Pledged (22 page)

Feeling slightly guilty as something of an undercover reporter in the middle of the room listening intently to a harangue against undercover reporters, I wondered what choice writers like me had, when faced with the national organizations’ media blackout. I didn’t have sinister intentions, didn’t plan to write a book sensationalizing negative aspects of sororities; as I explicitly told national officials, my goal was to provide a truthful, balanced look at real sorority life. But as official after official countered, my intentions didn’t matter. Reporters—all reporters—are threats. To sororities, the media is the enemy because there’s a chance it might present the wrong “image.” As the “Greek PR War Room” presenter said with disgust, “We do community service and they don’t cover it. One person falls out of a window and every paper in town is there.”

Well, sure. When in October 1998 Courtney Cantor, a Chi Omega pledge at the University of Michigan, plummeted through a window to her death following a Greek activity involving alcohol, that was news. When the Tri-Delts flipped pancakes for charity, that was not news. Frankly, with all of the focus on community service at the NGLA Conference, I was surprised to discover that in white sororities, service is much less a part of the organizations than Greeks would have outsiders believe. Moreover, the PR presenter implied that the point of community service was not to benefit the community but to balance public relations for the Greeks.

“The Values Institute,” held on the second day of the conference, was comprised of a series of plenary and breakout sessions on the four pillars. I was assigned to a group of about twenty-five mostly white Greeks attending sessions run by two adult moderators: one a national officer of a sorority and the other the incoming president of an organization governing national fraternities. Throughout the day, the moderators led discussions and activities designed to inspire the student leaders to return to their chapters ready to instill and improve the proper Greek values.

During the session on service, the group discussed the differences between philanthropy (donating money) and service (spending time and energy). “White groups do more philanthropy, cultural groups do more service,” one of the moderators explained. This statement was borne out by the responses when the moderators asked how often the participants’ chapters did some form of community service. “Once a semester,” mumbled a few people. “When we have a Panhellenic event,” others agreed. One of two Latinos—the only nonwhites in the group—looked around the room in surprise. “We do it every single week. It’s so important to us. It’s a big part of our brotherhood,” he said, as the Latina sorority sister nodded emphatically in agreement. The other participants seemed sheepish, though they offered some creative ideas. One white sorority sister later mentioned that her group had started a Girl Scout troop—an idea that was voted the top idea of the session.

The white Greeks were much more vocal during the conversations about the other three pillars. They had plenty of recommendations for how to improve the average GPA of their chapters, one of the official measuring sticks of a sorority’s success in the eyes of its Nationals. Another session began, “What values are important in the Greek community?” The group came up with this list, which one moderator scrawled on a large sheet of paper with a Magic Marker: safety, trust, support, loyalty, personal and professional growth, unity, pride, ritual (the moderator refused to write down “ritual,” explaining, “That’s how we practice the integrity of our organization,” and added “justice” instead), commitment, respect, service, responsibility, learning, excellence, and honesty.

The session on “Friends for Life” began innocuously enough, until the moderators wanted to discuss the differences between friendships inside and outside the Greek world. A brother who desperately wanted to discuss hazing—who had, in fact, asked at an earlier session, “Why isn’t there a discussion about parties?”—answered, with support from other brothers, “Pledging—the fact that we’ve been through that together.” Some of the other students tried to shift the topic. “With Greek life there are opportunities to expand on those friendships outside of and beyond school, through the sisterhood,” one girl said. “People don’t pledge organizations. People pledge people,” said another. But the rest of the session turned into a heated debate over whether Greeks should be allowed to haze.

Overall, the lectures and sessions of the NGLA Conference did come across as inspiring. Along with stoking the pride of being Greek (in some cases, a pride that involved a sense of superiority over non-Greeks), many of the conference leaders offered genuine intentions and noble purposes. The theme of the conference, “Values-Driven Leadership: Back to Basics,” encouraged participants to strive to emphasize the principles on which Greek-lettered groups had been founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But as an officer of a New England sorority pointed out to me during a break, “For every one of us here, there are at least fifteen girls back at the chapter who just don’t get it. Those are people in my chapter I’d call my friends but not my sisters. This is preaching to the choir,” which could explain why, by the last breakout session, more than a quarter of the participants in my group had disappeared.

