Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority will offer early bids to members of the Class of 2014 on Thursday, Sept. 22, before the official Panhellenic recruitment process begins Sept. 30, according to an email sent by Panhell to female members of the Class of 2014 on Tuesday. Students who receive bids will be able to bypass the formal rush process, the email said.
The new rush event will allow potential new members to indicate their preference for EKT by "shaking out" in a similar to the rush process used by Dartmouth fraternities, the email said. EKT will continue to offer additional bids through the formal recruitment process from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5.
"It's not necessarily moving away from formal rush," EKT rush chair Chelsea Stewart '12 said. "It's just more about reaching interested women who we wouldn't necessarily reach through formal rush, or who might be turned off by the chaotic environment of week-long formal rush."
Stewart said the new event will allow students to "block rush" EKT with their friends, making the incoming pledge class more cohesive.
The event would be a good opportunity for women who had already decided they wanted to join EKT, Stewart said. She emphasized that women who were undecided about which sorority to choose could still join the house through traditional rush.
Panhellenic Council President Ellie Sandmeyer '12 said this event will be a positive alternative to the traditional rush process, which she said often turns away a number of potential members.
"We always get complaints about the way rush runs, just because it's such a long, arduous process," she said, adding that the new event will be a good way for EKT to "generate some excitement" about the sorority.
The formal sorority recruitment process, which national sororities are required to follow, occurs in several stages, according to Panhell's website. The first stage requires female recruits to attend events at each of the College's eight Panhellenic sororities. During the second stage, women select up to four sororities to visit, after which they indicate their preferred two houses. After the prospective members attend events at those two houses, sororities issue bids.
Caitlin Nicholson '12, who previously served as EKT's vice president and currently serves as its new member educator, said Panhell approached EKT with the idea for the new rush event last year as a way to "stabilize" sorority membership numbers before bringing in a ninth sorority. Other sororities had requested smaller pledge class quotas, and Panhell was concerned that the quota would be smaller than the large number of graduating seniors in EKT, Nicholson said.
Although EKT's Class of 2013 pledge class is comparable to the size of other sororities' pledge classes, relatively few members of the Class of 2012 sank bids at EKT. During Fall 2009 rush, EKT accepted 14 new members, while the seven other sororities brought in between 23 and 33 new members.
During the Fall 2009 rush process, 83 women withdrew from the rush process. A number of students blamed this on perceptions of a tiered sorority system and students' disappointment after not receiving bids from their first-choice sororities, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Panhell is currently working to invite a ninth sorority, Delta Zeta sorority, to campus, but wants to ensure stable membership numbers among existing houses before doing so, Nicholson said.
Both Sandmeyer and Stewart said that while membership numbers were one concern for EKT, the sorority is mainly implementing the new rush event in order to reach out to a broader range of students.
"There are girls who would never consider going through formal recruitment," Sandmeyer said. "I think that's the point of this event to take advantage of that opportunity and maybe try and appeal to some girls who never would have considered rushing in the first place."
EKT is not the first Greek organization to alter its rush process. The now-defunct Delta Gamma sorority, which suffered from low membership, enabled women to effectively block rush in 1995 by allowing them to commit to joining the sorority during their freshman spring.
DG, which re-organized as the local Zeta Beta Chi sorority in 1997, was forced to close in 1998 due to continuing membership problems, The Dartmouth previously reported.
Block rushing was more successful for the newly-founded Kappa Delta Epsilon sorority in 1993, which used a process similar to that used by DG. KDE also conducted a "successful" open-rush similar to EKT's event approximately 15 years ago, Nicholson said.
