When I was eighteen years old, I received a bid from a top tier
sorority at the University of Maryland. Accepting my coronation into one of Greek life's
royal families would soon alter the trajectory of my college experience entirely. Three years
after a dramatic exit from my sorority, I released a podcast series about my
experience to break the culture of silence that is intentionally cultivated in these environments.
After releasing season one, I received an outpour of messages from individuals ready to
tell their own Greek life horror stories on the record. This isn't just my
story anymore. Welcome to Snap. Season two. Snapped. The entire process
of what goes on behind the scenes at sorority recruitment was quite a puzzle for
me to figure out. I only lasted seven months in my sorority, and
so I did not witness the other side of sorority rush. However, each
interview that I held, each document that I discovered, was a different piece
to the recruitment puzzle. In this episode, we will complete the puzzle so
that we can see the full picture of how sorority chapters end up with their
final pledge. Class. Welcome to Part three of the Snapped Recruitment special.
If you haven't listened to the first two parts yet, go listen so that
you can fully understand Sorority World's biggest event of the year. I'm your host,
Lucy Taylor. This is Snapped. As a PNM, also known as
a potential new member, you don't know shit about how you're being ranked or
judged on the other side of recruitment, so I could imagine that doing recruitment
for the first time as a sister and seeing it all unfold on the other
side would be a fascinating experience. I was excited to go through recruitment on
the other side. It was like the veil was being lifted for me.
The last time I'd experienced this, I was a freshman. I had no
idea what they were doing, how I was being judged. I had the
chance to interview Nicole, who went to a private university in California, and
I was super intrigued as she described to me what her first recruitment as an
initiated sister was like. Nicole had just gotten back from studying abroad, so
she hadn't seen her sorority sisters in a while. When I went abroad,
my eating disorder got a lot worse. I got depressed. I ended up
gaining a lot of weight as a result, and when I came back my
junior year, I was about twenty pounds heavier than when I came there at
first. So anyway, I come back and I was not this polished,
perfect sorority girl that I was when I was a freshman. And what ended
up happening was I would come in, I would get all dressed up and
bretty in the dress code. I would do full makeup, hare go through
the list. They would say, Okay, these are the girls that are
assigned to this round, and this is where you're standing. And at the
end, I come up to the advisor excuse me. I didn't hear my
name on the list. She said, Oh, we don't need you for
this round. I was like what. I was so confused. And this
didn't just happen once. Every night that we had these recruitment events, they
would like, not include me in the list. When midnight came around and
we met the new girls, I'm looking around the room like I don't even
know these people because I haven't been a part of the process. It was
really hurtful for me. Went up to the girls who were in my chapter,
who were leading recruitment. I asked them, why is this happening?
Why are you not you know, including me, like why are you sending
me home every night? And they would never give me a straight answer.
They would be like, oh, we're gooddy, we can't talk to you
right now. And even to this day, I'll have not got an exact
answer about why this happened. It was really bugging me actually leading up to
this interview, and I messaged the girl who was the president at the time.
I sent her a DM on Instagram. I was like, hey,
like, this was obviously a long time ago, but I was not allowed
to participate in recruitment and it's still bugging me and I just wonder why.
And she was like, oh, I wasn't directly involved in the recruitment.
That wasn't my role. And I'm like, Okay, that's probably BS,
because I definitely saw you up there with the VP of recruitment every night,
Nicole's alumni advisor and the recruitment team wouldn't allow Nicole to participate in recruitment events.
I think it's important to point out that this was the same advisor from
the last episode that instructed the members to rank the pnms using an ice cream
metaphor. She said, someone who's at ten is a perfect ice cream cone
who had rained sprinkles and it looks beautiful. Someone who's a five is like,
this is a nice dish of ice cream. I would eat it,
It's okay. And someone who's a one is like an ice cream cone it's
been dropped on the ground. And this was the same advisor that said,
you want this chapter to be one that you could not have gotten into.