During the breakout sessions, I wondered whether the stereotypes and the values of sororities were mutually exclusive. Here were the college chapter officers of sororities across the region from Maryland to Maine—student leaders chosen to attend this conference because of their commitment to developing within their chapters the proper values, as dictated by their national organizations, or perhaps because these individuals already adhered to the correct standards. And yet, these girls clearly exhibited many of the sorority stereotypes, such as conformism: girls from the same chapters often looked alike, with nearly identical clothes and similar hair colors and cuts (usually long and straightened); and being overly image-conscious: when I asked one sorority sister about the prevalence of eating disorders, she responded, “They’re even here, this weekend. Everyone is watching what everyone else is eating and is trying to eat the same amount or less because none of the girls want to be the heaviest eater at the table.”

But perhaps the most telling moment occurred in the first few minutes of the first breakout session, during an icebreaker activity. The moderators asked increasingly inclusive questions: “If you have a biological sister, stand up.” “If you have brown eyes, stand up.” And at the end, as they smilingly tried to rouse enthusiasm, “If you’re proud to be Greek, stand up!” (Yes, self-consciously, I stood up with the rest of the room.) And finally, a joke intended to get the audience back into their seats and ready to begin discussions, “If you think MTV’s
Sorority Life
is an accurate portrayal, stand up.” To the moderators’ surprise, two sisters stood.

There seem to be two sets of warring imagery at play. One is the image of the stereotypical sorority girl, embodying many of the traits attributed to them by outsiders; the other is the image of a different kind of stereotypical sorority girl, prude and proper, “wearing her pearls,” a 1950s throwback that Nationals seemed to hope would soon displace the former image. Two sisters of different sororities at a midwestern school told me that their Nationals were working feverishly to change the composition of their chapters. “I picked this chapter because it’s extremely diverse,” said the Delta Zeta. “Now they’re trying to tell us how we should be: we’re supposed to conform to one mold.”

Her friend chimed in, nodding furiously. “Nationals have a picture of what their ideal Tri-Delt is. But the personality of the house on the campus is why I chose it. The reason I went Tri-Delt is because the girls were personable, outgoing, and diverse. Nationals don’t know how the girls are in the house, but they have their own mold. They don’t want the Tri-Delts to be crazy and fun. But that’s why I joined.”

I asked the Delta Zeta to describe the mold. “Very old school, how it used to be when they were in sororities. Perfect, typical women.”

The Tri-Delt broke in again: “Polite, definitely passive, reserved. They can’t handle women with outgoing, strong personalities. Nationals are like PR—they look for groups of women who will represent the house. It doesn’t matter if they’re fake or real.”

“The image they want us to have,” said the DZ, “is a girl who’s proper, prim, doesn’t cuss, drink, smoke, have sex. Nationals just wants to look good! But we just want to recruit people we can live with.”

“You know that commercial for MTV’s
Sorority Life 2
?” asked the Tri-Delt. The commercial showed a wealthy, conservative-looking southern woman with an exaggerated drawl and teased, “done” helmet hair, extolling the virtues of her sorority and sincere sisterhood while fiddling with her pearls. “Yeah, that’s what our Nationals is really like.”

In her book
Torn Togas
, Esther Wright described how Nationals forced her chapter to kick out certain pledges. The sorority’s national adviser arrived at the chapter to encourage the sisters to vote two pledges out of the group. “Ladies, I cannot stress just how important it is for you to let this girl go,” the adviser said. “I know these girls are your sisters and friends, but if they are still in our sorority next semester, Nationals will probably not allow you to have all five of your exchange parties. You really have no other choice.” The girls voted to drop the pledges.

