The girls next door

few reasons why women might rush a sorority at other schools:

Legacy status.

Girlfriend shortage.

Skimpy resume.

And then there's the digs.

Yep, some girls just want to live in a mansion, operating on the principle that porch swings and maid service are worth the cost of flat ironing the hell out of your hair for a week.

You can't blame them. A once-over of the Delta Delta Delta house at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and you're struggling to find a reason why housing wouldn't top your motives for entering the Best Damn Pledge Class draft. Clearly old, the house is white clapboard with swinging ferns on a wraparound porch, a chef and, maybe more a product of content than form, the ebullient grins of some happy DDD sisters. Kind of makes you want to take a jog around the block in your letters, pull weeds in the front yard, or help string up a dopey philanthropy poster you painted on a sheet in bare feet and cutoffs.

Superficial? Maybe. But who'd want Elizabeth II's gig if Buckingham Palace weren't part of the deal?

And within those chapters, lack of space is a blow. IFC men say that afternoons spent playing Frisbee on their quad, or having member meetings and group activities in their common space make for strong, lasting bonds. What does that mean in measurable terms? It means hours of community service-the most philanthropic greek organization in terms of volunteer hours is Alpha Tau Omega, an IFC fraternity, and IFC chapters have a superior, stronger tradition of convening at reunions and donating funds back to both their chapters and Duke.

Having a physical place to visit and relive your glory days helps keep those college memories alive-and keeps checks and good deeds rolling in.

"[Panhellenic] chapter presidents would like to do more non-social things-those are the things that get them national awards. We already get all the GPA awards. But to be really strong chapters, well, we lack the infrastructure," says senior Kate Guthrie, Panhellenic president through January. (Full disclosure, Kate is a member of my own chapter, but is disaffiliated during her tenure). "We do less of the 'other' stuff because it's so hard to get space. It's a logistical nightmare. You can't do member education or girl's night in without having to jump through mounds of red tape. And how many rooms do you have to pick from?"

Very few, and they're in high demand-and notably without the careworn wood paneling, big televisions and other amenities of fraternity commons rooms.

"I don't really want to go have a pajama party in Von Canon," Guthrie says with a wry, slow smile.

In Chapel Hill, some greek women see housing and its perks not only as a reason to join a sorority, but as the glue that can bring a disparate pledge class together. Meals at the Sigma Sigma Sigma house on Franklin St. are sit-down family-style-"We sing a little dorky prayer," says Ashley Ours, '07 UNC and Sigma alumna. Living together is seen as a privilege earned by sisterly behavior, as members at some chapters must meet a certain minimum of "points" to qualify by volunteering and attending social and philanthropic events. The house where Ours lived her junior and senior years is a converted boarding and carriage house from the 1820s-a long, narrow white building with hardwood floors and fireplaces in all the bedrooms.

'The floors are all tilty," Ours says of the building's age.

"We even have our own ghost," adds Charlotte Murphy, a Sigma sister of Ours' and fellow '07 grad.

There are strict rules. Alcohol is prohibited in the house, even for members over the legal age. (Sororities are also prohibited by their national governing bodies from throwing parties with alcohol, hence the genesis of the fraternity mixer.) Boys are allowed to visit during certain hours, but must remain on the first floor in TV parlors and common areas. Rumors swirl about houses that allow long-term boyfriends to crash downstairs, or houses with "sleeping porches"-bunk-style sleeping rooms for overnight male guests-but men are by and large eschewed.

"It's kind of like a throwback to the 1950s," Murphy says. "It's having someone regulating your morality, and you're 21 years old.

"Still, I think when you join a sorority, you take that in hand and you realize you sacrifice some things to get other things. So it was never a huge problem for me," she adds. "And by the time I got tired of it, I moved out."

The mandatory moral education might seem a yawn for those who've earmarked the college years for unbounded experiment, and Ours contends that having a sorority's national headquarters enforcing P-and-Q-minding can get dreary.

"Our nationals are always in our faces because they do have the house," Ours says. The Sigma house, like many other greek residences in Chapel Hill, is privately owned-preventing constant check-ins from university officials, the girls say, but leaving them answering to other authorities. "We'll have a [national representative] come and stay with us for a week every year, and she'll take notes if you, say, come home drunk. Different things like that."