Nicole's sbrity advisor told the members that you want the girls coming in to be
of a higher caliber. Nicole shared that there was a clear initiative to turn
the chapter from a middle tier chapter into a top tier chapter. I think
the advisor might have even gotten some pressure from Nationals to reform our chapter and
make it top tier. And the fact that this is all influenced by a
puppet for this larger organization with its own agendas and its own financial motives is
just very very strange when you look at it from a business standpoint. The
goal of becoming a top tier chapter makes sense if you have that reputation as
top tier. The more people want to join the sorority, the more money
you're making. So in terms of business, the alumni advisor who's being instructed
by nationals is just doing their job. Essentially, the chapter was trying to
attain high valued recruits in order to become a top tier. So in the
same way that the sororities are identifying the pnms that are nonentities and might weaken
the image of the organization, they're also identifying the PMMs that they really want
to get in their chapter, the high valued recruits who might bring a higher
status to the organization or even bring more power by gaining a high valued to
recruit who may come from a powerful family Let's say their dad is in Congress
or some shit, the chapter then gains more power and control when bidding someone
offering them membership into these elite organizations. Greek life culture forces you to ask,
if we offer this person a bid, what will they give us?
Besides their money, of course, what perks or connects might this person offer.
I discussed this concept of a high valued recruit with a VP of recruitment
that I interviewed. Would there ever be like high valued recruits. Yeah,
well, I would get a lot of texts from sisters up being like,
oh I saw this girl's instagram and I know she's going through recruitment, like
she'd be great, and then like make all their friends vote tends on them.
Usually they were really rich, they're conventionally pretty, they're known for partying,
or they go to like the best clubs. We had a recruit who
had a really famous dad the VP of recruitment before me, who I was
shadowing for me, Oh, you have to put her with like our best
group. You have to put her with like our prettiest sisters. So she
asked first that and everyone was informed what party she would be in and like
who she'd be talking to, and was basically told, like, you have
to put on a show for this one girl. And of course the alumni
organization is involved when identifying these potential assets for the chapter. The most common
example of this is a recommendation letter, but there are more extreme cases of
this recommendation system. In my interview with a traveling leadership consultant who is an
alumni volunteering for nationals, she explained to me the information that alumni we're bringing
in This was in nineteen ninety six. So we would start early and we
would go to these rushes. I'll never forget. I was walking around and
they had a bit. You know, it's a big room of food,
you know, because the women are in there and they're rushing and talking and
you have food and drink something. And the alumni associations would send cupcake with
a girl who was rushing with her picture because they wanted them not to forget
with this girl looked like. So a lot of the Southern alumni associations would
know what girl was going to what school, and they would get together and
they would write you recommendations that that just wasn't enough for them, so they
would then send things like, oh, we've got this basket fruit, and
then you know, attached to it would be the girl's picture and like some
highlights. To be clear about what just happened, the alumni organization attached a
photo of the high valued recruit to the fruit basket so that members would be
able to look out for them during recruitment. In one of my other interviews,
I learned of another way that the chapter can be reminded about who is
a high valued recruit. I mean, even when I went through Rushed,
the hot rushies were sort of plastered up on the bathroom wall, so you
need to look for those people. In particular, the literal pictures of the
high valued recruits were hung up on the sorority bathroom wall, so the sisters
new to look out for them. So for a high valu you'd recruit.
Recruitment is like a walk in the park because you're being schmoozed to the eighth
power. I think I killed Rush same same and like just having the New
York City background, Yeah, that was both grew up in New York City.
It's such a stunt. Yeah, I feel like it's like, oh
my god, like the New York City girl, Like there weren't that many.
Damn. If only they knew that I would turn out to be a
liability. So taking it back to Nicole's chapter, who was blatantly trying to
rise up in the ranks and therefore trying to gain those high valued recruits.
I could assume why Nicole wasn't used in the same way that Nicole could assume,
but we both don't know because there's no evidence. No one's giving an
answer. In Nicole's senior year, she lost the weight and was able to
fully participate in recruitment, but to this day, she has not received confirmation
about why she was not able to recruit in her junior year. I was
under the impression that all members of a chapter did the recruiting during Rush.
This was the first time I'd even heard of this idea, that all members
aren't being used during recruitment. That was until someone else that I interviewed brought
up the same concept and my ears perked up. I was like an alternate,
And so if you were an alternate, you weren't in it at all.
