By JJ Bowman
Associate Editor
Although down slightly in numbers, this year’s sorority and fraternity rush ensured a vibrant Greek presence for the upcoming academic year.
Sororities lured 211 students while fraternities netted 82 bid signers during the rush period that officially ended Tuesday.
“Proportionally, this was a huge year,” Student Activities Coordinator Chris Van Velzer said.
Five of the seven campus sororities made this year’s quota of 31 female bid signers. Fraternities have a less rigid system on sending out bids, and thus had a greater variation of new class sizes. Sigma Chi and Sigma Nu had more than 20 new recruits while Beta Theta Pi and Psi Upsilon had smaller classes of eight and 12, respectively.
The positive story of the rush season may belong to Gamma Phi Beta. Although that sorority and Alpha Phi both fell short of quota, for Gamma Phi, this year, with 22 women, was a huge improvement from last, when only eight women signed up.
“I’m totally excited about our girls, we love them all so much,” Gamma Phi Beta President Angie Hofstedt said.
Van Velzer said he was impressed by the recruitment efforts of Gamma Phi as well.
“It’s really a fantastic accomplishment on their part,” Van Velzer said.
For Van Velzer, this year marked his first time organizing rush, and he survived with only a couple glitches.
One glitch came in the form of a campus-wide network outage Sunday evening, when students were to find out from which sorority they would receive a bid. This was the first year the entire process went online, and although Van Velzer said the new system was a huge improvement from the previous method, Panhellenic was momentarily paralyzed as the process had to move to a house off campus with Internet access.
The second problem came early Sunday morning when one former member of a fraternity scuffled with a current member. The case of the former member of the fraternity has been passed to the Student Disciplinary Committee, Van Velzer said.
However those who signed bids are not officially part of their fraternities and sororities yet. The new member initiation process lasts approximately four to six weeks, depending on the particular group.
New members will have to keep in mind that Pepperdine’s policy for Greek organizations extends beyond the campus.
One rule in the student handbook, for instance, states that whenever four or more members of the same organization are together, their gathering could be considered a university-sponsored event. Thus, students of legal drinking age must still be aware that Pepperdine’s alcohol policy could extend to them even in purely social events.
Judicial Administrator Sharon Beard said the the policy is meant as a guideline and does not mean the university will seek out students for breaking the policy.
“We’re very reactive in our approach to student discipline,” she said.
The policy would not be enforced, Beard said, when students of the same organizations go out together as friends who happen to be involved in the same organization. Such requirements for groups are meant to maintain the integrity of the university’s policies, she continued.
For now, Greek organizations can focus on their new members instead of university policy.
October 02, 2003