The national office of Delta Zeta Sorority was disappointed with its chapter at DePauw University, so they decided to come in and conduct a review, which resulted in them purging the sorority of all of the women of color and the overweight women. The New York Times reported on the story. Here is a quote:
Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.
The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.
“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.
The article also suggests that one of the “problems” with the sorority was that it had a reputation for attracting brainy women, who were in math and science. In order to revamp their image the national office of the organization tried to remake the sorority in a way that would make them more attractive to white fraternity guys, which apparently in their view meant that the women had to be skinny, white, and dumb.
This is not the first time the sorority engaged in discriminatory behavior.
This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.
Earlier this month, an Alabama lawyer and several other DePauw alumni who graduated in 1970 described in a letter to The DePauw, the student newspaper, how Delta Zeta’s national leadership had tried unsuccessfully to block a young woman with a black father and a white mother from joining its DePauw chapter in 1967.
Despite those incidents, the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.
It sounds like the sorority was doing just fine. If they needed to get their numbers up, they should have no problem attracting other intelligent women.
Unfortunately, this story supports all of the worst stereotypes of fraternities and sororities–they’re bigoted, party animals, who don’t care about school.
Thanks to Rory for the link!
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There were no sororities where I went to school. Fraternities yes, sororities no. I was grateful then, even more so after reading this story.
That’s shame in real-time. That the sorority’s national leadership actually did this with apparently no worry about repercussions or PR harm indicates how empty our society’s human heart is, and why some of us don’t take much part in society (either because we are appalled or we, too, are the overweight/unattractive/not quite white enough).
I don’t understand why men don’t find smart women hot. I sure do.
I have a stupid question (several really): What purpose do sororities and fraternities serve? What is their point? Why are they allowed on campuses? Does the school provide money to fund sororities and fraternities?
As a member of a sorority, I feel I can answer that question. Sororities and fraternities are “allowed” on campuses because they (generally) make community service and values very important to their members and contribute positively to the community. Each fraternity or sorority has a philanthropy that they serve, and require a set amount of community service to be a part of that Greek organization.
The sorority I am a part of allowed me to connect with girls I would have never had the opportunity to meet (I go to a very large university) without the unique experience of rushing and being initiated. It also allowed me to come into contact with VERY worthy philanthropic causes. Because of the vast numbers of sororities and fraternities on most campuses involved in Greek Life, generally there is a place for every person who wants to become a pledge and become part of the initiation process.
This De Pauw fiaso is disgusting and completely ridiculous, and it’s going to ruin what Delta Zeta means to me and my sisters. I hate that it takes a stunt like this for people to ask the questions they have about Greek organizations, which I believe, on the whole, strive to make adjusting to college life easier for girls and guys just trying to make new friends in a new place. Hope that helped.
And universities make the decision of whether or not to provide housing to sororities and fraternities, but other than that, we hold our own and pay dues just like any club that has to sustain itself. We have housing dues, dues that go to the national level to keep things running, ect., but we cover all these costs on our own. Even if the university couldn’t provide housing, houses are still established on campus through members buying property (i.e. a house) that isn’t university property.
The national membership should really consider a recall election, as this makes the whole organization look really bad. I mean, talk about not refuting anti-sorority stereotypes.
(Wasn’t the plot of “revenge of the nerds” based on a bunch of geeks fighting to stay in their frat? Man, I loved that movie when I was a kid. I don’t know how I ignored the terrible misogyny…)
I just wonder how the national organization has the authority to expel sisters in this way. In the fraternity I joined in college, membership decisions were explicitly on the chapter level, and there was a very specific process for expelling a brother or sister. (I’m not sure, but there was probably also a very specific process for revoking a chapter’s charter as well.)
It doesn’t sound like the Delta Zeta national organization did anything like this; rather, a few higher-ups simply decided to purge the chapter of undesirables without anything resembling due process.