You had to stay the entire time, even if you had a test,
even if your fucking grandma died, Like you had to stay the entire
time of Rush. Do you know why you weren't used? No, I
think they didn't like me that much because I was always speaking my opinions and
I didn't give a fuck what they said, So like I don't and I
also just I didn't care that hunch. I was just like they could tell
I didn't really give a fuck, And so I think that they were just
like they wanted the girls who were like live brings die sorority. This interview
was with Harper, an alumni from James Madison University. When Harper wasn't being
used to recruit, she was put to work as a chanting sister at the
door. Harper shared with me how this would go down. Before a round
of recruitment, they would pick a girl that they thought like would like you
based on god knows what. And so if you were like picked with a
girl, they would like, scream your name, and you're like, okay,
like Jessica, you're with Sarah, So get a line third and so
then one by one, sure enough, everybody who wasn't called to go get
a girl. We lined the walls and we were clapping and banging and screaming
the chance. So this concept of not using all members to recruit was clearly
not just Nicole's chapter. Like most things in sorority world, it's not just
a one chapter thing. It became clear to me that there was some type
of mechanism or process that strategically decided which members were worthy of being the face
of the chapter and recruiting, and which members weren't. This concept came up
again with someone who were calling Megan. You heard from her in the first
part of the Recruitment Special, and she is using a pseudonym for her own
safety. Megan was also not used as a recruiter and instead was put to
work on the reference committee. I wasn't actually a part of the interviewing process.
I was on the reference committee where I would help organize people and like
score them and put the scores onto the computer to see like which girl was
going to be chosen. So so you didn't do any of recruiting, no,
but I saw to be that. So I didn't actually need to be
a part of the workshop. But I was like required to go anyway.
To be clear, she had to attend the Zoom workshop week that we discussed
in part one of the Recruitment Special, where they learned how to recruit from
August twenty one to September thirteenth. It was like every day training. On
August twenty third, it was eleven am to seven pm a workshop. Except
if we like had messed up the night before, she would be like,
all right, I'm adding three hours she had to go to this ship and
wasn't even doing the recruiting. Then why do you have to get all the
outfit? Did you have to gets outfits? Yes? Why that's such a
good question. I would love him, though. They put me on reference
so that I wouldn't be talking to any of the potential new members, like
directly, because I wasn't like polished enough. I wasn't like the typical sorority
girl. They kind of wanted to keep me hidden from the girls that were
trying to join upon you, so that I wouldn't, like, you know,
mess up there. Their look. Megan's inclination about why she wasn't used
made perfect sense, given the fact that recruitment is appearance based and everybody knows
it. I spoke with someone else who did the nitty gritty work of transferring
scores from the slips onto Excel spreadsheets. She explained that in her chat,
this was a volunteer position, but you were encouraged to volunteer if you didn't
think you would be used during a recruitment. If you aren't used, you
just kind of sit in a room that isn't being used, like one of
the girl's bedrooms, all day, all dressed up and like hair done,
and that sucks. So they're like, if you think that you're one of
the people who won't be used, just volunteer and do this because the other
ways kind of torture. How do you know if you're a person who might
not be used, Like what's the consensus around that? Oh? Definitely,
if you feel like you're not like super popular, if you're not the kind
of person that they put on the tumbler page or like on the Instagram,
like you're not like the face they're putting forward, you're probably not going to
be used. And people kind of knew where they stood. There were a
couple people who didn't, and they ended up just like sitting in a room
all day, like not being allowed to talk to people, rushing. So
if you find out though, why are you still there dressed up? Because
they just have you convinced that if a bunch of people get sick, like
what if like six girls get food poisoning and like we need you, like
we need you to be dressed and ready to go because we might use you.