Ultimately, Nationals seems to be trying to expand the scope of its control beyond sorority houses and into individual identity. These desperate-seeming reactions from sorority officials made me realize that being “pledged” to a sorority had a much deeper meaning than merely committing one’s self to her newfound sisters. A sorority girl isn’t just pledged to a house; she must also be pledged to the group of older women in the national office who control the sorority’s activities and recruitment and watch over the house as the Big Brother—or Big Sister—of the sisterhood. Commitment to a sorority doesn’t just obligate a member to socialize with a specific group of girls—it imposes on her a set of rules, regulations, and codes that in many cases are intended to supersede even those of her school and her family. (Indeed, many girls told me, as did a sorority sister from Bucknell, “If Nationals says no and Bucknell says yes, the university rules are superseded by Nationals’.”) The danger of sororities, it became clear, is that instead of enhancing a girl’s identity as she shifts from her formative years toward adulthood, the sisterhood could have a tendency to swallow that identity altogether.

At the first session of the NGLA Values Institute, a general session during which participants were supposed to discuss the four pillars with other students from their campus, I sat in front of a group of national representatives in their thirties through fifties, expecting to hear them expound on the values associated with the pillars, guided by their NGLA workbooks. Instead, the advisers were discussing thongs. “I could not
believe
what those girls were wearing when they were supposed to be wearing ‘badge attire,’” said one, her nose in the air. “They were in tank tops and denim skirts with the badge
on the strap
of their tank tops!” The other women shook their heads and clucked knowingly. “I told them, ‘If you can slide the badge up and down, that is
not
badge attire.’”

Another woman chimed in. “I keep telling the girls to buy beige thongs,” she said. “Tan bodies, white thong, white dress—I can see it!” I wondered how sorority sisters managed to live in an environment in which they were constantly being judged by these women and their minions. “It’s frustrating because when you’re in the house you’re under a looking glass at all times,” Brooke told me later. “You’re always getting judged. The only way I could get out of it was to go to my boyfriend’s house, where I could be myself.”

Sorority girls are often caught between having to conform to two different sets of standards: the unwritten codes of trends and styles within a house, and the standards that Nationals insist they are supposed to represent. Lissa, a western sorority sister, described a story that illustrates the consequences that can result when these two value sets collide.

“Even once you’re in a sorority, it continues to be about your image, about maintaining a good stereotype,” Lissa said. “We’re a very respectable house on campus. So much goes into public relations, parties. We’re the [Betas], so that means we’re classy but we know how to party. We’re smart but we’re not nerds. We’re wealthy and well dressed, but we’re not snobs like the Kappas and we don’t have perfect bodies and eating disorders like the Thetas and Pi Phis. The others are mostly smokers who have big parties. They’re less like Daddy’s perfect little girl.”

“Is that what your sorority is?” I asked.

Lissa sighed. “Yeah. We try to fight against that image by partying. They tell the sophomores during rush, ‘Don’t talk about grades or that the house has the best GPA. Tell them we don’t care what your GPA is.’ The national office exerts control because they want [Beta] to be a good name everywhere. If Nationals weren’t as involved, our experience would be less about stuff prescribed in the book, and image.”

One year at a pre-game, one of Lissa’s sisters collapsed after someone slipped a drug into her drink. When her sisters found her, they dragged her to another sorority house, dropped her, unconscious, on the stoop, rang the doorbell, and ran away. She was taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.

The chapter’s behavior was akin to the cover-ups that some officials say occur when a university learns about a rape at a fraternity party. “Generally, what happens [is] the image of the university takes precedence over the well-being of the individual, and a cover-up ensues immediately,” Claire Walsh, a former university official who now runs a rape-prevention program, told Stone Phillips of
Dateline NBC
. “I have been told of instances where the victim is convinced not to report, where she is blamed for what has happened to her, which of course is very devastating to the victim.”