drowning deaths, introduced the Hazing Prohibition Act of 2003, a bill that would withhold federal student financial aid from students caught hazing. (As of this writing, the bill was referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce).
Meanwhile, the Greek definition of hazing expanded from focusing mainly on physical violence to the current National Panhellenic Conference definition: “Any action or situation with or without consent which recklessly, intentionally or unintentionally endangers the mental or physical health or safety of a student, or creates risk of injury, or causes discomfort, embarrassment, harassment or ridicule or which willfully destroys or removes public or private property for the purpose of initiation or admission into or affiliation with, or as a condition for continued membership in a chapter or colony of an NPC member fraternity.” The way to avoid these situations, as moderators at the Northeast Greek Leadership Association Conference explained, was to prohibit all activities that differentiate pledges from sisters. “Hazing is anything that distinguishes one member from another,” the moderators said.
Despite Nationals’ vocal derision of hazing, the National Panhellenic Conference has not sent the strongest message that it could. The NPC has two levels of policies: resolutions, which require a majority vote of the delegates of the twenty-six sororities, and Unanimous Agreements, which “must be incorporated into College and Alumnae Panhellenic procedures and are binding upon all chapters of NPC member groups.” Currently, the NPC’s stance against hazing is only at the resolution level. “It might have been more powerful if it were a Unanimous Agreement,” NPC chairman Sally Grant conceded when I asked. “It would be tougher on students.”
The new definition has led to debate and bewilderment among sisters such as the Alpha Rhos, who didn’t understand why their previous year’s activities—which included scavenger hunts and other pledge-only games—qualified as hazing. Several sisters felt they had lost the ability to relate to the pledges because their pledging experience was so different. “We never really hazed in the first place. I was disappointed we couldn’t do things the way we’ve always done it. It’s weird changing it after years of doing it a certain way. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t do some of the stuff—no one got offended by it and the girls seemed pretty comfortable,” Amy said. “This year’s pledges didn’t have to do anything. They said it was really easy, and they didn’t understand why the activities we canceled were considered hazing. We felt bad because we had to do all this stuff and they didn’t. We knew the older sisters better because we were given more of a chance to be involved.”
Beta Pi defied hazing rules much more egregiously than Alpha Rho by using pledge books, holding mandatory sleepovers, and forcing pledges to drink and carry around silly items. When I asked Vicki if she and her sisters were afraid they would get caught hazing, she replied, “I didn’t think it was really hazing because it was fun. We’re not a hazing house.”
Between sorority girls’ confusion over the rules and their disregard for or unawareness of them, the hazing crackdown has hardly eliminated sorority hazing. When Arika Hover pledged Alpha Chi Omega at Arizona University in November 1998, the sisters repeatedly reassured her that the chapter was opposed to hazing and that Arizona was an antihazing campus. But one night, sisters divided Arika’s pledge class into groups of five and separated them into different rooms in the house. In one room, the pledges had to answer questions and drink straight shots of vodka when they answered incorrectly. The girls consumed several shots in a fifteen-minute span before they were hustled to another room. The sisters in this room smugly gestured to a table that displayed a black permanent marker, a knife, a hammer, and a dildo.
“We are going to ask you questions,” the sisters told the anxious pledges. “And if you get them wrong, we will violate you with your weapon of choice.”
“Who were the founding mothers of this sorority?” a sister asked one of the pledges. That was an easy one; the pledges had been memorizing sorority minutiae for a month. The sisters turned to Arika, whom they had picked on throughout the pledge period. “How far is it from here to Wisconsin?”
When Arika thought they were kidding and made up a number, the sisters told her to choose a weapon. She picked the marker, and the sisters made her write the correct mileage number all over her face. Then Arika grew angry. “This is bullshit!” she yelled. “You told us when we pledged that you guys were against hazing and that this was a nonhazing campus. This is going to stop tonight. I’m leaving.” She led the pledges in her group out of the room and through the hallway, where they saw other pledges crying and cowering in the corners. Sobbing at home, Arika called her mother, who called the campus police. The sorority’s national officers came to Arizona to “take control and start the reformation,” Arika told me. “And then I got kicked out.”
Here I interrupted Arika’s story. “Wait a minute,” I said to her.