They had to buy the outfits and get dressed up every day. And
would they be annoyed. Yeah, they would be annoyed and sad, and
it was a hit to their self esteem because they obviously felt like, Okay,
you think I'm either not very attractive, my personality sucks, or like
there's a reason why you're hiding me and don't want me to talk to people
who will be in our sorority, who I'm supposed to be friends with and
get along with once they join. Nicole, Harper, Megan and the other
interviewee who you just heard from all go to different schools. I could confidently
say now that sororities strategically select their recruiters, and while sisters could assume that
they weren't used because they weren't polished enough or weren't featured on the sororities Instagram,
no sister could really be sure about the exact reasoning behind this choice because
they weren't the ones making the choice. We already learned in the second part
of the special that the real decision making in recruitment is limited to the recruitment
team, who is being instructed by the alumni advisors. But the recruitment puzzle
started to have a much clearer picture after a snapped listener sent in the Alpha
Fee Recruitment Expose Thanks for the tip. The expose was released in twenty eighteen
by a form of recruitment chair at the University of Michigan, note that the
information I'm about to read has been condensed for the podcast, but all wording
remains the same. You can find the link to the full expose in the
show notes for today's episode. The author refers to Alpha Fie as Beta Delta.
The part of the expose that I'm about to read is when the author
becomes the recruitment chair and can finally hear the insider secrets that only those on
the recruitment team are allowed to know. She states quote, the smiling former
recruitment chairs finally let the four of us hear the whispers. They told us
of the national policies that we would need to follow in order to be the
most desirable chapter on campus. They told us that the superficial scoring, the
messed up way in which we determined the value of potential sisters, didn't end
upon membership. It just changed. They told us that we would need to
rank the current sisters of Beta Delta on a scale of one to ten in
order to determine their recruiting strength. Seventy percent of that score would be their
external score. They were all sisters, and their external prescores had once been
high enough to grant the membership their seven and above external scores, however,
had been relative to one thousand, two hundred PMMs. Now we would need
to score them relative to each other, and they couldn't all be scored highly.
They couldn't all be equally worthy of meeting our most desirable recruits. So
we looked at our friends and sisters and belittled their worth into only numbers.
As p and ms eagerly lined up alphabetically outside the beta delta door, the
sisters then line up on the other side, prepared to pick up the right
girl who has been preassigned to them. The Beta delta tends would meet the
p ANDM tens, the Beta delta threes would meet the PNM threes. We
told the sisters that they couldn't mess up the lines because scoring would become too
difficult between rounds, But the sisters actually couldn't mess up the lines because a
PMM with an external score of eight couldn't be recruited by a beta delta with
a score of three. The PMM threes were gone before they walked inside,
and the Beta delta threes were used to entertain them for those twenty five minutes
before we could right click on their cell in the external prescoring document and press
delete end quote not this, but of horse this. I'm sure that this
ranking process can vary a bit from chapter to chapter, in the same way
that the way to rank a PNM may have a unique twist depending on their
chapter. But just like the ranking system that's used to rank pnms, this
one too has a clear motive, bringing the conventionally attractive girls to the forefront
and weed out the unpolished sisters. It seems like the sisters that are ranked
poorly are either waiting around to be used, are being used to entertain p
and ms who are marked as nonentities, or are performing other duties such as
filing slips and chanting. A VP of recruitment at George Washington University told me
that in her chapter, the lower ranking members would fill the role of entertaining
the lower ranked PMMs. They would just be doing what we would call floating,
which is basically standing in the middle of the room and waiting for someone
to signal that they weren't having a good time talking to someone rushing like we
would have all of these signals for like the recruiting room if we were in
person, like if you put your hand like cross behind your back. It
would mean like, I need someone to come help me with this conversation because
I really don't like this person. And so then a lower ranking girl takes
over because she's not wanted anyway. Yeah, what was the signal? On
zoom? On zoom? Usually someone would just text the VP of recruitment and
she would send someone in. That's like one of the things that they don't
tell you until I was already initiated. It makes sense why she wasn't allowed
to know this info until after she was initiated, because the deeper into the
group you go, the more information you know. Remember the different layers that
we were talking about in the last episode. You know how the exact board
is in a deeper layer than the general members, and the alumni advisors are
in a deeper layer than the exact board and tear Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra
Stein, where I learned about the structure of these layers and cultic groups.
I also learned that quote in support of the structure, the group employs secrecy
and deception to maintain the separation between layers. It takes time to move a
person sufficiently far into the system until they become isolated and detached enough from rational
thought before the group can afford to unveil the secret ideas. End quote.
Listen to what Alex, one of the vps of recruitment that I interviewed,
said about the use of secrecy in her chapter. We would have conversations with
our new member classes after they had joined the chapter, before they were initiated,
to talk about recruitment with them, like what did you like this year?