I can’t speak for any school but the one I went to. I was a member of a fraternity at MIT. There were no sororities at that time (the male/female ratio was 10:1 then), but there are now (now m:f::55:45). The school provided no grants to the fraternities, although there was a loan fund for physical plant capital expenditures (and I do mean loans, they had to be and were paid back with interest). AFAIK all MIT houses operate their own building, paying a mortgage if they haven’t been in existence long enough to own their building outright.
Fraternities exist to create mutually supportive communities for students and to increase the diversity of housing and social choices available. This is especially important for a school like MIT, which for a lot of kids is kind of like learning how to swim by being thrown in to the deep end of the pool. You can get lost fast at a school like that, but a fraternity puts you together with a group of people who will take an interest in how you’re doing and “show you the ropes” and make sure you don’t have a breakdown.
Fraternities (and, I should think, sororities) provide many hours of service to the MIT and Cambridge/Boston community. No fraternity at MIT that I was aware of discriminated on any basis. Nationally my fraternity was known as a Catholic house, but the MIT chapter had Catholics, Protestants, Jews and one kid who was either Buddhist or Shinto, I forget. We had white kids, Asians, a Pacific Islander and a black kid (not a lot of blacks at MIT back then, at least not ones born in the USA). We had Mexicans and a Canadian. Fat kids, skinny kids, all body types and appearances. Guys with long hair (not a common option back then) and guys with crew cuts.
Crap like what’s in this story gives fraternities and sororities a bad name. De Pauw should de-certify this house.
Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty,
would seem to be at variance with
It sounds like the sorority was doing just fine.
You can’t ignore reality; the mortgage has to be paid. But I can’t think of a more self-destructive way of dealing with this problem than the one that the national organization came up with. WTF were they thinking?
They’re behaving the way this culture has taught them. “Fat” women and minority women are unacceptable. Being a smart woman is akin to being a “fat” woman, ie unacceptable. Well, actually you can be smart, just not smarter than men. And if you are smarter than men, you’d better be properly ashamed of that and properly grateful if any male deigns to fuck you.
The media has to combat the bad reputation rich white frat boys have recieved recently. Who better to attack than women who obediently follow the patriarchy? After all thats why its there. To control women and despise them for conforming to it.
I don’t know where you went to school, pheeno, but way back in the day when I was in college, there was no sense (or I certainly never ran into the idea) that there was anything wrong with being a smart woman. I myself, at 20, took it for granted that I was smarter than anyone else, male or female, and I never occurred to me to be ashamed of that. I had absolutely no shortage, I assure you, of men following me around seeking my company.
But back then my school (Stanford) had a differential admissions policy, and there were 4 males for every woman on campus. It was taken for granted that the average woman was smarter than the average man.
That was 40 years ago. Still holds true, however. :)
Why any intelligent woman would have time for some man who is so insecure that he considers her intelligence a threat is a complete mystery to me. There are so many men who think being smart is sexy, and such a numerous subset who think being smarter than they are is sexier still! These men are far more interesting and fun anyway than some loser who wants someone dumber than they are even.
There will always be losers. It’s a law of nature. Let them go off and lose in peace.
I recieved an entirely different reception to being intelligent. I met the societal norm of being attractive, and on top of that I have DD’s. (big boobs and brains shocks people for some reason) I actually had a BF resort to trying to dominate me physically after I made a much better grade in the same class. Suddenly, after about a week of sulking and accusing me of cheating in class, he decided my shorts were too short and demanded I stop wearing them. I cut them off shorter and told him if ever told me what to do again I’d go outside naked. That resulted in a physical fight which ended with me knocking the shit out of him with a bat and chasing him out of the apartment. He couldnt be superior to me intellectually, so he resorted to the old stand by.
So you can be smart…but you’d better have some flaw that evens it out. And if you dont, you dont dare do anything that flaunts intelligence. Which isnt something I abide by, so of course that makes me an uppity bitch.
pheeno, you need to broaden your male acquaintance pool. Get out more. Or something. The BF you reference wasn’t worth more than the six seconds it should have taken you to figure out that he’s a jerk.