“You’re saying that you were so upset with the hazing that you walked out, called your parents, and cooperated with the police, but despite everything these girls did to you, you didn’t willingly drop out of their sorority?”
“Nah,” she replied. “I thought about dropping out but my whole family was Greek. They’re like, ‘That’s just what happens.’” Not long after the national officers arrived on campus, the adults instituted a random room check for alcohol—and found a bottle of alcohol that had mysteriously appeared in Arika’s closet. Allegedly framed, Arika was tossed out of the chapter.
Compared to other hazing stories I heard, Arika’s experience seemed fairly run-of-the-mill. What surprised me, however, was that after all the supposed torture that the older girls had put her through, she still wanted to be their sister. Throughout my interviews I discovered that girls just arriving at college, seventeen and eighteen years old, lost and lonely among thousands of strange faces, will often do just about anything to belong to something larger than themselves; to find fast friends and a long-term affiliation. “They’ve actually done studies in which they’ve found that those people who have been hazed . . . actually feel that they want the group even more. They are more determined to be in. They’re more dedicated,” Dr. Joyce Brothers has said on television. The tightness of the group and its aura of secrecy lead these dedicated members to succumb more easily to peer pressure. “Whenever you have a group . . . it becomes a mob after a while when it’s secret, when there’s no light there, when you don’t let other people know. So the very worst part of the worst person in that group begins to do something, and then the others are afraid to pull away, so you get behavior, mob behavior, which is the very lowest common denominator.” (When I asked Brothers, a sorority member herself, for further comment, she told me she would not participate in “somebody else’s book.”)
Clearly, lowest-common-denominator behavior, such as the California sisters leading their pledges to their death in the ocean, is deplorable. But the new national sorority interpretation of hazing, which essentially says that a group can’t make pledges do anything the sisters don’t do, is confusing and frustrating to today’s sorority girls. Many upperclassmen have difficulty understanding why their current pledges are not allowed to share the experiences they had. In their eyes, punishing a sorority for hazing because it asked the pledges to wear sorority colors is akin to suspending a fifteen-year-old under a high school zero-tolerance drug policy because she carried Tylenol for a headache. As Amy explained, the panic over the new rules led to a rift between sisters and pledges instead of a slowly strengthened bond. “Part of the problem was that there was no pledging,” Amy said. “I know it’s different now with all the rules, but we were trying to come up with a happy medium and couldn’t find it.”
The moderators at the Greek Values Institute I attended in Pittsburgh reluctantly allowed a brief group discussion about hazing after students kept raising the issue. When the moderators explained that the rule forbidding pledge-only activities extended to the mandatory pledge study hours—that the sisters would have to be in the room studying with the pledges—many students objected. “The reason why national policies are so comprehensive is because someone screwed up and you guys have to pay the consequences,” explained the moderator. Hands immediately waved in protest.
“The hardest pledging makes you care about your house so much,” said one student. “I feel like it has to happen.”
“Not hazing means not pledging,” said another. “Without it you’re not considered ‘real’ brothers and sisters.”
“It’s tradition,” said a third. “It is a rite of passage and a necessary evil.”
Nationwide hazing debates repeat these sentiments, particularly the need for a pledge to “earn her letters” before being allowed to become a full-fledged sorority sister—to prove her worth and devotion to a sorority and to learn to subordinate herself to the group. A 1980s study found that 77 percent of then-current Greek members and 63 percent of alumni believed that hazing was important to Greek life. In the same vein, in 2000, a sorority president posted on stophazing.org, a leading antihazing web site, a defense of hazing. “Wherever you go you are going to be hazed to some extent, at work, at school, even at home,” she wrote. “I have been hazed, and I now haze our pledges . . . There is a purpose. It teaches the pledges togetherness, communication, respect, courage, and a huge sense of accomplishment. I can’t tell you the feeling I got when at the end of hell week I was able to take off my blindfold and all of the sisters were gathered around us and a banner saying congratulations was there. I had earned something. I had accomplished something. And for that I am a much stronger person.”
