Quote:
Originally Posted by Tulip86
That would look like most Dutch fraternities and sororities.
One of the things I noticed about "Greek" life when I got here (the Netherlands) is that it resembles the American Greek system a lot. They just have local, city-wide groups and the setup is different between universities to suit the scale and style of the city. They don't have Greek letters, but a name instead. Some groups are on their own, some are part of larger associations and that is where you really see the old European traditions (no fencing though). But at their core, they're all pretty similar to the Greek system.
Rituals, alumni-involvement, leadership, specific values, friendship, recruiting, activities, pledging, parties, mixers, formals, traditions? All there.
The tent-talk and the gossip are present. Even the tales about hazing are the exact same stories I heard in high school.
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Really interesting. Thanks for the info. Are these groups single-sex?
And as for the bolded, that's certaily not without precedent in North America. While the vast majority of fraternities and sororities use Greek letter names, not all do, or did. Consider Triangle, Acacia, FarmHouse, Ceres, . . . . And, of course, there's the case of Sinfonia, a name which our tradition says was taken from the name of a German student organization that the Director of New England Consevratory, George W. Chadwick, had been initiated into while studying at the Royal Conservatory in Leipzig.
