Everyone in the Greek community has heard of, if not visited, GreekRank.com. If you are an exception or simply not in Greek life, GreekRank is a website where every campus fraternity and sorority chapter can be ranked based on looks, popularity, classiness, involvement, social life and sisterhood/brotherhood. The ranks are given by anyone, either anonymously or not, and include comments explaining the ranking. Does it sound shallow yet? Don’t worry, it gets worse.
GreekRank was designed with good intentions in mind, I’m sure. In it’s best form, the website provides a place for incoming freshman to get a more honest gist of how each chapter is perceived on campus. I, as an incoming freshman not too long ago, can say that I read GreekRank when trying to determine which sororities I may like when rush rolled around. I immediately regretted using GreekRank because all it did was tell me how mean, criticizing and shameful the Greek community was at large and discouraged me from rushing at all.
GreekRank is not a “real” and “honest” review of any campus chapter. If it were, then the ratings would be roughly the same from each commentator and would include a wide variety of perspectives from the campus. Since neither of these facts is true, readers are left to wonder who is determining the “end all be all” rankings for these sororities and fraternities. With the exception of very rare occasions, I can confidently say that rankings do NOT come from the 30-80% of students on campuses that are not involved with Greek life. If you think that Student A who is a pre-med bio major with barely enough time to shower has the time or cares enough to go online and bash 20-something Greek chapters on campus, then you are kidding yourself. Therefore, I would estimate that almost 100% of negative rankings come from fellow sororities or fraternities on campus.
This all probably seems logical to the Greek community because that’s “just the way it is,” but I refuse to accept that. Is bashing fellow PanHellenic and InterFraternity members just to make you look better “just the way it is”? Is knowing that other groups within the community see these actions and categorize all of us as shallow, shameless and petty “just the way it is”? No. It is the way it is because we allow it to be. But as a member of the Greek community, I beg you, stop allowing it. Stop criticizing each other and bashing each other for the entire world to see. In the long run, that anonymous comment about how ugly or unsocial or unintelligent you want people to think another chapter is will only hurt you and your chapter. As an incoming freshman, I read GreekRank and considered not rushing at all because I saw the community as a bunch of middle school girls writing in their burn books and posting anonymous comments on Formspring about how ugly Samantha’s hair looked yesterday.
These are actual comments taken from the first page of various GreekRank chapters at my school. (Keep in mind this is only 4 chapters from 1 school as an example…)
“Way too many fatt girls.”
Way too many “t”’s if you ask me
“This is a joke right? ... their brothers is just mediocre.”
Yes, a joke, just like 4th grade grammar
“@realtalk you must be weird as f to have gone to every one of (XXX) parties.....”
@RealTalk, srzly guyz lolz
These comments do not reflect poorly on the chapter being ranked, but on the chapter of the ranker due to the pure unintelligence in the comments themselves.
With that being said, I now challenge all Greek members to view GreekRank a little differently. What if we all treated GreekRank as a ranking of our schools Greek system as a whole? What if all the comments were viewed on one page and were meant to represent every chapter? I promise you that then, the rankings would be very different. There would be less shameful bashing, and more realistic views. Basically, everyone would follow one rule: if you can’t post anything nice, don’t post anything at all. Sound familiar? I know it seems a little cheesy, but its true. If everyone focused on only posting the positive comments, either about their own chapter or others, then GreekRank would showcase the Greek Community as a supportive, mature, and upstanding group of intelligent students as opposed to the disgrace it portrays us as now.
