Women's rush designed to maximize the number of women who receive bids and equalize the size of each sorority's pledge class has drawn criticism for being unnecessarily complicated and lacking transparency. Woman who only receive invitations from houses they are not interested in joining often drop out of rush.
>>Dartmouth's sorority rush process: Click here
Dartmouth, however, has not always used the current rush process, and the National Panhellenic Conference does not mandate a specific rush format. Several of Dartmouth's peer institutions structure recruitment similarly, but have not recently experienced the same problems that have plagued Dartmouth's process in recent years.
The 2009 Rush
This year, 83 women an unusually high number chose to drop out of rush, and only 68 percent of the women who entered the process received bids. In 2008, 76 percent of women who rushed received bids, while in 2007, 83 percent were extended bids.
A significant number of women this year also chose to "suicide" electing to indicate a final preference for only one organization instead of the standard two to avoid receiving a bid from a sorority that they disliked. NPC regulations prohibit women who have declined a bid from re-rushing for one calendar year.
Several women who dropped out of rush, in interviews with The Dartmouth, said they did not want to join the organizations they were invited to pledge. The women asked to remain anonymous because they did not want to offend organizations whose invitations they declined.
"I dropped out because I didn't feel comfortable in [the sororities] where I received invitations," a member of the Class of 2012 told The Dartmouth.
Ashley Cartagena '10, vice president of public relations for the Panhellenic Council, said that women should be more open-minded when participating in the rush process..
"To our knowledge, this is the first time that we have encountered such a controversy in recruitment not with the established system itself, but with the mindset of potential new members," Cartagena wrote in an Oct. 19 guest column in The Dartmouth, adding that women who withdrew from rush were likely to receive bids had they been willing to consider membership in all sororities, rather than in just a few.
Only one woman did not receive a bid due to a lack of invitations this year, Cartagena wrote in her column.
In addition to the 83 women who withdrew from rush, at least 24 women suicided and did not receive a bid.
The maximum number of bids each sorority could extend the so-called "quota" was particularly low this year, contributing to the high numbers of women who withdrew or did not receive a bid. Although quota was initially projected to be 35, the final number was 27, according to two affiliated women who told The Dartmouth that they had received the information in an e-mail to their sororites from their rush chairs. The women asked to remain anonymous because they were concerned Panhell would penalize their sororities for talking to The Dartmouth.
The Dartmouth was unable to independently verify the quota number, as all sororities have agreed not to release the figure, according to Panhell President Amaka Nneji '10.
Nneji declined to comment about specific rush procedures.
"We don't disclose our processes," Nneji said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth.
Several sororities exceeded quota because they were permitted to offer quota additions, according to the one of the affiliated women. A quota addition may be offered to a woman who chose to attend all rush events to which she was invited, did not choose to suicide and did not receive a bid through normal bid matching, according to the14th edition of the NPC Manual of Information, posted on the Greek life section of the University of California, Irvine web site. A woman may be placed as a quota addition at one of the chapters she attended on preference night, the last night of rush, in a "way that is optimal for the system," according to the manual.
Due to a mutual agreement between the 26 NPC sororities, women who choose to suicide are not eligible for quota additions, according to the NPC manual.
A member of the Class of 2012 who participated in women's rush and chose to suicide told The Dartmouth that she was not informed by Panhell representatives that suiciding would make her ineligible to be added as a quota addition. The woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she did not want to offend members of the organization that she did not list on her preference card, said that knowing this consequence would have "greatly influenced" her decision. The woman did not receive a bid.
Cartagena said in her guest column that women who entered rush with a specific organization in mind were largely responsible for the relatively low percentage of women who received bids this year, although she said that Panhell recognizes the need to make "certain improvements" to the rush process.
"We will consider making all-campus events for freshman women obligatory to increase equitable visibility, and we will reassess a cap on recruitment spending," Cartegena wrote in her op-ed.
Nneji also said that Panhell will work to open a dialogue about the most recent rush process.
"We as a council have decided to be pro-active and talk to '12s and '11s who went through recruitment to figure out the best way possible to proceed," Nneji told The Dartmouth in an e-mail.
Tracing the History of the Current Rush Process
The NPC does not mandate that member organizations use a specific recruitment process. Deb Carney, assistant dean of Residential Life and director of Greek Letter Organizations, said that the NPC only mandates that rush involve an element of "mutual selection."
"The recruitment procedures are dictated by the Panhellenic Council at the colleges and universities of which they are members," Carney said in an e-mail.
Carney declined to comment further.
The NPC manual advises that Panhellenic councils consider the dynamics of each individual campus, including the number of sororities and the overall interest in Greek life on campus.
The NPC also does not require that rush processes use a quota system. Two of the NPC-recommended rush procedures do not use quota figures, according to the NPC Manual of Information. Dartmouth sororities did not use quota figures until 1989, when then-Dean of the College Mary Turco instituted that feature.
In addition, Dartmouth sororities have not always used a formally structured rush process. Sigma Kappa sorority now Sigma Delta sorority and Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, the first two female Greek organizations established at the College, initially conducted an unstructured rush process, according to articles previously published in The Dartmouth. The two sororities, which were members of the College's Inter-Fraternity Council, held rush at the same time as fraternities and conducted interviews with interested women. By 1980, affiliated women had formed Dartmouth's Panhellenic Council and had established a formal recruitment procedure featuring several rounds of parties and a systematic bid-matching procedure similar to that currently used.
From time to time, as specific sororities have become less popular, more women suicide or drop out of rush. In 1982, Kappa Alpha Theta sorority extended bids to 21 fewer women than the other three sororities. The following year, a significant number of women chose to suicide, then-Panhell President Crista Bracci '85 told The Dartmouth in 1984.
Following the 2006 rush process in which two houses extended up to 15 fewer bids than most of the organizations an abnormally high number of women chose to suicide in 2007, then-Panhell President Kate Robb '08 said in an interview with The Dartmouth in 2007.
Rush Outside of Hanover
While most other colleges and universities use the NPC guidelines, their rush processes differ from the College's. At Dartmouth, women visit all eight sororities and are then "called back" to a maximum of five houses in the second round and two for the final round.
Several universities similar to Dartmouth in terms of the number of sororities on their campuses have four rounds as part of their recruitment process, rather than three. This allows women to get to know each organization better and have more options remaining after each round, according to representatives from those institutions.
At some universities, local sororities hold their own rush process, much like Dartmouth's co-ed Greek organizations.
The University of Pennsylvania's rush process is eight days long. Following an initial round, women are invited to a maximum of six out of eight houses, then four, then two, according to Stacy Kraus, associate director for programming in Penn's Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs. At Cornell University, women go to all 11 sororities, then nine, then six and then three, according to Laura Sanders, adviser to Cornell's Panhellenic Council.
At both Penn and University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, approximately 70 percent of women who began the rush process received bids this year.
While only a quarter of the women at Penn are affiliated, about 500 women sign up for recruitment each year and about 350 sink bids, Kraus said.
Kraus said that stereotypes exist about each sorority at Penn and some women drop out because they are unhappy with the chapters that invited them back, while others decide Greek life is not for them or are encouraged to drop out of the rush process by their parents.
