When Zena Abro came to the University of Richmond in 2018, she wasn’t excited about the idea of joining a sorority. She did it only because her friends joined, and she didn’t want to feel left out on a campus where more than half of undergraduate women are in sororities.
From the get-go, Abro (above), who is Asian American, felt disconnected from Pi Beta Phi. Older students didn’t seem as enthusiastic about getting to know her, which made her feel less welcome, she said, and the pressure to party in Greek life wasn’t her thing. In May, after the end of her sophomore year, she realized the dissonance was serious.
Several days after George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed in police custody, Pi Beta Phi leaders penned what Abro felt was a meaningless, poorly worded statement acknowledging police brutality. She stepped in and helped draft a better version, but it wasn’t published until nearly two weeks after Floyd’s death. She took that as a sign that her sorority didn’t understand the gravity and importance of the moment.
In July, Abro and 17 other women of color wrote an “Open Letter of Group Disaffiliation,” in which they vowed to quit their sororities. The women said they had “been repeatedly disappointed by our chapters and their leadership members, many of whom remained silent” about the deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other Black people. They said they were tired of feeling “tokenized” and frustrated with the pressure to conform to, for instance, “Eurocentric beauty standards.”
More than 130 of the university’s sorority members have now signed the letter and pledged to leave their chapters. Leaders of Richmond’s Panhellenic Council, which governs the sororities, resigned en masse this week. The now-former council president told the campus newspaper she’s also in the process of quitting Pi Beta Phi.
The system is working in the way that it was meant to work, and it was meant to be exclusive.
Richmond students are part of a new movement to abolish predominantly white fraternities and sororities that has gained traction at more than a dozen campuses this summer, driven by the national reckoning over racial injustice. The students involved say they’ve concluded that participation in Greek life — a system of exclusive groups that were historically limited to the white and wealthy — isn’t compatible with their newfound resolve to dismantle oppressive institutions.
The activism has gained traction through a network of Instagram accounts that publish anonymous submissions alleging racism, homophobia, hazing, and sexual assault within Greek life. The movement was bolstered by outrage over a video, posted in July, of a Vanderbilt University fraternity member using a racist slur among a group of fraternity and sorority members. Petitions and emails to faculty and staff members seek to drum up more support for the students’ cause.
They haven’t won everyone over. Some members of Greek life are vehemently opposed, writing in campus newspapers that it doesn’t make sense to shut down the entire system for problems within a handful of chapters. Others have said formally abolishing sororities and frats would simply drive parties and misconduct underground, out of the purview of administrators and safety regulations. And while administrators have pledged to take action in some cases, they haven’t voiced support for immediate abolition.
But at some campuses, the number of students quitting Greek life is striking. At Vanderbilt University, where about one-third of the institution’s 6,900 undergraduates are members, advocates for abolition say at least 250 students have committed to disaffiliating.
While Greek-letter organizations will never vanish entirely, said Doug Fierberg, a lawyer who has sued fraternities on behalf of students who’ve experienced hazing and sexual misconduct, they could be eliminated from some campuses. That’s what students are hoping, too.
Many envision a gradual dissolving of the system: As more members leave and fewer join, chapters will shrink in size. Without a vibrant social scene, the thinking goes, Greek life will lose much of its appeal, and with it, its ability to perpetuate inequality in campus culture.
Kate Hader, a Northwestern University junior, joined her sorority, Kappa Delta, mostly because she worried she’d be lonely and miss out on friendships and social opportunities if she didn’t. She liked the women in her chapter. But she was bothered by sororities’ fixation on moving up the Greek “ranks” — the idea that they were jockeying for social standing with other chapters. A higher “ranking,” she said, seemed to be synonymous with having whiter, skinnier, and richer members.
Now Hader is pushing to abolish Greek life, and she’s in the process of disaffiliating from her sorority. “It feels really self-congratulatory to say I’m standing up for this now,” she said, noting that other students have spoken out about the harms of Greek life for years.
Like Hader, many white students see abolition as a concrete action they can take to further their commitment to social justice. “This is about tearing down these institutions from the inside out,” said Emma Pinto, a senior at Vanderbilt who’s quitting her sorority, Zeta Tau Alpha. Pinto said about half of the members in her chapter also planned to leave. “The space and social capital that Greek organizations take up needs to be distributed,” she said.
Students of color, like Abro, say they’re fed up with what they see as Greek life’s ignorance and inaction on diversity and inclusion. “The system is working in the way that it was meant to work, and it was meant to be exclusive,” Abro said.
Most of the outspoken voices in favor of abolition have been sorority members. But some fraternity men are speaking out, too.
At American University, the entire membership of Delta Tau Delta quit in July and called on its peers to follow suit and end the “cycle of abuse, misogyny, and racism perpetuated by Greek-life organizations,” according to The Eagle, the student newspaper. At Vanderbilt, the president of the Interfraternity Council, which governs historically white Greek-letter organizations, stepped down in July, along with two other council leaders.
Macey Goldstein, a Northwestern junior, said he and most other members of his Delta Chi chapter have decided to disaffiliate. He felt increasingly uncomfortable with white, straight men controlling the campus social scene, with the risk of sexual misconduct within fraternity spaces, and with the fact that some low-income students were being shut out of Greek life by financial barriers.
After Floyd’s death, Goldstein said, his chapter was discussing how to raise money for mutual aid and bail funds for protesters. Yet, he said, he was continuing to participate in a system that “maintained white-supremacist values and racism. A lot of us felt incredibly uncomfortable with that dichotomy.”