If you’re hinting that I have “some flaw that evens it out,” to wit, that I am not “attractive,” I could muster a whole platoon of men who’d disagree. (If that’s whose opinion we’re worrying about.) And I flaunt my intelligence all the time. That’s how I make my living. Indeed, on my way to work this morning I confided in my beloved that actually (though I don’t spread this around) I think he might be a hair smarter than I am, and he retorted: “You don’t think that for a minute.”
Alas, he’s probably right.
That race was an issue is purely speculation, and IMO purely groundless speculation at that. Yes, the NY Times tries to turn it into a racial thing by pointing out that all the black, Korean, and Vietnamese members were thrown out, but the membership was low enough, and there appear to have been few enough non-white students (note that almost everyone in the picture is white) that it’s probably not statistically significant.
Call me cynical, but I bet the reason the NYT mentions Korean and Vietnamese members specifically, rather than just “Asian,” is that a Chinese member was allowed to stay.
Sounds like the alums have dramatically turned around recruiting!
When i saw that i figured it was intelligence, not racism: I.E., I assume the POC students were in the “smart” set and unwilling to devote their lives to becoming vapid beautiful mannequins out to get men.
Therefore (apparently) they were “insufficiently committed”. And you know what? they probably WERE “insufficiently committed”. So were the non-skinny folks.
The crucial thing to remember is that being “insufficiently committed” is, in this case, a compliment.
“I’m sorry miss, you fail to meet the criteria for the local idiots’ society, so we’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Brandon said,
“That race was an issue is purely speculation, and IMO purely groundless speculation at that.”
That’s fine, such a typical Brandon Berg response, but I can agree that we do not know for certain that race played a direct factor in who was kicked out. Of course, no one can deny that the way fraternities and sororities have traditionally been organized is racist, but let’s just say for the sake of argument you are right.
We also don’t have definitive proof that weight and nerdiness were factors in these women being kicked out, and the national chapter denies it. Why zero in on race Brandon? Why not treat all claims with equal skepticism?
This is the typical pattern of colorblind racism people often pull. Because you believe that discrimination against fat women, and nerdy women is real, you refuse to interrogate that claim with the same vigor that you interrogate the claims of racism. Since you think all claims of racism are suspect, you refuse to believe in the possibility that racism exists. Have you ever met a claim of racism that you believed?
If intelligence was the problem here, Sailorman is on the right track.
In spite of the laudatory posts above on how wonderful and public-spirited and downright virtuous campus “Greeks” are, in my own experience (which in my case included only men, since there were no sororities at Stanford) these guys tended to be on the empty-headed side, to say the least. Which didn’t cut into their overblown self-esteem, however.
Of course my experience is certainly outdated, and may not be representative anyway, but in this particular case, the women who were thrown out of this particular sorority should probably include that fact on their resumes.
Susan said (paraphrasing sailorman), “should probably include that fact on their resumes.”
Yeah, it’s a compliment to be kicked out.
“pheeno, you need to broaden your male acquaintance pool. Get out more. Or something. The BF you reference wasn’t worth more than the six seconds it should have taken you to figure out that he’s a jerk.
If you’re hinting that I have “some flaw that evens it out,” to wit, that I am not “attractive,” I could muster a whole platoon of men who’d disagree. (If that’s whose opinion we’re worrying about.) And I flaunt my intelligence all the time. That’s how I make my living. Indeed, on my way to work this morning I confided in my beloved that actually (though I don’t spread this around) I think he might be a hair smarter than I am, and he retorted: “You don’t think that for a minute.”
Alas, he’s probably right. ”
My male aquaintance pool is broad enough, thanks. The man Im engaged to now has no problem with my intelligence, nor did my late husband. But there does exist societal judgement against women who are intelligent. It starts in the public schools. There are less positive stereotypes of intelligent women than there are negative. I wasnt hinting at anything about you at all.
