Nearly seven months after first announcing its intention to prohibit freshmen from rushing fraternities and sororities, the University administration will unveil how it plans to implement the ban on Sunday at 2 p.m. The ban will take effect this upcoming fall.
The announcement will culminate half a year of meetings and deliberations by a committee of faculty, staff and students chaired by Dean of Undergraduate Students Kathleen Deignan. The Greek Life Implementation Committee was charged by President Shirley Tilghman with defining what exact actions should be prohibited, determining appropriate consequences for violating the policy and deciding how best to communicate the policy to the student body.
This past fall, the committee met with the USG, residential college advisers, residential college staff and leaders of Greek organizations and eating clubs to solicit advice on how to construct the policy, according to Deignan. The committee, however, has been tight-lipped on what the policy may look like. Deignan has said she wants to present the committee’s suggestions to Tilghman before revealing details to the entire University community.
The University is not the only school in the Ivy League determining how to enforce a ban on freshman rush; Yale is currently figuring out how to implement the ban they announced in early March. Penn and Dartmouth already have well-established delayed-rush systems.
These Ivy League schools have grappled — or are grappling — with issues similar to the ones Princeton currently faces, and a look at how they implement their policies provides insight into what Princeton’s may resemble. Yet Princeton’s policy of non-recognition of fraternities and sororities puts it in a unique position among peer schools that have sought to delay rush.
Delayed-rush policies have been in place at Dartmouth and Penn since the mid-1990s. Administrators involved with fraternity and sorority life at those schools said the later rush has become ingrained in institutional culture and that there is little demand from the student body to move the process to freshman fall.
“It was originally created to help first year students establish themselves before they got involved in the fraternity/sorority community, but now it’s viewed from the community standpoint as very beneficial,” said Wes Schaub, Dartmouth's director of greek letter organizations and societies.
Although Dartmouth does not allow students to officially rush until their sophomore fall, Schaub said students are allowed to attend events with Greek organizations and meet with members throughout freshman year. Fraternities and sororities are not allowed to offer bids of any sort until students go through rush in their sophomore fall, at the earliest.
“You don’t defer rushing, you just defer pledging,” Schaub said.
At Penn, one of the university's governing councils recommended in 1993 to postpone rush until sophomore fall. After nearly two years of deliberations in accordance with what Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs Director Scott Reikofski called the “Quaker tradition of communicating and giving feedback,” the committee agreed to push rush back until freshman spring.
Reikofski said students seem happy with the current rush timing and noted that when the administration opened discussion about potentially moving rush back to the beginning of freshman year, students did not support the change. According to Reikofski, the average GPA of Greek-affiliated students has increased since rush was moved to the spring, and there is now less “deadweight” — students who join but later become uninterested and inactive.
“It allows students to become acclimated to Penn culture and the academic rigors,” Reikofski said of the timing of rush.
Because the delayed-rush policies are widely accepted and barely contested at Dartmouth and Penn, these two schools have not codified any set consequences for students or organizations who violate the policy by rushing early. By contrast, one of the stated goals of Deignan’s committee is to determine a consequence that is reasonable yet harsh enough to deter students from violating the policy.
Schaub said he did not remember a time in his tenure that Dartmouth has had an issue with students violating the rush policy. However, Schaub noted that if a student was found to have conducted or participated in an early rush, he or she would “go through the judicial process.”
Reikofski said that in the 17 years since the ban on freshman-fall rush was put in place, Penn has only had to deal with violations of the policy “once or twice.” In those instances, discipline came primarily from the national organization, which placed restrictions on the chapter and stripped the students involved of their affiliations.
But the situation is different at Princeton. Because Greek organizations are not officially recognized at the University, attempting to regulate but not recognize the groups is one of the primary challenges Deignan and her committee face in crafting the wording and specifics of the ban.
But the University is not alone in having to deal with unrecognized social organizations. University Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee ’69 has said Princeton has a “faux-Greek system,” due to the presence of eating clubs. In many ways, all fraternities and sororities at Princeton resemble four groups that have been called “pseudo-Greek organizations” at Penn.
Many of these Penn groups — known as Theos, the Tabard Society, the Owl Society and Oz — are remnants of former fraternities that were deactivated by the Penn administration in the 1980s due to charges of hazing and other violations. The Office of Student Affairs/Fraternity & Sorority Life’s website strongly discourages students from joining these organizations, much as the Princeton administration discourages freshmen from rushing Greek organizations by sending a letter home to entering freshmen and their families.
However, Reikofski said Penn does not regulate these organizations, which Princeton is by definition seeking to do with the ban on freshman rush. No potential disciplinary action is stopping Penn students — including first-term freshmen — from joining these unrecognized organizations.
“Officially, since they don’t exist, it’s kind of hard to ban them,” Reikofski said. He added that the only course of action the administration has at its disposal is to punish individual students, but some other violation — such as allegations of hazing or alcohol abuse — has to trigger this punishment.
Though he said these unrecognized organizations can be dangerous — an allegation Tilghman has raised against Greek organizations, citing an alleged focus on alcohol consumption — Reikofski said that seeking to prevent students from joining them would run contrary to Penn’s institutional culture.
“Penn values highly freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and those constitutional rights as they translate onto a college campus,” Reikofski said. “It’s a fine line that we walk.”
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