Dartmouth Panhell Boycott

8/12/2019 Dartmouth Panhell Boycott

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Subject:To Our Community: A Call to Action

Dear Members of the Dartmouth Community,

We, the undersigned members of the Panhellenic Executive Council, write to youto explain our decision to abstain from Winter Recruitment this term and to seek

your understanding as well as proactive engagement with issues detailed below.

We feel that there are clear flaws in our Greek system and we acknowledge our role in

re-creating these flaws, through processes such as Recruitment and on a daily basis. At the

moment, our Greek system is not an inclusive and constructive institution for all of our peers

at Dartmouth. While in theory no member of the sophomore class in good standing is barred

from the Recruitment process, in practice, the Recruitment process stratifies the Dartmouth

community along race, class, gender and sexual orientation, where those individuals who

better approximate a narrow sorority ideal receive preferential treatment. Furthermore, the

day-to-day practices within Greek life are not an attractive option for many Dartmouth

students and yet, due in part to the dominance of Greek life, alternative options are weakened.

This is a call for moral leadership and for us as a community to look inward at the system we

perpetuate through our participation, whether consciously or passively. The five of us involved

feel that as leaders of this community it is our duty to unequivocally renounce these parts of

our Greek experience and to speak out against them with the goal of fostering a culture of

public dialogue and progress.

Here are some of the issues we hope to address in our community:

(1) We as sorority members must stop blindly empowering fraternities in cases when they fail

to create safe spaces for all sorority members and members of the community.

(2) While we as sorority members consistently recognize that much of what we stand for inpractice is a glorification of drinking and alcohol, we nevertheless consistently fail to move

beyond that.

(3) We recognize that Greek life is exorbitantly expensive, and that an institution which

dominates our social scene should not be both exclusive and prohibitively costly for some


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people.

(4) The Panhellenic Council has failed to provide inclusive, and consistently welcoming spaces

for women of color, non-gender-conforming individuals, and women who deviate from the

sorority ideal in general.

(5) Finally, it s no secret that Recruitment often spirals into a superficial process, the outcome

or which is the recreation of exclusivity based disproportionately on rushees' looks, ability to

small-talk, and pre-existing connections, whether athletic or otherwise.

Our primary goal in this message is to drive home the need for serious and lasting

critical engagement on the part of our peers - whether affiliated or otherwise -

with regards to the flaws in our dominant social institution. In addition, an

incomplete list of changes we believe most immediately actionable include the

following:

(1) If the administration wishes to continue to support the Greek system at the present level of

accountability, it must make it financially accessible to all: there must be a new centralized

scholarship system for those on financial aid. Examples of suggested changes include:

a) Standardizing dues for all Greek houses

b) Requiring that Greek House dues must be free or a part of the school tuition (i.e. student

activities fee)

c) A permanent endowment securing financial inclusivity

(2) All sex offenders found guilty of rape by the Committee On Standards must be expelled

from the College immediately with absolutely no exceptions. On-going reforms of the COS

process should receive top-priority treatment and should proceed without delay. Additionally,

the past offenses of accused perpetrators must be taken into account when determining the

guilt of someone accused of rape or sexual assault.

(3) To combat a lack of dissemination of information for members of campus who have been

sexually assaulted or raped, we request that each class syllabus include a list of resources and


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pertinent phone numbers. This way, resources are constantly and consistently visible and

accessible.

The official Recruitment process takes just one week for most women involved, but it takes a

full term of commitment for the Panhellenic Council. Because Recruitment dominates the

majority of our working hours, implementing structural change to the process becomes a task

secondary. Furthermore, with our concentration diverted elsewhere, we are limited in time

and ability to tackle pertinent problems in the Greek community.We are complicit in

perpetuating the structures of inequality that occur year after year, term after term, and

which in many cases harm rather than strengthen the women we were elected to serve.

The Panhellenic Council creedstates that "We, as undergraduate members of women's

fraternities, stand for good scholarship, for guarding of good health, for maintenance of finestandards and for serving, to the best of our ability, our college community." For too long,

as members of the Greek community, we have recognized our own system's flaws

yet failed to be proactive in creating change. Greek Life, at its core, is most

available and empowering to those who can afford it, those who excel in the

moral, physical and psychological challenges of pledge term, and those who can

navigate a superficial Recruitment process.

Our reprieve from recruitment this term will provide us with the time and resources we needto push for necessary, progressive change for the Panhellenic community as well as the wider

Dartmouth community. Our hope is to bring total focus to a number of issues that rarely

receive our full attention. We hope that you will view our decision as an opportunity to make

Dartmouth a better place for our sisters, potential new members, and all women of this

institution.

To the women who wanted to rush this quarter: We know our decision may feel unfair to

you. However, we feel that enabling you to enter this unchanging cycle would be more

unjust. We are also thinking of the women who on a consistent basis feel excluded from

Recruitment for whatever reason.

We apologize to the women who rushed this past fall who had bad experiences. Despite our

greatest efforts to make rush a better experience than it has been historically, we realized
http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dartmouth.edu%2F~orl%2Fgreek-soc%2Fcfs%2Fpanhell.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGMP9J3lJ-ajKlKJOESOKw7vyWeLA


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there was little we could do within the existing structure to avoid the miserable experiences

which so many womenour peersfaced.

We would lastly like to state that this decision and the opinions detailed above reflect only

those of the undersigned. We invite other members of the Panhellenic General Assembly and

Executive group, as well as all members of the Panhellenic, Greek and Dartmouth

communities to speak on their own behalf.

We acknowledge that our decision will be unpopular with some. We welcome productive

feedback and wish to engage with our peers in our coming course of action.

Sincerely,

Eliana Piper, President

Michelle Khare, Vice President of Operations

Jenni Gargano, Vice President of Public Relations

Kate Shelton, Programming Chair

Alex Leach, Programming Chair

Documents

Dartmouth Panhell Boycott