Even if you're 21?

"It still looks bad to her!" Ours says, smiling. "You've got to be really careful."

And though absence of alcohol and boys keeps the halls and bathrooms reliably free of party sludge, there can be girl overload. Murphy says she can hear girls conversations through the wall, and that "you hear about drama and stuff-if you made it known what was going on, people would know your business."

"When somebody comes home late at night and they're crying or something, everybody rushes down and is like, 'Oh my gosh, what happened?!" Ours adds.

But an all-girl crowd can make for respect and solidarity when it's most needed. The Sigma sisters held a special candle ceremony for Ours when she became engaged last spring. And Murphy maintains that the house is instrumental in preventing a sorority from becoming just a stereotyped social caste.

"I'm a little hard to get to know at first, so I really didn't know lots of people well until I was in the house," she says. "I think you'll hear that from a lot of girls. Without it, the sorority would become more of an campus-club type experience... living together bridges that gap."

The tangible pluses of having facilities aren't bad, either. General consensus is that the strongest chapters have the best houses-coincidence?-and that things like free, campus-proximate parking spaces, chef-prepared meals and historic accommodations for piddling rent payments make the abundance of rules and estrogen more tolerable.

"Houses with yogurt machines definitely got bumped up my [preference] list," Ours laughs of her recruitment days. The Sigma house has such a gadget in its own kitchen. "My favorite, though, is that my senior year they added breakfast on [to the house meal plan], so I'd come down in the morning and our chef would make my eggs, just how I liked 'em."

"Lacey started making omelettes to order on certain days," Murphy adds.

"Yeah," says Ours, "They'd say, 'Extra runny and a little bit of bacon?' and I'd say, 'Yes, sir!'"

n the old days, greekdom at Duke was bigger-if less diversified. Only Panhellenic sororities laid claim to the rosy brick buildings of Georgian East. By the time the peak of 13 chapters had colonized in the 1940s, 60 percent of women were members.

Panhellenic as a governing body first set up shop on East-then the Woman's College-a full two years after the arrival of the first sororities, Alpha Delta Pi and Kappa Delta. As more chapters colonized into the late 1930s, most meeting together ad-hoc in East Campus dormitories, the University felt obliged to provide them permanent space. Enter the Panhellenic House-now the Crowell Building behind the Marketplace-and an adjunct space called Mordecai Cottage, established for greek women circa 1949-50. Each building housed what were called "chapter rooms"-long, narrow rooms much like today's fraternity commons rooms. Girls hung composites, pledge paddles, letters and photographs in the space, which they used for weekly meetings, girls-only social gatherings and recruitment events. Delta Gammas and Tri-Deltas wrote in their late-50s rush handbooks that they used their chapter rooms for "listening-in parties," aka listening to away football games on the radio while sharing a pizza pie. They also drafted their top-secret plans for their float entries for Joe College, an annual festival and parade much like other schools' homecomings.

The spread wasn't bad. The ten chapters in the Panhellenic House shared four kitchens, two lounges, and a downstairs soda counter and convenience store, called "The Dope Shop"- located where the Coffeehouse now resides. Prior to the start of rush, freshmen were encouraged to "get a Coke in the Dope Shop" to get to know older sorority women-a form of cross-class pollination that wasn't formally replaced when the building was closed to greeks.

And shutter it did, in July of 1959, when the Board of Trustees ruled its closing as a part of the long-range strategic plan. At the same time, the Board promised it would establish "more adequate and attractive facilities" and "improved assembly quarters" within two years.

But by the early 1960s, sororities were still meeting in the classrooms they'd been assured were temporary, and holding philanthropy events and recruitment in whatever empty space they could find. By 1963, plans were unveiled for a new student center with suites for all chapters. To again assuage rushees worried about the shunted-into-a-corner status of greek women, Panhellenic assured them: "You no doubt will have the privilege of seeing these plans completed."

