PHA discourages 'facebooking' pledges

Students planning to participate in women's recruitment this year should think twice before requesting friends on Facebook.com during the next few months.\nRecruitment directors from IU's sorority chapters and executive board members of the Panhellenic Association agreed in a recent meeting to discourage current sorority members from accepting friends and messages from potential pledges, said Zeta Tau Alpha recruitment chair Johnna Kingery.\n"It sounds like a flashy idea but it's pretty basic and simple," said senior Jaclyn Reinking, PHA's executive vice president of recruitment.\nReinking said the purpose of removing contact via the online friends network is to "protect potentially new members" from assuming they will receive a bid from a certain sorority merely because one of its members is her "friend" on Facebook.\n"We want to keep recruitment a very fair process," Reinking said. "It's really not that big of a deal."\nNonetheless, Phi Mu's Co-recruitment Director Hillary Breslich said the PHA's new Facebook policy creates "a sticky situation."\n"Everyone has Facebook and everyone wants to make friends," she said. "It's hard to trust people's word that they're not going send a message to freshmen."\nStill, Breslich said she would implement the policy among members of Phi Mu and thinks it will go smoothly. \n"I don't think sororities are going around and asking freshmen to be their friends," she said.\nReinking said another reason that led to the decision of eliminating Facebook use in the recruitment process is to inhibit pledges from receiving a false sense of what certain chapters are like by information in its members' profiles. \n"Some people put things in their profiles with shock value to look cool," Reinking said. "We don't want pledges to see something that would discourage them from pledging."\nKingery, too, said this could be an issue.\n"Not everyone you see on people's profiles is representative of what the chapter's like," she said. \nThe new rule comes before women's recruitment begins this fall. Regardless, informal recruitment events have begun at sorority houses this week, perhaps the reason for the Facebook rule's current existence.\nBreslich said Phi Mu has played host to several potential pledges already by inviting them over for dinners or "to watch 'The OC.'"\nKingery said Zeta Tau Alpha, too, has initiated some informal events for potential pledges but that attending these "isn't that important."\nHowever, she, like Reinking, encourages future sorority members to attend formal recruitment at 8 p.m. Sept. 27 in Alumni Hall when all 19 of IU's sororities are hosting "Greek Opportunities for Women," followed by "19-Party" Nov. 12.\nFor now, interested women can register at www.indiana.edu/~gogreek.