Nearly three years ago, Trinity College did some soul-searching about Greek life on the campus after a spike in drug and alcohol problems and a drop down the national rankings.
The small liberal-arts college in Connecticut announced a major change as part of a plan to improve campus social life: Its seven single-gender fraternities and sororities would have to become coeducational. By the fall of 2016 the groups would need to have virtually equal shares of male and female members.
One year shy of that deadline, however, not a single student has crossed the gender divide in those seven organizations.
The idea of coed Greek life had precedent at Trinity: The college’s trustees actually approved a similar plan 23 years ago. It fizzled because there were no mechanisms in place to enforce it. When the college revived the idea, a panel initially recommended setting target quotas for fraternities and sororities to ensure compliance.
The target for this coming fall had called for 30 percent of fraternity members to be female students, and vice versa for sororities. The final benchmark would have required 45 percent minority-gender membership by the fall of 2016. But those quotas have disappeared.
What happened?
Kathy Andrews, a spokeswoman for Trinity, wrote in an email to The Chronicle that the college’s goal “continues to be that these efforts will result in quantifiable progress, in terms of gender equity, among Trinity’s selective social organizations.” Within fraternities and sororities, she said, it’s still expected that “the number of male and female members will be reasonably close to equal” by the fall of next year.
Greek leaders have made an effort to achieve gender parity, said Alexander I. Loy, a 2015 Trinity graduate and former president of the college’s Kappa Sigma chapter. But in his conversations with Trinity students, he said, “I didn’t come across a single female that wanted to be a member of a fraternity on campus or a guy that wanted to be a member of a sorority.”
With public scrutiny on fraternities continuing to build, a number of colleges are considering plans to shake up their Greek systems. Making Greek life coed is one strategy that, in theory, would force fraternities to clean up their acts but also keep their houses on campus, satisfying students as well as alumni and other potential donors who might be angered by a move to ax the Greeks.
Elsewhere in Connecticut, Wesleyan University followed in Trinity’s footsteps last fall, announcing a coed mandate for its residential fraternities. One Wesleyan chapter is fighting the university in court over the plan.
Trinity’s experience, however, may be a lesson for other colleges, said Gentry R. McCreary, chief executive and a managing partner at Dyad Strategies, a higher-education risk-management firm. Colleges that are grappling with Greek life need to “stop looking for easy fixes and magic bullets,” Mr. McCreary said. “They don’t exist.”
A New Social Code
In 2011, James F. Jones Jr., Trinity’s president at the time, described one of his wishes for the college’s future in a white paper that was prepared at the request of the faculty.
“If only I had Harry Potter’s wand, I would wave it over Vernon Street and change all the fraternities and sororities into theme houses,” which students could join based on “merit and individual value” versus appearance and economic privilege, he wrote.
In response, the college’s Board of Trustees assigned a committee made up of students, faculty, staff, and alumni to write a new social code and recommend reforms of Greek life.
Many of the committee’s proposed changes have become reality. In the fall of 2014, male and female students interested in joining Greek life had to attend recruitment events at every fraternity and sorority.
“It wasn’t as awkward as I expected,” said Mr. Loy of women participating in fraternity rush. At the same time, he said, “we knew they wouldn’t be there unless they had to be.”
He likened the atmosphere to “an eighth-grade dance.”
Last spring fraternities and sororities had to keep recruitment events open to men and women, though interested students were no longer required to visit every house.
Ms. Andrews said all fraternity and sorority chapters had also met higher academic standards for the past year — students need a 3.0 grade-point average in their previous semester to rush an organization, and chapters need an average 3.0 GPA among members — and pledging had been eliminated.
The committee’s initial recommendations said that Greek chapters failing to meet the annual benchmarks toward gender parity would face a warning and, potentially, a ban as a Trinity organization.
But Jane H. Nadel-Klein, an anthropology professor at the college who was a member of a committee charged with carrying out the changes, said the quotas had not been included in the final version of the policy. And despite the lack of opposite-gender members in seven of Trinity’s Greek organizations, no fraternity or sorority chapter had been penalized.
“Now we seem to be in a kind of limbo where I would say we’ve basically made no progress,” said Ms. Nadel-Klein, who personally supported abolishing the Greek system.
William Morrow, president of the college’s Inter-Greek Council, asserted that the plan lacked genuine input from students. Mr. Jones held forums during the 2012-13 academic year at which students could ask questions about the policy. But Mr. Morrow said many students — including non-Greeks — did not support it, and he didn’t feel that students’ concerns had been given any weight.
Though Mr. Jones had spurred the college’s actions to change Greek life, he did not remain at Trinity to carry out the coed mandate. He stepped down in 2014, a year earlier than he’d planned. He then became interim president of Sweet Briar College and supported a plan to shut down the institution, but after Sweet Briar alumnae won an appeal to keep the college open, Mr. Jones resigned.
Trinity College leaders said at the time of the announcement of Mr. Jones’s departure from the Connecticut institution that the move was unrelated to the opposition to the Greek-life mandate. The Chronicle could not reach him for comment.
Uncertain Progress
Former and current Greek leaders say they’re not sure what the future will hold for their organizations at Trinity.
The college has tried to measure progress on the coed mandate. Mr. Loy was part of a committee that examined each Greek chapter’s annual report on working toward gender parity and other standards.
He said the committee had measured how well fraternities had reached out to women and whether fraternities had offered women bids, among other criteria. But he said the committee’s work on the coed policy had seemed to hit a dead end because “there just wasn’t a whole lot we could measure.”
In a November 2014 letter to the campus, Trinity’s current president, Joanne Berger-Sweeney, praised “substantial progress” in Greek life and said the college was “continuing to consider options for improved gender parity.” Ms. Berger-Sweeney was not made available for an interview this week.
Mr. Morrow said he was confident that Ms. Berger-Sweeney would involve Greek-organization leaders as well as faculty members and other students in future discussions of coed Greek life.
Gregory B. Smith, a political-science professor who opposes the policy, thinks Trinity’s administration might be “treading water” on the coed mandate and “hoping it will go away.” But Ms. Nadel-Klein said many faculty members, including herself, hope that’s not the case.
“The idea of Greek life embodies a fundamentally antidemocratic and gender-biased system,” she said.
Still, as Trinity, Wesleyan, and other colleges move forward with various changes in Greek life, Mr. McCreary said administrators should keep in mind that a college’s culture can’t be transformed by targeting one aspect of campus life.
The coed idea “will not have the impact” that colleges are looking for, he said, “and it might have a lot of unintended consequences,” such as declines in alumni giving.
Another potential drawback is that national fraternity and sorority organizations require chapters to be same-sex. If Trinity’s Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority chapter accepted men, for instance, the National Panhellenic Conference would revoke the group’s affiliation. Operating without national oversight, Mr. McCreary said, would make the college’s chapters “a huge risk-management liability.”
In 2012, Mr. Smith wrote a letter to the committee devising Greek-life reforms; he argued for an expansion of the Greek system to 24 chapters, with 12 fraternities and 12 sororities. More options, he said at the time, would establish a better balance for women in Trinity’s Greek system, which has only two sororities.
He said his idea had a lot of support among students. The committee wrote in response that the plan would be too costly.
But Joshua Frank, a senior and former president of Trinity’s student government, said he believes the college’s current administration has recognized the flaws of the coed policy.
To improve Trinity’s social climate, he said, “we’ve got to focus on broader college issues” like socioeconomic diversity, “not just 20 percent of the campus.”
