Yale bans freshman fall rush after controversial pledge task chants in 2010

Starting next year, fraternities and sororities at Yale will be prohibited from holding fall rush for freshmen, Yale College Dean Mary Miller and Dean of Student Affairs Marichel Gentry announced to the Yale student body last Thursday.

Yale’s Committee on Hazing and Initiations recommended the ban in April 2011, a committee created by the University in 2010 after members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale were seen shouting offensive chants as part of a pledge task. The fraternity received a five-year ban on its charter for the incident.

Yale’s decision to prohibit fall rush for freshmen comes on the heels of a similar decision by the University in August 2011. Unlike the Princeton policy, though, which prohibits freshmen from rushing at any point during their first year, freshmen at Yale can still rush in their spring semester. The University’s policy — initially recommended in May 2011 — takes effect beginning with the Class of 2012.

Master of Silliman College and Committee Chair Judith Knauss said in a March 2 Yale Daily News article that the decision was meant to allow freshmen to get through orientation and to understand better the dangers involved in hazing.

“The work of the committee was to look for solutions to and prevention of situations that could result in practices that would undermine the fundamental work of education,” Gentry said in an email to The Daily Princetonian.

Gentry said that Yale administrators are still determining the logistics of the ban. A different committee with representatives from each Greek organization will be formed to devise these regulations. This composition will allow fraternities and sororities to provide input in the decision-making process — something they claimed they did not have the opportunity to do while the Committee on Hazing and Initiations was constructing the policy — according to the YDN article.

Last spring, some Princeton fraternity and sorority members expressed a similar displeasure with the fact that they felt they were not adequately consulted by Working Group on Campus Social and Residential Life, which recommended the ban in May 2011. As at Yale, though, the implementation committee gives them a voice in the process, since the committee formed in August 2011 after the announcement of the ban includes three students who are involved in Greek organizations and three who are not. President Shirley Tilghman charged the new committee with implementing the ban and clearly defining its parameters.

While Yale’s Committee on Hazing and Initiations made its recommendation the month before the University did, Yale sophomore Avi Arfin, president of the school’s chapter of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, said the University’s August decision to ban freshman rush was a factor in the Yale administration’s decision.

“The administration told me that Princeton’s decision was one of the factors it looked at because Princeton is a ‘peer institution,’ ” Arfin said in an email. “Of course, the problem with this reasoning is that Princeton’s fraternities are not our peers. All of Princeton’s fraternities are unregistered and unassociated with the school, whereas, for example, Yale’s AEPi is a registered on-campus organization with large ties to the rest of Jewish life at Yale.”

Arfin added that he does not think the new policy will be effective in addressing hazing issues on campus.

“Hazing is absolutely a problem that needs to be dealt with, but it should be targeted directly,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to target rush if the problem is initiation.”

Arfin also said that he disagreed with the University’s decision to target fraternities as the primary sources of hazing on campus.

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“The administration mistakenly believes that the problem is mostly a Greek problem rather than a broader cultural phenomenon that is prevalent across a wide variety of groups,” he said.

The new policy will not have an effect on sororities, which currently hold rush in the spring. According to the YDN article, sorority leaders are in favor of spring rush because it allows freshmen to socialize outside of sororities and familiarize themselves with the Greek system before making the decision to rush or not.

Some Yale sororities do hold recruitment sessions during the fall, although most female students who rush in the fall are sophomores, who are exempt from the ban.