It wasn’t only in the foyers and living rooms of fraternities and sororities that rush took place last week, but also on computer screens across campus, as a website posting offering rankings and descriptions of Cornell’s various Greek houses made it all the way to Facebook.
The rankings, posted by a Cornell student under the pseudonym, cornellrushweek, sought to “present a general Cornell consensus about each house rather than a personal one,” in the poster’s words. For the most part, cornellrushweek posited, “people in the Greek system who read these will agree with my descriptions and rankings.”
And from the comments found below the initial blog — 285 responses on 19 pages — a consensus indeed emerged.
“Surprisingly pretty accurate,” wrote cornellstudent09. “Wow. This is chillingly accurate,” said another, who lamented that the guide wasn’t available when he went through rush.
While the majority of comments and questions on the site came from concerned or confused freshmen, the rankings also made their way into fraternity and sorority houses, with rush chairs across campus consulting the posting — a thread on the website College Confidential — as the week began.
So what began as one student’s opinion suddenly became a signpost for countless freshmen, as well as a touchstone for frats and sororities to gauge their own coolness on campus. As cornellrushweek hoped, consensus was apparently achieved.
“To me,” wrote Margaret Thatcher (presumably not a sorority lady herself, but a vixen nonetheless), “consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.”
To be fair, the rankings accurately captured widely-held stereotypes about Cornell’s many houses — and in that sense, it is something that many believe. In writing that Kappa Kappa Gamma has “the ‘girls with pearls’ thing going on,” and that Sigma Nu has “a lot of athletes and big guys,” the posting hewed closely to most of the houses’ actual reputations.
Indeed, most anyone on campus would corroborate the ranking’s test for spotting an AEPhi girl: “bright green hoodies, black leggings and Uggs,” versus an SDT girl: “black leggings and bright blue hoodies,” and there’s certainly some truth to the portrayal of Alpha Delt guys “with their Polo collars popped all the time, and wearing boat shoes and Polo sweaters.”
Yet the inevitable failure of such rankings is that they fail to account for the vast differences between a house’s reputation and its actual character. Interestingly, while many of the most popular fraternities and sororities on campus have undergone vast changes in the past few years, their reputations have remained static.
Take Psi U, described as “Top of the Top” on the website, known as the “rich guys house,” with many “rich kids from Massachusetts and Connecticut,” and small pledge classes between 12-14 guys.
From a freshman’s eyes, these stereotypes might ring true, but as Spencer Ross ’09, the Psi U rush chair, explains, the fraternity he represents is far different from its portrayal on College Confidential (though he maintains that the “Top of the Top” characterization is accurate).
True, more than half of this year’s incoming class went a prep school, Ross said, but Psi U’s recent pledge classes — which, at 20 students last year and 17 this year (it would have been 18, Ross noted, had one gentleman not joined “the society on the wrong side of Forest Park lane,” as he razzed neighboring Sigma Phi) — are far greater in size than the rankings account for, and go far beyond their stereotypes.
“When we look through our process, we gave no consideration to family income or educational background,” Ross said, pointing to many of the fraternity’s pledges who do not conform to the alleged Psi U image.
Yet the changes go far beyond vague conceptions of “type.” Perhaps the greatest shift in fraternity and sorority makeup has been the seismic shakeup in religious and, to a lesser extent, racial backgrounds within houses — a phenomenon that has seemingly gone unnoticed by the “consensus” viewpoint.
This year, Delta Gamma, described as “mostly blonde and super pretty” — perhaps a faithful homage to sorority sister Ann Coulter ’84 — and Sigma Alpha Epsilon, an allegedly “preppy house” with “rich white kids,” (read: WASPy on both counts) both took sizable numbers of Jews in their pledge classes. At Psi U, there is a contingent known as “Psi Jew” that partakes in a weekly Shabbat ceremony with other houses on campus, and this year, they extended bids to two black students.
Yet even though houses like SAE are probably more Jewish than not, they escape labels like, “Another Jewish house,” as was the very first comment on more than seven of the descriptions from the list (though to Zeta Beta Tau’s credit, they have a “fair amount of non-Jewish guys in the house”). And it’s worth mentioning that with one exception, every single so-called Jewish organization was ranked as middle- or lower-tier.
In just the last four years, many of Cornell’s prominent fraternities and sororities have drastically shifted their purview on campus, yet their age-old reputations remain intact. That’s why the website presumes that a fraternity like Pike would compete with “Jewish houses like ZBT [and] TEP,” when in fact, according to Jason Pearl ’08, Pike hardly “cross-rushed” with those houses, and actually contended with “houses that used to be exclusively non-Jewish.”
To their credit, Cornell students have broken through all of the old barriers to entry — whether they be fortresses of privilege or bastions of anti-Semitism — and it’s high time that the gawkers, the critics and the Greek houses themselves let go of antiquated labels that have outlived their use.