[Peace-discuss] DePauw Cuts Ties With Controversial Sorority

[Robert Naiman]

can we kick these people off our campus too?

The New York Times
March 12, 2007
DePauw Cuts Ties With Controversial Sorority
By SAM DILLON
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/education/12cnd-sorority.html

DePauw University severed its ties today with a national sorority that
evicted two-thirds of the university's members last year in what the
sorority called an effort to improve its image for recruitment, but
which the evicted women described as a purge of the unattractive or
the uncool.

"We at DePauw do not like the way our students were treated," DePauw's
president, Robert G. Bottoms, said in a letter to Delta Zeta. "We at
DePauw believe that the values of our university and those of the
national Delta Zeta sorority are incompatible."

The sorority evicted 23 members of its DePauw chapter in December, and
half a dozen other women later quit in protest. The action greatly
diminished the chapter's diversity. The women the sorority allowed to
stay were all slender and conventionally pretty. Those evicted
included some overweight women, and several minority members were
evicted or left the sorority on their own.

In an interview, Dr. Bottoms said that beginning this fall Delta Zeta
would no longer be permitted to house students in its Greek-columned
residence on the DePauw campus in Greencastle, Ind. Only a handful of
undergraduates are currently living in the Delta Zeta house, and four
of them are seniors, Dr. Bottoms said, adding that the university
would help any women who had been planning to live in the residence
next year to find alternative housing.

The sorority's actions were the subject of an article in The New York
Times on Feb. 25 and received widespread coverage in the news media.
On March 1, Delta Zeta's national officers said they were cutting off
communication with news organizations.

A woman who answered the telephone today at Delta Zeta's national
headquarters in Oxford, Ohio, said that Cynthia Winslow Menges, the
sorority's executive director, was busy with a conference call.
Thereafter, Ms. Menges did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Delta Zeta has chapters on 165 campuses nationwide. Its chapter at
DePauw, a rural campus 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis, is one of
its oldest.

In a message posted on its Web site this month, the sorority said:
"Delta Zeta National apologizes to any of our women at DePauw who felt
personally hurt by our actions. It was never our intention to
disparage or hurt any of our members during this chapter
reorganization process."

That apology, however, did not bring reconciliation at DePauw.

"It's like a thief who's sorry that he got caught, rather than for
what he did," said Rachel Pappas, a junior who left the sorority
before the evictions and organized a campus protest about it last
month.

In addition to the apology, the sorority posted on its Web site
statements critical of the women forced out of the DePauw chapter and
of faculty members who supported them. In the letter sent to Delta
Zeta today, Dr. Bottoms cited the sorority's decision to publicize
that criticism as contributing to his decision.

"The arrangement we have with Greek organizations is that they're
guests of ours and we expect them to live up to university standards,
and in this case Delta Zeta did not," Dr. Bottoms said. "This means
that sorority can't exist on our campus as an organization beginning
in the fall."

Robert P. Hershberger, the chairman of DePauw's modern languages
department, who earlier this year circulated a faculty petition
criticizing Delta Zeta's treatment of the women, said today in an
interview: "This was the right thing to do. I doubt there will be many
people here upset about this."