By Ashley Phelps

October 6, 2009

Sorority recruitment season has yet again come to pass at Elmhurst College, and once again I was filled with contradictory feelings about the whole ordeal.

On one hand, pledges, members and outsiders alike seem to be filled with hope for the new Greek year. No one can doubt the excitement pledges must feel at the prospect of being accepted, of finding their home, their sisters. This, quite simply, is a time of new beginnings, of forging new relationships with each other and with the campus as a whole.

However, lying amongst these warm and fuzzy feelings are the cynical threads of doubt.

I just couldn’t shake the vision of lambs shuffling to the slaughterhouse as I watched group after group of bright-eyed, smiling women file into Sorority gatherings.

I couldn’t help but think, will their experience actually be a positive one? Could this really be a year of growth and change for Greek women?

In the past, I was victim to fuzzy feelings of optimism about sororities because I believed that they held a great potential. Even though I still believe that they have everything they need to create a powerful and productive community of strong women, I’ve come to learn that this potential is rarely, if ever, realized.

Hence, my hope for sororities has quite simply run dry.

As an outsider, I mourn their wasted potential and what seems to have become a forgotten mission.

Sororities should exist as positive forces, promoting and striving to become a sort of utopia for women in which strength, beauty and power are not only cultivated, but utilized to make each other and campus better.

This has yet to happen, and quite possibly can not happen, because sororities have forgotten what true sisterhood is all about.

What kind of sisterhood watches a sister develop eating disorders, and then encourages her to continue purging and skipping meals?

Or lets sisters get into the driver’s seat after drinking?

Or forgets and ignores sisters simply because they don’t have the money to pay dues?

Or blackmails sisters for information about their private lives?

Bad behavior should not be rewarded with an executive position.

Elmhurst Sororities have become a twisted machine more concerned with money, booze and the letters on their hoodie than with genuine sisterhood.

While they do great things for great causes sometimes (I could never accuse the Greek system of not giving back to the wider community), their own members are used and abused, and their campus feels neglected.

Sororities simply need to refocus. They need to embrace whatever hope this new year and their new members have brought for them.

They should start working on their internal selves, doing something that betters the campus rather than their reputation among the Greeks, and start healing the wounds left on many members.

I have no doubt that there are some good sisters within the Greek system, but it seems that their bad counterparts have usurped control.

It’s time for those positive members to rise up, take control and stop sacrificing morals and standards for great parties and great bodies, start actually living by the ideal of ‘blood is thicker than water’ and start weeding out, or at least shaping up, the bad apples who are destroying sisterhood. 

And they should do this before our sororities hit rock bottom and rot away in that horrible, stereotypical wasteland of brainlessness, boozing and backstabbing that they are plummeting toward.