A strategic decision

The University may have legitimate grievances with Greek organizations on campus, but, as long as they exist, it is foolish to eschew potential mutual benefits of cooperation. Indeed, the committee’s recommendations overlap greatly with the goals of the sororities.

For example, the committee found that mentorship made a significant difference in providing freshman women with positive reinforcement and role models for leadership. Yet the survey found that 60 percent of freshmen surveyed did not feel they had a mentor at Princeton. Furthermore, 77 percent of freshmen who took the survey felt that there was a lack of opportunities to meet upperclassmen.

Yet not a single sorority member to whom I spoke felt bereft of guidance and mentorship. One explained that it is common for new members to be assigned an upperclassman “Big Sister” who advises them specifically, while members can also seek advice from the general group. “People are always emailing the listserv for notes they missed or advice on classes to take,” one woman told me.

Though the report identifies “strengthening peer-to-peer advising” as an essential part of ensuring women are confident enough to pursue leadership roles, last Wednesday evening at the committee’s panel presentation Tilghman herself admitted that the University’s ability to institutionalize such mentoring opportunities are limited at best.

Nor should they try. The academic advising program is generally considered inconsistent in quality at best and completely dysfunctional at worst. While sororities are not right for everyone, it would be foolish to discount the opportunities for mentorship they represent, considering their substantial membership. The University should pursue a composite strategy that acknowledges the role that sororities can and do play in encouraging female leadership. It is well-known even within the administration that female membership in USG and eating club administrations overlap greatly with sorority membership. “Having a supportive network behind you is a necessary component of the decision to run for a leadership position elsewhere,” as one Princeton sorority president told me. Sororities provide not only bases of support essential to winning elections in the USG or eating clubs, but they also serve to recruit potential candidates to positions all over campus.

The committee found that recruitment was key to understanding the discrepancies in male and female participation in leadership positions. “Women are not as likely to put themselves forward,” Tilghman said. “There’s no evidence they have been discriminated against.” The biggest hurdle was not electing women but getting them to run in the first place. The report notes that many of the female leaders on campus recall being specifically encouraged by a peer or mentor.

Additionally, this type of validation and encouragement is exactly what occurs within the University’s sororities. One sorority member on the USG Projects Board told me that an older member had held the position before her and encouraged her to apply. Another told me that members of her sorority supported her in joining and eventually gaining a leadership position in the largely male Whig-Cliosophic Society. Several members with whom I spoke mentioned one sorority’s custom by which members anonymously submit the weekly accomplishments of other women, which are read publically at the meeting and rewarded with candy. Practices as simple as these provide the social structure of mutual reinforcement and support that the committee wishes to replicate through formal mentoring programs.

What would a University partnership look like? It could be as simple as having a sorority contact for the administration to notify of upcoming elections or open leadership roles on campus. Sororities can encourage women to apply for opportunities, such as the Rhodes Scholarship, whose Princeton delegation has recently been so predominantly male that the organization’s representative requested an explanation from Tilghman directly.

The University can pursue a partnership with the sororities without explicitly recognizing them. Harvard, despite withholding official recognition for its sororities, allows organizations to co-sponsor events with the university’s Women’s Center, and to send representatives to the university’s “Women’s Cabinet.” The deep genius of this move is its mutual benefit — sororities gain a say in university policy while Harvard gets information it couldn’t have had without soliciting sorority participation and plausible deniability about the existence and activities of its Greek organizations.

The University’s conception of sororities as elite or exclusive — accurate or not — is no reason to reject the opportunities the organizations can present. Caroline Shifke ’12, the first female president of the Ivy Club, was a sorority member with many affiliations within the organization. Yet women such as Shifke who use their sororities as bases of support for reaching leadership roles set institutional precedents for all women, regardless of affiliation. Finally, the University must remember that sororities will continue to function with or without its sanction, making it increasingly pointless to forgo the potential benefits of cooperation.

Allen Paltrow is a freshman from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at apaltrow@princeton.edu.