Students in fraternities and sororities, along with nonaffiliated allies, are taking steps to try to dissuade the University from banning freshman rush. The ban, which was recommended in a report issued Monday by the Working Group on Campus Social and Residential Life, would need the approval of the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students in order to be implemented.
At the meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community on Monday afternoon, members of Greek organizations voiced their concerns with a number of the arguments the working group gave to explain its recommendation. These students said they were primarily dissatisfied with the claim that membership in a fraternity or sorority limits a student’s ability to explore other social and extracurricular options during their freshman year, arguing that the University did not have sufficient data to back up that statement.
University Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee ’69 — who co-chaired the working group with Vice President for Campus Life Cynthia Cherrey — acknowledged that he did not possess that specific data, which prompted some students to ask if the group’s claim was made based on anecdotal evidence from a possibly biased sample. But Durkee said in an interview that the members of the working group were more intimately familiar with life on campus than many of the recommendation’s opponents gave them credit for.
“The people who came forward with this recommendation are pretty knowledgeable about life on campus,” said Durkee, who has spent almost 40 years in the University’s administration and has three children who attended the University, said of the committee. “There was some sense Monday night that we didn’t really understand how things work. I think we do.”
Still, some students in Greek organizations are taking it upon themselves to try to prove the working group wrong. At least two sororities and one fraternity are collecting data on the other activities in which their members are involved. Some Greek organizations are encouraging their members to send emails to Durkee, Cherrey and President Shirley Tilghman, introducing themselves as members of a fraternity or sorority and listing some of their other extracurricular and social activities.
But Durkee said that these emails would not be helpful because they do not address one of the committee’s main concerns: that students who join Greek organizations create a social circle before exploring as many options as possible.
“There is a quite interesting variety of things that they do, but it’s not that we thought that students in fraternities and sororities participated in that activity and did nothing else,” Durkee said. He said he believes the problem is that fraternities and sororities are antithetical to the University’s vision of a freshman-year experience.
“Why do you bring to Princeton people from very different backgrounds from all over the world?” Durkee asked. “You don’t bring them so that the first thing they do is find a comfortable social setting and become encompassed in that, even if while doing that they’re doing other things. What you really want freshman year to be is a time when students are trying out different things, getting to know different people, not settling into a social circle right away.”
Nevertheless, students have begun taking organized action since the recommendation was released. Fraternity member Jake Nebel ’13 wrote an open letter to Tilghman on Tuesday to oppose the proposed prohibition on freshman rush. As of 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the letter had gathered 600 online signatures. Of those 600, 30 percent came from students who are unaffiliated with a Greek organization, Nebel said.
“One thing I hope is that the administration will see, from the diversity of people who’ve signed the petition — and especially that it’s come from students who are not in fraternities and sororities or who have even been denied bids — that it would be a great shame if all fraternities and sororities had to suffer for reasons with little research behind them and insufficient consultation with the parties affected,” Nebel said.
Though Nebel said he has been considering submitting the letter for a USG referendum, it was not his principal concern. In addition to demonstrating the extent of opposition to the proposed freshman rush ban, he said he hopes the letter will help facilitate further discussions between the administration and the Greek community. For example, Nebel said, he would support a University-initiated survey of fraternity and sorority members’ extracurricular activities and hopes the letter will help promote an atmosphere in which an initiative like this could occur.
“I completely understand why people won’t come forward and say, ‘I’m a brother of X fraternity, let me answer some questions for you,’ but I wish we had the atmosphere where people could,” Nebel said.
The letter has already exceeded the number of signatures — 500 — that is necessary to propose a referendum outside of the USG elections cycle.
Rockefeller College Master and English professor Jeff Nunokawa, a member of the working group, said the polarized nature of the debate made it hard for the concerned parties to find common ground.
“I respect enormously the fact that young men and young women of intelligence and integrity see things differently from the way I see things as a member of that task force,” Nunokawa said. “I’m just not sure what we could say that would persuade them otherwise.”
One possibility for compromise that Nebel said he and many members of the Greek community would potentially support is to hold rush in the spring of freshman year. Though Durkee said the decision was not in his hands at this point, he did not think spring rush would be much of an improvement on the current situation.
“The risk of a spring rush is that you just put life on hold in the fall knowing that you’ll rush in the spring,” Durkee said. “If we really wanted to reclaim the freshman year as a time to explore other options, it wasn’t going to work as well if you allow rush to go forward in the spring.”
Durkee added that the working group seriously considered postponing rush until sophomore spring — when, he said, the University has a “long tradition” of “students deciding what they’re going to do socially for the rest of their time at Princeton” — so students could decide if they wanted to be in both a Greek organization and an eating club or do one or the other.
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