What didn't you like? Getting opinions from people who just went through it
so that we could, like, you know, make it better for next
year. And there were multiple times I would start saying something and I'd get
cut off because I was about to spill too much. Don't tell them anything.
They're not initiated. They could still drop, you know, we want
to keep them until initiation. If you're not allowed to tell anybody about what
you're doing, how can you reflect on it. The only people that you
can talk about it with are the ones who are just as indoctrinated and are
being instructed to do the same shit. The next step in ranking your fellow
sisters is forming them into bump groups. And everyone in this bump group meets
the same pianom So this is when they bump each other and are like,
oh, like, I want you to meet my other sister. This concept
confused me, and it was well described in a BuzzFeed article called Here's what
sorority of recruitment is actually like, and in the section about bump groups,
they say, quote, Let's say you walk into a house for a party
and are immediately greeted by mary Anne, who, unbeknownst to you, is
in position number one in her bump group's order. You and Mary Anne will
chat for a few minutes, and then oh mg, her friend Christie number
two in the bump group is here. Mary Anne produce you you were just
talking about bell buckles, which Christie loves, and then Mary Anne and Christy
will talk to you two on one for a few Then mary Anne will find
a way to politely excuse herself. It was so great to meet you.
I'll let you two get to know each other better, and you and Christy
will get a few minutes alone to chat and then oh, hello, it's
Christie's friend Stacy, number three in the bump group. The process repeats itself.
Meanwhile, Mary Anne has gone to find and bump Claudia who is number
five aka the last position in the bump group end quote. So they practice
this transition in the sorority boot camp that takes place before sorority recruitment, and
we talked about it in the first part of the recruitment special and at these
basically boot camps is where they learn the choreography of this bump group rotation to
make it seem seamless and not at all rehearsed. The VP of re went
at GW University told me how her chapter does bump groups. The way that
I was told to do bump groups is to have at least like two bump
groups that are just like the best recruiters, and then from there on out,
for every other bump group, have the first two people be the best
recruiters because they'll be the only people talking to anyone, and then put everyone
else at the backs of the group so they feel like they're part of a
group, but maybe they'll talk to like three girls. In the Alphacai Delta
Bumping and Rotation guide that I found online, I learned how this sorority would
create their bump groups. I'd like to note that the excerpts that I'm about
to read from. The PDF has been condensed for the purposes of the podcast,
but you can find the full PDF in the show notes of today's episode.
This pdf says quote, bump rotations are much more than a plan of
who talks to who. It includes strategically matching sisters based on commonalities and recruitment
strength. Similar to establish a PNM evaluation process, it is critical that chapter
members are evaluated as well. There's a benefit to aligning the PMM and sister
evaluation process on the same number and or color scale. By doing this,
the party matching efforts can be expedited by simply matching the same colors splash numbers
to one another and factoring in commonalities or deep connection points. At the very
least, sisters should be evaluated on a one to three scale. For presentation,
the strongest recruiters are not necessarily those who are most photogenic, but simply
sisters who show up on brand on trend and put effort into presenting the very
best versions of themselves. These sisters are also able to follow guidelines for all
areas of personal presentation, including attire, makeup, hair, nails, and
accessories. Sisters on the lower end of the evaluation scale should not be in
the same groups as top strength recruiters and vice versa. Matching also plays a
crucial component, especially when fump groups are created to connect with specific demographics or
target area. P and ms want to feel that they will fit in with
the chapter. Doing such intentional work when creating bump groups should be translated into
intentional matching efforts to optimize the P and M experience and give the chapter the
best chance of increasing priority statistics. I spoke with Christine, an alumni from
the University of Maryland, who explained to me how this matching process went down.