I could muster a platoon of men who weren’t sexist, but that doesnt mean we’ve stopped living in a sexist society.
I’ve met a lot of guys who TALK about intelligence being attractive, how they value smart women and so on. But I’ve met precious few who, when the rubber hits the road, don’t act irrationally threatened and defensive around women who are actually smarter than them.
It’s obvious on the face of it that this was a shallow, shitty thing to do. At best the national chapter kicked out all the ‘ugly’ ‘dull’ girls. I hope the club goes down in flames.
Was it racism? Hell if I know for sure. I’m still not sure if racism means you set out to harm people of group-X, if you don’t like non-white/group X because they’re group X or if racism is a system that disparately impacts people based on their ethnicity. (Not trying to start that debate here. Just saying)
Now I’ve just established that I’m not an expert on race theory but haven’t there been a bunch of studies done that show regardless of race American’s percieve white features as more appealing?
I’m thinking of a video I saw a long time ago where an interviewer asked children which doll as prettier and most of them picked the white doll. The dolls didn’t have much in the way of features they were just different colors.
Just my 2 cents.
Personally I’m satisfied that the DZ national chapter is a bunch of jackasses regardless of the exact definition of how.
Brandon wrote:
I find the attribution of motivation here to be odd, for someone who is arguing against “pure speculation.” Are you saying the Times should have deliberately omitted reporting that the evicted members included all the black, Korean and Vietnamese members? As far as I can tell, they merely reported the facts.
Technically, there is no such thing as statistically significant when the sample isn’t randomly chosen. But I do know what you mean. However, it’s almost always true, when discussing individual events, that the numbers are too low to be able to support statistical claims from a social science point of view.
Can we know for sure that claims of racism are true? No, we can almost never know that on an individual case level. But to say they are “groundless” seems like a vast overstatement, given the history of racism in the Greek system (and possibly in DZ in particular) that Rachel mentions, and the factors Joe mentions.
Are you saying that you know for a fact that “a Chinese member was allowed to stay,” or is this speculation on your part? If it is something you know for a fact, can you please state your source of information?
I suspect all of the women asked to stay were white. If any women asked to stay were POC, it seems odd that Delta Zeta’s official statement denying racism doesn’t mention that. But I admit I don’t know for sure.
Even if a POC was among the dozen asked to stay, however, that doesn’t prove that race isn’t relevant here. As Joe points out, it’s quite possible to adhere to beauty standards (or other standards) that are racist in that they arbitrarily favor attributes more likely to be held by white students.
Let’s mate with the ones who aren’t, and the other kind will die out. :)
heh
Thanks for that link, Amp, I hadn’t read DZ’s full statement. “Oh, my (bat bat bat), we are so sad that you could think such a thing of us! We are oh-so-committed to diversity blah blah.” Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Btw, Susan, have you read The Gate to Women’s Country? I think of it a sort of a complement to The Handmaid’s Tale: a dystopian post-apocalyptic fantasy wherein the women have won, and… life still sucks.
Thanks for the reference, Lu, I’ll have a look. I admit that I never read The Handmaid’s Tale because it sounded kind of depressing.
I’d be astonished if a society ruled by women was not subject to a whole host of failings, since the last time I looked we’re human beings too. ;)
“That race was an issue is purely speculation, and IMO purely groundless speculation at that.”
Indeed. Look at the photo in the NY Times article of an Asian girl who was expelled. She was ugly.
The NY Times is probably using this card because race based discrimination is possibly illegal in this context, but there are no laws against discriminating against ugly people
Half Sigma,
You’re banned from this thread for this comment: “Indeed. Look at the photo in the NY Times article of an Asian girl who was expelled. She was ugly.”