A 2003 post expressed the argument that college students face risks regardless of whether they are hazed. “People can be harmed or even die doing almost any activity. It seems silly to say that scavanger [sic] hunts present a real threat to the life and limb of students,” the person wrote. “I assure you more people have died at concerts, skiing, hiking, crossing the street, or climbing ladders. Should we therefore ban greeks (or better yet all college students) from latters [sic], crossing streets, rock climbing etc.?”
The flaw in this approach is that just because any situation can be risky doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to prevent risks. Should we remove lifeguards from beaches and pools because some swimmers have died while lifeguards were on duty? At the same time, however, it’s clear that the current catchall policy—apparently designed to shift as much liability as possible away from the sorority national offices—isn’t working. In December 2001, Michael V. W. Gordon, a former longtime executive director of the National Pan-Hellenic Council, stated, “There’s no question that hazing in sororities is increasing in frequency as well as severity.”
This failure may have to do with the ambiguous and subjective nature of the current sorority hazing definition. Representatives of the national sororities say that anything chapters do that distinguishes a pledge from a sister is hazing. But these same Nationals still call for a mandatory pledge period between rush and initiation—unlike the African American sororities, which eliminated official pledging entirely in 1990. Moreover, under the hazing definition, chapters would be vilified for doing to pledges what sororities are already allowed to do to rushees, such as suggest they wear certain outfits, herd them around in groups, or make them wait outside the house until the end of a “door song.” Further, by banning all ways to distinguish pledges, Nationals have pushed more dangerous forms of hazing underground. Because they aren’t even allowed to send pledges on scavenger hunts or other activities they consider benign, many sorority sisters figure that if they are going to do anything to the pledges, then they might as well revert to the forced drinking and fat-circling of the 1980s.
It is difficult to see how asking pledges to wear a particular color could injure or kill them. There is a line drawn between demanding color-coded dress and forcing pledges to wear bikinis in the snow. And with all of the local advisers at a sorority’s disposal, it seems reasonable to expect that an adult could be present at all pledging activities. Regardless, if sorority national officers respond that these suggestions would lead such activities down a slippery slope, one could direct them to their own hypocrisy. Nationals claim that pledges aren’t supposed to be distinguishable from sisters. Funny then, that these same Nationals require pledges to wear a “pledge pin” distinguishing them from sisters, don’t allow pledges to wear the sorority’s crest, exclude pledges from ritual ceremonies, and refuse to initiate pledges until they pass a pledge-only test.
TRADITIONS AND SECRET RITUALS
From Spring Breaking to Breaking Oaths
Our Ritual and ceremonies, those things which symbolically bind all Pi Phis together, are also to be shared only with other Pi Phis. It is a sign of your loyalty to the Fraternity, that you treat these things with confidentiality as well as respect. In turn you will find your entire lifetime fraternity experience and accompanying Pi Phi f
riendships take on deeper and more beautiful meaning when you know they are shared only with those who bear the name of Pi Beta Phi.
—Pi Phi Forever, 1990s
Only sisters of your sorority know this confidential information, and you must promise never to reveal it to anyone.
—Ready for Rush: The Must-Have Manual for Sorority Rushees! 1999
Girls Gone Wild
SOMETHING THAT BROOKE SAID about her chapter’s “Boob Ranking” continued to resonate with me throughout the year. She said, “Everyone before you did it, so you have to do it, too.” This creed is the linchpin of sororities. Tradition binds sisters to each other, to their national organization, and to their organization’s history. For some sororities, tradition is embedded in their strict adherence to their group’s ritual. Others gain a sense of continuity through yearly repetition of specific activities. At one large Virginia school, chapters of Alpha Phi and Zeta Tau Alpha translate tradition to mean holding Naked Parties.
Once a year, these sororities hold what are officially called “Sister Parties” but are commonly referred to as “Naked Parties,” for which the pledges dress up the sisters in outfits as unattractive as possible (a recent year’s theme was “rednecks”). Naturally uncomfortable in their laughable outerwear, the sisters last only an hour or so before they end up stripping off their clothes until they are running around in the nude. While many of the girls continue the usual party activities (drinking, talking, and dancing), others take the now racy function in a different direction: the girls hook up, sisters and sisters, pledges and pledges. By the time boys are allowed to walk in the door, they are thrilled to find naked girls kissing.
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