In her experience, was in a room where there was a group of
like the hottest, most gorge fantastic girls in the sorority, and they were
rushing a group of girls that were like being talked about as like they really
wanted them. Like it was like this group a group of freshman girls that
were super cute and popular already amongst the guys in our grade, and they
knew that they all wanted to be in the same sorority, so they wanted
to get them from arrival. I remember saying, like, who are these
girls? I'll look out for them, like I want to meet them too,
And one of the girl said to me, will take care of it,
And I was like, you will take care of what? Like if
this person joins the sorority, they're my sorority sister too. I was a
very secure person at the time, but I would say even now, I'd
be like, well, what makes me unqualified to talk to them and try
to have them join us? You know, like why are all the pretty
girls mask like the pretty girls? And like I was diversity chair at the
time, so the amount of like women of color I talked to, you
know, I talked to like the odd ball, either any odd like odd
person or anybody of color was always talking to me always because you were the
diversity chair. Yeah. And then I also remember one girl emailing us in
the PHA and saying that she's Asian. In all sixteen houses, she got
matched with someone Asian for the first round of recruitment. If you want to
know recruitment, that is recruitment. What do you do when you might not
have any women of color in your chapter? He matched them with the diversity
chair, got to show them this is a safe space, no matter how
seamless. This bump process, or the matching process, or this whole fucking
process can be. It's inevitable that members of the chapter are going to catch
on that there's some strategy behind this all. And while it's inevitable that some
might catch on, that doesn't mean that the recruitment team isn't trying to prevent
the members from catching on. In the Alpha Fea recruitment expose, it states
that quote at Beta Delta, we told the girls that we grouped them in
the way that we did to show the p and ms that there was no
typical Beta Delta girl, And that's exactly what we did. We ensured that
the girls in each bump group were quote different from each other. We ensured
that each bump group had a mix of girls from Florida and California and Chicago,
rather than having a bump group of girls who were all from Michigan.
We ensured that each bump group had some louder girls who were full of personality,
and also some were laid back, easygoing girls. We ensured that each
bump group had an even ratio of blondes to brunettes. But among these quote
unique differences, there was one way that the girls in each bump group,
without question, were exactly the same. Bump Group one would only include sisters
who were scored as nines and tens. Bump Group fourteen would include only sisters
who were scored as ones and twos. Bump groups ten to fourteen and their
pnms would sit on the hardwood chairs in the brown empty dining room. Bump
groups one to three would get comfortable on the couches in the smaller extra living
room. The idea was that in this enclosed space, p and ms would
look around at the room full of pretty beta Delta girls and the pretty pnms
whom they were rushing, and admire these girls who might all become their sisters.
The chaos that we worked so hard to control fiercely returned. During the
ten minute scoring break between each round, the living room girls would whisper shout
about girls they've wanted as their little sisters, and the dining room girls would
stare enviously and whine about how they hadn't met anyone good yet. It didn't
take more than a few rounds for the dining room girls to figure out that
they had not met and might not meet, a single girl who quote reminded
them of their current sisters. The rest of the year would be the dining
room against the living room end quote. So it seems to me that different
chapters might need to utilize the system in different ways. So some might be
more strategic about it in the way that they're trying to show this one group
of p and ms that they actually do have girls from the South and so
even though this is the Northeast school and you can still find girls just like
you. And another chapter might be strategic in another way, like by matching
the Asian pnms with the one Asian sister and the chapter. But whatever strategy
they're using, it comes down to one common denominator, which is doing whatever
it takes to attain the high valued recruits, and if you're a lower tier,
it means doing whatever it takes to form a full pledge class, even
if that means that by doing that, they're breaking down the sisterhood that they're
actually promoting. It's a front, it's a trick, it's a gag,
it's a prank, and I was pranked. You were pranked. Another part
of this prank that they pull on the p and ms is that sororities brands
themselves as philanthropic organizations. In the last episode, we learned from the book
Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein that cultic groups have a front group,
which is the public face of the group, and these front groups exist
for the purposes of recruitment and fundraising. So in sorority chapters, it seems
like their front groups are their philanthropies that they claim to so passionate about.
I mean, there's even a whole round in recruitment called Philanthropy Round that is
dedicated to talking about that chapter's philanthropy. An example of a sorority philanthropy is
Tri Delta and their national partnership with Saint Jude's Children's Research Hospital. On Tri
Delta's website, they state that quote Tri Delta is changing the way the world
treats and defeats childhood cancer through their powerful philanthropic work end quote. I spoke
with Maggie, a former P and M who had lost a leg due to
childhood cancer. Maggie shared with me what it was like to rush Tri Delt,
a sorority that consistently boasts about how their philanthropy is so integral to their
sisterhood. So when I first rushed there, was tri delt on my campus
and I was like, oh my god. Their philanthropy is childhood cancer awareness,
which that's why I lost my life to the cancer. I've raised so
much money for child cancer throughout my life. I'm super involved in this.
