Making a Pan-heaven of Panhel

The Panhellenic Association sororities’ annual recruitment is underway, which makes now just the time to critically assess recruitment practices employed by Panhel. The intensive selection process is downright daunting for some female students, especially given the unenviable task of having to win the approval of group members in limited time. It should come as no surprise that, although each sorority refuses to publicly declare the criteria it uses to evaluate potential members, individual sororities might seem to resort to superficial metrics in this assessment. More unsettling, however, is Panhel’s laissez-faire mentality with respect to the issue—a sense of complacence with the values espoused by the recruitment processes.

It is worth mentioning that sororities’ recruitment events are inflexible to an extent. Many must adhere to the stringent guidelines set forth by their respective national chapters for fear of significant financial reprimands. National Panhellenic requirements can be even stricter, in some cases placing restrictions on the content of girls’ conversations. Simply put, some aspects of the superficiality of the process cannot reasonably be controlled by Duke Panhel and are simply endemic to the national Greek culture. Sororities on campus can’t be held accountable for this.

At the same time, we emphasize that national regulation does not constitute an excuse for Panhel to stand idly by. The grievances most frequently voiced by existing members themselves or potential new members—namely undue emphasis on physical appearance and social pressure to aspire to join so-called “top-tiered” sororities—are serious and not without merit.

A multilateral effort to combat these issues would be most effective. We strongly believe that a potential Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life/Panhel partnership is armed with sufficient political clout and social sway to implement specific solutions to these problems. Of utmost priority is a thorough, empirical investigation of the attitude of sorority women toward ideas such as “effortless perfection” and their respective chapters’ implicit endorsement of them. Indeed, before any concrete steps are to be taken, we must formally and quantitatively assess the pervasiveness of this issue on Duke’s campus.

Panhel and individual sorority chapters ought to implement other actionable measures too. We commend Panhel’s current recruitment counselor program in which select sorority members advise and encourage affected potential members, and we believe it is wholly necessary for each sorority chapter to extend this support structure to members post-recruitment.

Further, we advise Panhel to publicly acknowledge and denounce the presence of the aforementioned values within sororities at the beginning of recruitment. Lasting change to recruitment and sorority culture with respect to these issues will not occur outside of the public spotlight.

These requests are by no means unreasonable or unattainable. As it has demonstrated in the past, Panhel is an influential organization equipped with the political capital requisite to affect campus change. As many well know, it was able to successfully eradicate College ACB and fraternity progressives from Duke—two ostensibly fixed features of Greek life on campus. Why not continue to extend its laudable track record?

Transitioning to the college social scene is already an awkward and stressful process. Women should not be burdened further with having to conform to superficial values that Greek organizations sometimes promote.