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| Pledge this, motherfuckaaaaaaa! |
Is there some kind of ropes course involved in this recruitment thing?
Barbed wire?
Hours of calesthenics?
Do you handle firearms?
Do you give those firearms NSFW names?
Are there Chads involved?
Do fraternity brothers and sorority sisters stay up all hours of the night to determine whether or not their Chads are dimpled or dangling?
If so, is that kind of work strenuous?
Does a drunken Christopher Walken keep all of you up all night?
Do you do nothing but recite Shakespeare in the rain?
What else could you possibly do if you do none of these things?
Is Yaro involved?
Could you be so lucky?
I don't have any inside information, but I have observed the following on my campus in the last few weeks:
ReplyDelete--A significant increase in the number of guys wearing shirts and ties (and carrying books with embossed gold lettering on the covers, which are about the same size as, but do not appear to be, Bibles or Korans). I'm not sure whether either of these activities would be tiring, though perhaps the shirt, tie, and general well-groomed look might require another half-hour or so in the morning than the more common un/half-shaved jeans-and-sweatshirt one.
--male students in black skulking around the basement floor of my building late at night. I'm still not sure what they were doing, but I strolled by, and nobody seemed to be in extremis, so I decided not to worry about it.
--large groups of male students in identical bright-colored collared shirts and khakis standing around c. midnight near one of the campus roads (I'm not sure what in the world they were doing -- perhaps waiting for a shuttle to a party, since all of our frat houses are way off-campus?)
--howling (or at least shouting) on the quad, also late at night.
So, as far as I can tell, fraternity rush seems to involve a lot of late-night activity, but I'm not sure what the activity actually is. Oddly enough, none of the students mentioned above were visibly drunk, or hung over. And the complaining I hear has more to do with midterms than with rush. Some of our students complain that we aren't a real school because we don't have football team. Perhaps we don't know how to do rush correctly either?
I'd tell you what's involved in pledging, but I'd have to kill you.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, pledging can be a time-suck and a grind. Consider it a month(s)-long teambuilding exercise filled with challenging tasks, rote memorization, and chanting. Done right, it's a good time that you don't want to experience again.
That sounds about right. I swear I did some of the same team-building exercises in my fraternity as a pledge that I did 10 years later in my professional career.
DeleteAs for hazing, some frats and some colleges take it more seriously than others. My chapter at the SLAC didn't haze. However, when I went to grad school at a state school my frat's chapter was notorious for hazing. I tended to avoid them as much as possible. FWIW they're now an ex-chapter as they had their charter pulled and they were disbanded.
We recently discussed students pouring liquor in your asses to get drunk more quickly. Was that not enough of a peek into their lives for you, Nicholas?
ReplyDeleteMy experience isn't common, since I joined a co-ed fraternity (yes a "real" one and no I'm not in a "frarority") at UNC-Chapel Hill. A fellow sister and I were talking about what commonalities drew folks during our years there to the group, and it was mainly about having a "chosen family" - being outcast or not close to our biological families had something to do with it.
ReplyDeleteWe aren't rich: our alumni org only has a budget of approx. 40K/year to manage the house. The current active chapter has taken the lead on campus with sexual assault/harassment awareness training through the local rape crisis center. Our chapter alumni have included artists, journalists, collegiate soccer coaches, sculptors, technologists, and the like. (And also some unsavory folks too.) We don't rush like the other "regular" fraternities on campus, either.
All in all, I'm glad I joined; and I'm glad that some of my other college friends *didn't* join. I had a deep bench of friends and could get relief from house pressures/needs with others.
College students are bad at time management for Any Particular Reason... news at 11?
ReplyDeleteFrom what I understand, the hazing at one of our sororities involves not only an outrageous amount of alcohol, but mock blowjobs given to members of an allied frat.
ReplyDeleteAlso, shocker: they don't care about classes. I had several students not show up to afternoon class or not complete work for the next morning class because their sorority had an event in the afternoon. It was mandatory. If they didn't show up, they were fined. Having class/homework was not a valid excuse.
ReplyDeleteI was also in a co-ed fraternity, but we had no house, so my experience wasn't the same. The reason I chose it, besides its emphasis on doing things for others as opposed to partying, was it had the reputation of being the only Greek group without hazing. We had some silly activities (carrying around that damned pledge book, learning the names of all the actives and taking each of them for an "ice cream soda date" to learn about them, memorizing a lot of useless info about the organization), but to this day, I can read and write the Greek alphabet. That came in handy for grad school. I also got to do a lot of great service projects that gave me an appreciation for the social justice values my religiously-affiliated SLAC espoused.
ReplyDeleteFriends who pledged traditional sororities and fraternities were not as lucky. They were often rousted from their dorms in the middle of the night, forced to do that same stupid memory work while intoxicated, required to clean active members' cars or dorm rooms, eat moldy bread with bugs on it, and even hosed down in their pajamas. Going a couple of days without sleep was not uncommon, depending on how well the pledges performed other activities.
Particularly humiliating activity came from a group that was a local frat. One was called "pen on a string." The pledges were each given a list of names that included mostly females on campus, including staff and faculty. They had to get these people to sign a sheet in their pledge book. The string in "pen on a string" was attached to the genitalia of said pledges, so their junk was constantly being pulled on. This was the same frat that made their pledges eat under the cafeteria tables once a week as actives threw food on the floor and forced them to consume it while chanting, "I am a cockroach, sir."
I wanted to make friends while I was in college. I didn't want them that badly.
I taught at Big Southern State U. Apparently the Greek system is a way bigger deal in the South than it is in the Northeast, where I actually attended school. I read Alexandra Robbins' "Pledged," and suddenly it made a hell of a lot more sense. Now, it hardly counts as an academic (or even well-researched) account of Greek life, but it did provide some insight.
ReplyDeleteI happen to be fortunate in that I teach social science, and I can get away with sometimes saying to my students "I saw this on the quad, what the FUCK was that?"