I would love to be in that philanthropy because I feel like I have so
much to give. And then during RUSH, I'm like telling them, like,
I'm really interested in your philanthropy and I've done this and this, and
then the next day they fucking dropped me. They literally immediately dropped me.
I'm like, there's someone's literally standing in front of you, being like,
I'm a childoo cancer survivor. I've raised at least thirty thousand dollars in my
life or childhood cancer research. I'm telling you how much this philanthropy has affected
me, and then you then you dropped me. I sobbed, sobbed.
I was like, maybe they just didn't think I was pretty enough, because
during RUSH I never tried to hide my prosthetic leg. But during RUSH,
I remember being like, maybe I should have worn pants, Like maybe they
saw my leg and like they didn't like how it looked. It was the
first time I was like I feel embarrassed because of the way I have one
leg, and I'm like, imagine if you had someone in your sorority who
was a childhood cancer survivor and could speak on that. Oh my gosh,
imagine they impact that would have. They don't give a fuck. Don't give
a fuck. They're like, now, we don't really, we don't really
like the way you look. I went into it having pure intentions. I
found a strority that I love there, Philippy. I have a personal connection
to it. And then after that I was like, well, yes,
I just gotta play this game. I just gotta work harder for the other
top tier strorities I have left. Maggie quickly realized that if she wanted to
make it out of recruitment with a bid, she would have to adjust her
mindset to play the game. The competitive nature of recruitment is not a recent
development. I learned this and Women of Discriminating Taste, a book by Margaret
Freeman, who is an independent scholar that researches sororities. Freeman's book provided key
insight into the history behind sorority recruitment, which you can hear more about in
the first or second part of the recruitment special. But as we're nearing the
end of this recruitment special, I think it would be fitting for Freeman to
tell us where the term rush even comes from. The term rush seems to
have come in part from the action of hurting to meet the new women as
they arrived on campus, and also from the slang dating term rushing someone as
you're spending a lot of time and effort paying them compliments and trying to woo
them, almost in a romantic sense. As Diana Turk explains in her book
about the history of Cap Alpha Feta Scorty women at the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, we're basically in competition to meet the new students on campus.
First, the sory woman went out to approach the perspective rushies. They had
to go promote their story chapter as the best one on campus. So they
were trying to lure these quote unquote most desirable new students to pledge their chapter,
and you wanted to go out and beat your rivals in doing that,
And in extreme circumstances, women were literally rushing or running to the train station
to be the first to introduce themselves to get their chapters foot in the door,
so to speak, and hope that they can make them best impression on
the women that they felt were the top rushies in the incoming class. And
it should be noted that the group that came the NPC, the National Panel
and the conference. It was actually established around the turn of the twentieth century
to try to create some rules around rushing and to cool off the heated rivalries.
NPC bringing in the rules I see you, so the sobrity ladies were
no longer allowed to rush those high valued recruits right when they first met them,
and they could no longer say things like rush tried out. You can
see this rule in the twenty twenty five MW recruitment packet that we went through
in the first part of the recruitment special. In the packet, when talking
about the sorority members interactions with the PMMs before recruitment, it states, quote,
you are able to follow them back on social media. If you see
them in a store, you are encouraged to talk to them. You,
however, are not able to bid, promise or anything of the sort.
You should be saying things such as go Greek. I'm happy I went Greek.
You are even able to say you are five MW. But please in
caps, do not in caps say go find you. Please start taking your
Instagram accounts off private so p and ms can see us. I strongly encourage
you to share all the fine you photos slash posts you have on all your
social media platforms. Please do not dirty rush girls. Simply push them to
go Greek and be their friends. The rest will fall into place during formal
recruitment. End quote. To me, this shows that they just do little
things like make a rule to make things seem more fair, but the competitive
environment does not change. I mean, just listen to what Christine said about
her chapter's mindset when trying to acquire a group of high valued recruits. They
wanted those girls in the sorority, so that's the other sorority didn't have them.
