[sorority_woman]

Originally Posted by thetalady

NO!!! The "maximizing your options" is NOT a guarantee that everyone who wants to be Greek gets a bid!

PNMs can and are dropped from recruitment on every campus. Just because you sign up for rush is not a guarantee of a bid. Going to all parties that you receive invitations to and IF you make it to pref round IS a guarantee of a bid. It is part of the standard RFM policies that virtually every campus follows.

There is no need to be aggressive toward me. You are wrong. It is clear that you don't understand how recruitment works at Tufts. I was in a sorority there a number of years ago and helped plan recruitment for my chapter while I was a student there. I am familiar with this system, and it is unique.

It is called generally assured bidding and it DOES mean that the PNM is guaranteed a bid as long as she maximizes her options. The university mandates that as long as a PNM maximizes all of her options during Formal Panhellenic Recruitment, she must be given a bid at the end of the process. The only exception is if the girl does not have the requisite GPA (I believe this is a 2.5+ GPA). However, low GPA girls can still be given bids if the chapter CHOOSES to do so despite the GPA.

For example, if a PNM who is above the GPA threshold is released from all of the houses during recruitment, she goes back to the ones she ranked more highly. If this PNM we are talking about (who is released from all houses during a particular round) ranked her houses A, B, C, D and can go back to 2 houses the next round, she will be invited back to A and B as long as she maximized her options. As long as she keeps maximizing her options, she will receive a bid from A or B at the end of the process, even if A and B don't want her at all.

Yes, this causes chapters to take girls that they do not want to take, but the fact remains that this is the system Tufts has and no one will be released from Tufts' Panhellenic Formal Recruitment as long as they maximize their options (unless their GPA is low).

When I was at Tufts, I talked to some faculty about the possibility of changing the system, and was told that this simply wasn't going to happen. It is still in place.

Originally Posted by clemsongirl

At this campus, that is how sorority recruitment works. It's a mandate from the university president that every woman who signs up for recruitment receives a bid, regardless of whether the chapters want to give her one or not. With the exception of GPA cuts, no woman can entirely be released from recruitment at this school. They are a private institution and this is a condition of having a chapter at this campus.

Without having any inside information whatsoever, I would imagine that this was part of why AGD chose not to colonize there this fall.

AGD was not able to garner enough interest when they tried unsuccessfully to colonize in Fall 2015, which is why they postponed their colonization to Fall 2016.

I do not definitively know what their ultimate reasoning was for choosing not to colonize, but I imagine that they would not have put forth an application let alone a full colonization push in Fall 2015 if they had a problem with how the system at Tufts works.

Originally Posted by naraht

To me this also equals no quota at all. If every woman on campus signs up, then the size of the sororities gets insane.

Note, the Sorority Life page at tufts.edu lists 5 sororities including the non-NPC Lambda Pi Chi, but I don't know if Lambda Pi Chi is treated as an equal in this. The page for the Panhellenic council OTOH says there are 5 NPC sororities.

No, this does not mean no quota. Quota is still determined in the normal way during formal recruitment. It also does not mean that you can simply join the organization that you want to join and they are forced to accept you. It just means that you will get a bid somewhere if you participate in formal sorority recruitment and maximize your options, though it may be at your last choice.

At Tufts, a minority of the student population goes Greek. The sororities are not insanely large. When recruitment numbers went up, Tufts opened for expansion.

Lambda Pi Chi would not be in the Panhellenic Council. They were not on campus when I was there, so I don't know anything about their recruitment, but from googling them you can see that they are a Latina sorority.

There are 4 Panhellenic Council sororities at Tufts: Alpha Omicron Pi, Alpha Phi, Chi Omega, and Kappa Alpha Theta. It is possible that the Sorority Life page has not been updated in a while. Alpha Gamma Delta was supposed to be the 5th Panhellenic Sorority and had several colonization events in 2015, but did not ultimately form a chapter.

I know that Tufts students also participate in NPHC organizations, but these are city-wide ones and don't have to adhere to the university rules.

Originally Posted by clemsongirl

For a little more context, this was taken from Tufts' Greek Life policies webpage: "Generally Assured bids: By mandate of the Board of Trustees of the university, all eligible Tufts students seeking to join a fraternity or sorority and participates in the entire recruitment process (attending all scheduled events to which they are invited) are generally assured a bid from at least one of the social fraternities or sororities on campus. This system does not guarantee an invitation to join a particular chapter of a student’s choice."

Kappa Alpha Theta came on a couple years ago and was allowed to be selective (i.e. not extend bids to potential new members) for only their charter class, then they had to fall in line with Tufts' mandate.

This mandate only realistically applies during sorority formal recruitment where there are scheduled events that do not interfere with each other and it is possible to attend events from all the organizations and maximize options, so sororities are allowed to be selective during informal recruitment and colonization since these are times when not everyone else is recruiting. This is probably part of why the colonization recruitments have happened in the Fall, since Formal Recruitment is in the Spring.

That also explains why fraternities don't have to be bound to the mandate while recruiting, which is what I was referencing to 33girl in my original post. If it's not possible to attend all recruitment events from all houses and maximize options, the mandate doesn't realistically apply. So the Fraternities get to be selective about who they choose as members and therefore the fraternity hazing cannot be explained by an "everyone who wants to be Greek gets a bid" policy.