Reform, abolition advocates have said, isn’t an option when problems are so baked in. Twenty-seven members of Vanderbilt’s Delta Tau Delta chapter published a highly critical statement in the student newspaper, saying they had appealed to other fraternity members and administrators with proposals like an application process that would allow the houses occupied by Greek-letter organizations to be used by other student groups. Their ideas were met with “harsh resistance,” they said.
“This system’s existence turns Vanderbilt into a space that oppresses the identities of so many individuals that we should empower,” the former fraternity members wrote.
Campus administrators, meanwhile, remain largely committed to the idea of reforming Greek groups, rather than disbanding them.
At Vanderbilt, Kristin Torrey, the director of Greek life, reached out to Pinto and another student pushing for Greek life’s abolition. She offered a meeting. “As you can imagine given my role on campus, this is not a movement that I support,” Torrey wrote in the email, provided by Pinto. “However,” Torrey continued, “I absolutely support creating substantive change in our community, as well as individual students making the personal choice to leave their organizations based on their experience.”
In an interview, Pinto said she met with Torrey and other administrators but described the conversation as frustrating. Torrey didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Chronicle. A Vanderbilt spokesman provided a statement: “We respect the right of students to join or disaffiliate with any registered student organization.”
At Richmond, Provost Jeffrey Legro sent an email to faculty members after students pushing for abolition tried to solicit their support. In the email, obtained by The Chronicle, he highlighted recent changes within the Greek system and wrote that “Greek Life also has strong supporters among our students and alumni,” citing its impact on “persistence to graduation.”
Many colleges’ top donors are fraternity and sorority members who don’t look kindly on efforts to shut them down. Moreover, even though the Greek system often ends up in the news for negative reasons, several studies have shown that fraternity and sorority members have higher retention rates than do nonmembers.
Legro was unavailable for an interview, but a Richmond spokeswoman wrote in an email that “we applaud any student effort to make better, more welcoming, more equitable, or more inclusive the organizations in which they participate.”
Travis L. Martin, director of fraternity and sorority life at Northwestern, wrote in an email that the problems raised on a pro-abolition Instagram account run by students “go against the values” of the university’s Greek system. He said his office would help students “make informed decisions about their affiliation through chapter leadership coaching.”
National fraternity and sorority leaders say the activists are calling attention to the right issues but taking the wrong approach. Jud Horras, president of the North-American Interfraternity Conference, the umbrella group for most predominantly white fraternities, said his organization is advising campus officials who are under “enormous personal attack” from the abolition movement, which has employed tactics that “bully and harass” and “pit and divide.” Horras said that to his knowledge, just three fraternity chapters out of 6,000 nationwide have closed because of the disaffiliations.
The space and social capital that Greek organizations take up needs to be distributed.
He and Dani Weatherford, chief executive of the National Panhellenic Council, the umbrella group for sororities, argued that eliminating Greek-life organizations wouldn’t actually eradicate the sexual misconduct, racism, and other discrimination that students were calling out, and that students would be better off staying in the groups and working to improve them. “If you want to address some past harm, you don’t just walk away from it,” Weatherford said.
Stevan J. Veldkamp, executive director of the Timothy J. Piazza Center for Fraternity and Sorority Research and Reform at Pennsylvania State University, said he appreciates “the sense of urgency surrounding concerning behaviors” among students. But he cautioned against making broad, sweeping statements about Greek life, which “is not a monolithic entity.”
The Piazza Center, named for a student who died in a hazing incident, recently surveyed more than 1,600 Greek chapters at 53 colleges, and found that 80 percent of the chapters did not have any student-conduct violations, which include alcohol problems, hazing, and sexual misconduct. The center also found that the vast majority of fraternity and sorority members surveyed believed that being in Greek life had “positively impacted my comfort with people of a different culture/race other than my own” and had “positively impacted my commitment to social justice.”
Over all, Veldkamp said, “most students in fraternities and sororities, as well as campus professionals report that the experience is mostly positive.”
Recent efforts to shut Greek groups down or fundamentally change how they operate have yielded mixed results. Trinity College unsuccessfully tried to make its fraternities and sororities go co-ed. Harvard University sought to discourage students from joining single-gender organizations by banning members from holding campus leadership roles and receiving high-profile scholarships, but rescinded the policy after fraternities and sororities sued.
Last year, though, after sexist and racist documents surfaced at Swarthmore College that were allegedly part of one fraternity’s rituals, angry student protests led the college’s two fraternities to voluntarily disband.
There are logistical barriers, too, for students who want to leave Greek-letter organizations. For those who planned to live in their fraternity or sorority houses this semester, it’s probably too late to make alternative housing plans. And even though Greek life famously operates under a model of student self-governance, the chapters are beholden to multiple outside entities: national umbrella organizations, alumni boards, housing corporations, and campus administrators. Some students say their sorority’s national group must sign off before they officially quit the organization.
At Northwestern, Hader said, shutting down Greek life would require a vote by the university’s Board of Trustees. Even if all current members of her sorority quit right now, national leaders could quickly start building the chapter anew. The term for doing so has oppressive undertones, she said: recolonize.
“That cycle would just continue,” Hader said.
While total abolition faces an uphill battle, Northwestern sorority leaders are discussing the possibility of pausing recruitment this fall, Hader said. At Tufts University, sorority leaders have already done just that.
At Richmond, Abro said, she and others are calling for the university to suspend all Greek life activity for one year as a starting point. Since the letter written by sorority women of color was released publicly last month, Abro said she’s heard from many of her peers in Greek life.
Some have told her: “After reading this, I don’t know how I can stay.”