It wasn't oh, we're so excited to get to know these girls.
It's like those girls Instagram esthetic is fantastic and she seems nice, but also
try it out wants them, so we have to get them. I learned
from Freeman that the open house round, which is the first round of recruitment
where all the pnms are required to meet all the sorority chapters was actually created
to end the practice of dirty rushing and make recruitments seem more fair. By
signing up instead of being sought out, and by getting the chance to meet
all of the sororities during the open house round, p and ms could then
infer that they were all being considered for membership. But given what we learned
from the recruitment special we know that not all pnms are actually being considered.
But with these new rules, sororities would of course have to get strategic and
develop some sort of process that would make it seem like all recruits are being
considered. And this process is the orchestrated and choreographed process that we see today
with the pres and the matching system. In my interview with Freeman, she
elaborates earlier on it was less orchestrated. There's not these rounds of the parties,
the open house round. It's in the pref night that we seem to
be used to and has been going on for decades now. It probably became
worse and sort of more unnatural because of the choreography of having rush the way
it is with the different parties and who you talk to win and have being
a certain place and moved to a certain other place with the person the right
person. They saw this open house round as being more egalitarian than before.
It was supposed to keep that problem of well, we're not even going to
look at them because we don't know them from happening, and lets you have
more opportunities to meet other women on both sides. But the people get cut
and so as you still were not seen as somebody they wanted. And all
the choreography, calculation and scientific precision that recruitment entails has been developed and perfected
in order to engineer a top tier pledge class or hit quota for that semester.
And it makes sense why there's all of this choreography and calculation, because
they're selling this as a process that happens naturally and is based on compatibility.
So you should just trust the process because it'll lead you to your forever home.
It kept saying you're going to run home on mid day, like you're
going to go back home. So while the PMMs don't know it, and
sometimes the members of the chapter themselves don't know it, we can conclude that
the open house round is another part of their facade. After learning about the
historical context of these groups, and after hearing from primary sources who experience the
other side of recruitment, we've been able to put the different pieces together and
complete the recruitment puzzle. So hopefully you can now see a full picture of
what this puzzle looks like. What I'm seeing is that these discriminatory cults that
run freely on American college campuses brands themselves as philanthropic social clubs that are inclusive
and empower women. But what do you see as the full picture? Does
this look like inclusivity and empowerment to you, Snapped, We've been waiting for
you all winter and we're so glad you're finally here. Thank you so much
for listening to the Snaps Recruitment Special. Before I get to my thank yous
to the people who made this recruitment special possible, please rate, review,
subscribe, share this episode to your Instagram story, and send it to your
subrity sisters. Please do whatever you can to spread the word as Snapped is
an independent podcast. Now to my thank yous. First off, thank you
to all the women that I interviewed for this special. This special would not
exist if it wasn't for your bravery and willingness to tell your story. Next,
I'd like to thank Margaret Freeman. Right when I finished the first chapter
of Freeman's book, Woman of Discriminating Taste, I knew that it would have
to be featured on this season. If you're interested in sorority history, you
need to buy yourself a copy at Margaret L. Freeman dot com. My
next thank you is to Savannah Jerome soulbachin I Snapped intern throughout the spring and
summer of twenty twenty one. Savvy and I would do things like dissect and
understand the book Fraternities Without Brotherhood. My next thank you goes to Meghan Thompson,
the Snapped copy editor. Any written content is always proofred and spruced up
by this talented woman. Of course, I need to shout out Nila Gottlia,
the Snapped audio engineer, Taylor Jones, the artist who created the season
two cover art, Sienna Sharer, the musician who created the Snap theme song,
and Mello Rello, the musician who produced the Snapped outro that you're listening
to right now. And last, but not least, I'd like to thank
myself for conducting interviews, editing, producing the special reading these books, writing
episode outlines, creating narrations, creating promotions, emailing all the interviewees to ensure
that they're comfortable with the content, writing episode descriptions, etc. Thank you
to me for sticking through with season two. Thank you so much to everyone
again, and thank you for listening and supporting in this process. To us
the process and abolished Greek life and fuck recruitment. I'll talk with y'all soon.
Bye. Snapped