From the Sunday New York Times comes this story of the Delta Zeta sorority at DePauw University in Indiana. On a college campus where nearly everyone is involved in some kind of "Greek Life" (that phrase makes me want to puke, sorry Sisters) the Delta Zeta sorority included many fat, "geeky" (math and science majors) and non-white women. Of course, this didn't make the Delta Zs the most popular house on campus and other
DZs nationwide feared the reputation would suffer. So national representatives of the sorority swooped onto campus to interview every woman in the house, resulting in a purge of 23 of the 35 members. "The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit." But first, before they axed the unsuspecting Delta Sisters, they put the girls through several humiliating episodes.
A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to
hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their
rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a team that included
several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some
slender women invited from the sorority’s chapter at Indiana
University, Ms. Holloway said.
The women who were expelled from the sorority were done so under the pretense of calling into question their dedication to recruitment. This included the house President and the Secretary.