[Deleted by Amp. If you want to whine about being banned, take it to email; don’t post again in a thread you know you’re banned from. –Amp]
What many ardent feminists have never understood is that enhancing one’s appearance (light makeup, jewelry, etc.) and displaying one’s smarts are not mutually exclusive. Back in the seventies and eighties, I can’t tell you how many bright women I dated who made every attempt to look unattractive. Drab hair, let’s-meet-at-the-barricades clothes, and the like were the first impressions offered. If their appearance represented their self-image, it cast an immediate shadow, and seemed a barrier to overcome rather than an invitation to engage. Was there anything worth pursuing? Very often there was, but after a time who could summon the effort?
I was looking for an ultra-bright woman, and married her when our paths crossed. She is no less a feminist than my 1970’s girlfriends, but the effort she makes to look attractive is a lesson that some women (even of 21st century vintage) have never learned.
Wynton sez:
At this point, I feel fine completely ignoring anything Wynton ever writes ever. There is so much wrong with that sentence: I have never heard an actual non-straw feminist claim looks and brains are mutually exclusive not being least of them.
Meantime, the one thing I liked about this whole thing is that 6 of the remaining women quit. Kudos to them, I say.
I totally agree with Raznor.
Wynton, can you link to an actual example of a feminist saying that “enhancing one’s appearance (light makeup, jewelry, etc.) and displaying one’s smarts [are] mutually exclusive”? If you can’t, then I think your credibility here may be forever blown.
He didn’t say they said it; he said they never grokked the converse.
I think we’re in danger of causing a very big thread drift. So unless Rachel disagrees, I’m calling an end to the subject of “do feminists fail to realize that one can be simultaneously attractive and display smarts” in this thread. Further comments along the lines of comments 31-34 should please be taken to an open thread. Thanks.
Now, I enjoy oversensationalized news stories just as much as the next girl, but I feel a little angry about how several facts about this Delta Zeta debacle have been obscured. I did live in this Delta Zeta chapter, and I don’t remember it being a positive atmosphere at all! A place where you could be yourself?No, absolutely not. I remember feeling very alone and a little depressed at that place. Many of the girls were not social at all; the house was often eerily quiet.This sorority was a massive waste of money.
If anything, I laughed when I first heard Nationals decided to restructure the Delta chapter. Too many bad memories of that place, I guess. I remember the chapter being very diverse, but not in the way you would usually think. There were some of the coolest girls on this planet, and some of the nastiest pieces of work you’d ever have the misfortune of meeting. Delta Zeta did have some smart girls, but other sororities here do too! I don’t remember a majority of “brainy” girls. Many of brainy girls I knew were independents or in other sororities. Another point is body image, but there are several other thriving sororities here that take girls of all shapes and sizes. Delta Gamma comes to mind. Quite frankly, I always remember thinking that the other sororities seemed to be better managed and were more cohesive.
Also, there were several deactivations in the previous years. I was one of them. I also remember my new roommate(graduated long ago) coldly exhorting me to move out (although I was supposed to stay until the end of Winter Term) because I would be deactivating. Not wanting an argument, I went to Housing, got a dorm room, and carted my stuff, little by little, by myself across campus. To add insult to injury, it was raining hard the entire day. To give my roommate credit, she did drive my bookcases to the dorm. She was glad to get rid of me. Yeah, sisterhood is strong at that house. I remember certain former sorority sisters (some of whom are being paraded in the media right now) maligned us deactivates and refused to speak to us because we “weren’t committed to the sisterhood.” But now, the tables have been turned, and I finally feel a sense of vindication.I do feel bad for some of the younger girls and nice girls I knew there. This incident has been really hurtful for them. I believe they are getting their revenge now with all of this media coverage. Truthfully, I think Nationals was getting fed up with this house, just as I was. There is more to this story, but I doubt anybody will care. This tale of the evil plastic sorority tyrants versus the victimized nonconformists is just too good, too juicy to add shades of grey. Moral of the story-sororities are often a bad deal.
