“We’ve had countless, you know, diversity inclusion sessions and workshops, and everybody is, quote unquote, trying. “I didn’t want to continue to have to spend all my time educating all the girls around me,” Ms.
She and four other women of color decided to quit. Lots of her sisters “liked” her comment, and the conversation flowed for an hour or so. She sent the chat a message expressing “disappointment that whenever something like this happens, I’m the first person to bring it up or another person of color is,” she said, and urged her sisters, most of whom are white, to share resources and make donations related to the protests.Īt first, reception was positive. “Nothing was being talked about in our group chat except for, like, a trip to Vegas,” Ms. Thompson, who is Black, said there were no efforts from her sorority sisters to discuss anti-racist action. As protests flared around the country, Ms.
Taylor Thompson, 21, a rising senior at Vanderbilt University, was one of the first to leave the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority in late May, after the death of George Floyd in police custody. The movement at Vanderbilt has been the biggest so far, with many students leaving several prominent fraternity and sorority chapters there, including Delta Tau Delta and Kappa Kappa Gamma.īoth national organizations said that membership numbers remained healthy Delta Tau Delta said that “approximately a third” of the Vanderbilt chapter had disaffiliated, and Kappa Kappa Gamma said “a majority of our women at Vanderbilt University remain members.” In both cases, formal disaffiliation requires that each student submit paperwork at Kappa Kappa Gamma, there is a waiting period of several weeks.īoth organizations stated their commitment to supporting remaining members in efforts to address and reform issues within the Greek system and outside it.
On Wednesday, the governing panel of sororities at Tufts announced in a statement that rush (when students become acquainted with the different fraternities or sororities on campus) would not take place in the fall as they “decide what the best course of action is for Greek Life at Tufts” and continue to examine “the structurally and situationally problematic nature of Greek Life.” “We’re just going to see history repeat itself over and over again,” he said. Similar “Abolish Greek Life” movements have sprung up at other universities around the country, including at the University of Richmond, Duke, Emory, American University, Northwestern and the University of North Carolina.Įmma Heck, 21, a senior at Emory who recently dropped out of the Pi Beta Phi sorority, said, “The national organizations are always going to prohibit any real change.” Max Ratelle, 21, a rising senior at Tufts, said he dropped out of his fraternity because reform felt futile. The mass action, which has taken place while students have been away from the Nashville campus for the summer and isolated because of the pandemic, has been accelerated by a handful of racist incidents that have been surfaced in videos and on social media.īut students said their real reasons have deeper roots: that Greek life is exclusionary, racist and misogynist, as well as resistant to reform because of the hierarchical nature of the national Greek organizations, which control local chapters. They have written searing op-eds condemning their own organizations for the student newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler.Īnd they have petitioned the administration to ban Greek organizations from campus. They have gathered, digitally, using group-run Instagram activist pages. In the past month, hundreds of students have dropped out of their fraternities and sororities at Vanderbilt University.