As the years went on-and lofty visions of rooms to call one's own never materialized-the debate grew more philosophical. By the late 1960s, the conversation was no longer sotto voce, and it was no longer about wanting soda counters for Coke-having, or pretty lawns on which to host fraternity pinning ceremonies. It was about modernity. As the loss of a physical address became permanent, it emerged that sororities and their mannered traditionalism were no longer the prime substance of a woman's undergraduate experience. Fewer women pledged. A wider range of extracurriculars welcomed women to their ranks. Sororities were stale.

As a result, a group of greek and non-greek women distributed "The Sorority Evaluation" in 1967, a broad survey of women's opinions on the relevance of the East greek system.

Responses varied. "Sororities are not very important, and their value is somewhat intangible," said one woman.

"Because sororities at Duke do not have houses, we work with a system having built-in problems," wrote then-President of Panhellenic Ann Dodds, more than a tad defensively. "It takes more effort to get together and work together on projects."

"I don't worry about sororities going [away for good]," one senior wrote, responding to concerns that greek life would simply evaporate before the start of the 1970s or the integration of the Woman's College into Duke in 1972. "If there is honestly no need for them, the sorority girls themselves will take appropriate measures."

One wonders if the current status quo-with sorority unity most prominently on display at off-campus clubs like Shooter's II and George's Garage-is the measure she envisioned.

o, what's the point?

That sororities are only worth joining if there are houses?

Girl, please. It's a superficial rite of passage in Legally Blonde, or the sinfully indulgent ABC Family series "GREEK," but sorority membership-like any collegiate affiliation-has depth beyond wistfully wishing for PJ party space.

Fraternal association is as old as the United States, a tradition begun with the then-social fraternity Phi Beta Kappa at William & Mary in 1776. Sororities formed a lifetime later, in 1851, with the Adelphean Society in Georgia-later to become Alpha Delta Pi. The girls in that first society had a pact and rites and cheesy mystic goodies before they had a temple in which to store them. Housing has always been a secondary, though important, component of the secret society.

Some 250 years later, housing remains just as relevant. Plans for Central are taking on steam, and finding space for the spaceless-notably arts groups-is a priority. And as focus groups and administrators try to actuate the Campus Culture Initiative's findings, the epic showdown between greek life and future relevance is about to begin. Bring popcorn.

"We have really two options: Do we use sororities as vehicles for enhancing undergraduate life-not just for the members that are affiliated but for the entire University-or do we say they don't really have a place?" says Todd Adams, assistant dean of students for fraternity and sorority life. "This idea of sort of placing them in a middle ground-which is uncomfortable for everybody-doesn't seem to work."

Adams describes the situation as "just barely getting by," with providing sororities storage in the basement of Trent for 100 years worth of junk.

"It's my hope that, not just as a result from the CCI but as a result of conversations that have been taking place over several years, that we're now primed to have this discussion," he says. "Where does greek life and, in this case, sororities as a part of that, fit into the bigger picture of Duke over the next 10 to 20 years? If we have that discussion, it seems to me that some of the space things will fall into place."

Guthrie also feels the time is right for a lurch back into action.

"The opinion is too diverse within sororities as to whether or not they would want to live together," she says. "But going back to the original chapter rooms that sororities had on East Campus-that's exactly the situation that we should be willing to push for right now. Our focus is really more about common space."

Absent in today's discussion seems to be the passion and spirit of members and advisors in the late 1950s, determined not to let centuries of tradition die out. The last time Panhellenic sororities emitted an audible protest about their nomadic status was in 1995, when they solicited a meeting with Student Affairs and the University architect to lobby for space. Though the groups came to some sort of consensus, prompting blueprints and yet another optimistic statement from Panhellenic about soon-to-come rooms, not a brick has moved in the past 12 years.

Adams says that the January meeting at Duke of the 10 national chapter presidents-a rumored response to the debauched description of lacrosse-era sorority life in an infamous Rolling Stone article-got the ball rolling. "One of the things that came out of that discussion... is that space is needed, and if it can't happen on West because of the real estate shortage, is Central an option?"

But perhaps it's better for the nomads to not hoist the battering ram quite yet-their gloved predecessors would hardly have applauded such behavior-and simply make the small points.

"If we had space, Tridelt could look on their wall and see a picture of Elizabeth Dole when she was here," Guthrie says. "And that's pretty cool."