Hopefully ,this is the last time I have to talk about this petty nonsense that controlled my life for a semester, but I just wanted people to know the truth.
If Deactivated has some valid points than I think the DZ nationals did a really bad job at explaining why they did what they did.
Ampersand:
Journalists are always forced, due to time and space limitations, to omit most details from their stories. Because of this, the inclusion of a specific detail suggests significance, and a fairly predictable result of mentioning the fact that all of the black, Korean, and Vietnamese members were expelled is that many readers will infer racism. I don’t think it’s appropriate to mention this fact in the story without evidence that this was more than simple coincidence.
I have a fairly rudimentary knowledge of statistics, so I may well be wrong, but I don’t think this is correct. The question is whether the data allow us to reject the null hypothesis, namely that evictions were distributed randomly with respect to race. And they don’t. Not even close (see below).
I don’t think that the two incidents Rachel mentions are evidence at all. These were things that happened 25 and 40 years ago, and for all the information given here, the accusations of racism in the 1982 incident may have completely bogus. But let’s suppose that they were legitimate. How do the actions of the DePauw chapter leadership in one incident 25 years ago constitute evidence for racism in the national leadership today?
I’ll be honest: When I said that, I didn’t have any evidence that a Chinese member (or any non-white member) was allowed to stay, and I apologize if my phrasing in any way suggested that I did. And I probably went out too far on a limb in suggesting that a reporter from the NYT would commit such a breach of journalistic integrity, and you were right to call me on it.
But what do you know? It turns out that I called it perfectly. Watch the first video clip (“Former Delta Zetas Speak Out”) here. The money quote: “Included in the 23 were all of the overweight students and three of the four minorities in the house.”
Anyway, here’s the available evidence regarding racism:
1. All the black, Vietnamese and Korean members were expelled. Which, by the way, was exactly one of each, for a total of three. Oh, and one non-white student was allowed to stay. So minorities were just barely overrepresented among the evicted, by about 4/10 of a person.
2. There were two incidents, 25 and 40 years ago, in which DZ leaders probably no longer affiliated with the sorority and almost certainly not involved in this membership review denied membership to two minority women, possibly for racist reasons.
3. Elizabeth Haneline, an East Asian member who was kicked out, apparently didn’t suspect racism: “The Greek system hasn’t changed at all, but instead of racism, it’s image now” (emphasis mine).
Rachel:
Yes, I’ve met claims of racism that I’ve believed. For example, I’m pretty sure that there was a lot of racism involved in the Billy Ray Johnson case on which Ampersand posted recently. But I tend not to comment much on things with which I agree, unless I have something unique to contribute.
Anyway, I don’t think racism is completely dead. But I also don’t think it’s anywhere near as pervasive as you do. I think that there are a lot of people who are far too credulous when it comes to racism and far too eager to use allegations of racism as a political weapon, so I tend to be very skeptical when I hear people cry racism.
And this story is a perfect example of why I’m so skeptical.
I think there are alot of people who cry ” they’re playing the race card” and use the chicago syndrome to minimize how much racism still exists.
DePauw threw the sorority off campus today as a result of this behavior.
I was a sorority member for three years. then in my senior year it was as if someone opened a window into my mind. I realized how petty, how cruel and how wrong the entire process was. I tried to talk to the pres and the pledge master but was told to keep my opinions to myself and not to “rock the boat”. If I continued, I was warned, I would have NO friends and would graduate alone. I was heartbroken that the sorority I had poured my heart and soul into for the past three years was turning it’s back on me. I still couldn’t stay with them, and I guess I couldn’t believe they would do as they did. I de activated and in my letter pleaded with the president to TALK to me about the problems within the sorority. I was ignored and from that day on until I graduated, I was shunned by the women of the sorority. That was over 20 years ago and it still hurts when I think that women I trusted and respected would turn on me like that.