PKT25: Risky Bidness
The end result of both fall and spring fraternity rush is Bid Night. On this night, all of the fraternities deliver their formal invitations (aka, a bid) to join their respective chapters. For most of these chapters, the bid delivery process looked something like this:
- The chapter votes on who gets a bid and who does not. As we've seen from me attending two rush events, there wasn't necessarily a correlation between event attendance and getting a bid. Sometimes people who'd been to every event didn't get a bid, and other times someone who only attended one event got one. Some votes were unanimous, and others were very contentious. I found that we acted like we had higher standards as the membership of the house got larger, but I also have to note that there were some people we thought would be exemplary brothers who weren't, and others that had strong opposition who became mainstays of the chapter. It sometimes led to some heated discussions, but at the end we had a list of bids to deliver.
- Each bid would be written up into a nice card.
- At the start of bid night, two brothers in formal attire would be sent out to visit each person who was getting a bid. They'd usually start by looking for them in their dorm room unless we had specific knowledge they'd be elsewhere. I personally helped deliver a bid to a future brother who was sleeping on the floor in a room in Norton House, which at the time was the sole female-only dorm (it's a long story). In at least one case I can remember we sent a whole host of brothers over to deliver a bid to someone we really liked (he didn't accept).
- Upon finding the person, we'd invite them back to the house. Most accepted, but if they didn't the two brothers would deliver the card and do a welcome speech. I should mention that it wasn't uncommon for someone to get bids from 2 or more houses, so if we could bring our candidates back to the house so other fraternities couldn't find them on bid night (remember: this was before mainstream cell phone usage so finding people was hard!), so much the better. We lost a candidate or two to other houses over the years, but generally most people were only rushing one fraternity if they were rushing at all, so it wasn't a major consideration for our strategy.
- Most candidates, including me, came back to the house. There they were treated to a fancier version of the welcome speech with a little more ceremony around it. In my case, I and the other candidates waited in the formal living room (aka, the Red Room) and were brought one at a time into the study room, where Dave (President), Zuck (Associate Member Educator) and Davis (...secretary? Honestly, I don't recall why the hell Davis was in there) presented the bid with some ceremony.
- A few people accepted immediately. Others waited a day or two to think about it before accepting or declining. And then there was me, who was completely not expecting a bid to join any fraternity and was somewhat dubious about the entire thing. This is why I uttered the immortal words "so what do I do if I won't want this?" which I asked mostly because I wasn't planning to ghost them (note: this was also before ghosting was common terminology). This apparently was not a common question because Dave doubled over laughing before Zuck politely said just to give him a call either way.
I am not sure to this day that I could clearly articulate the reason I joined a fraternity. I was playing football, I was taking 18 credits and was generally incredibly busy. I hadn't even considered the idea of the Greek system before I went to college, and while I was aware that roughly 1/3 of the male undergrads were in the Greek system (a number that held steady throughout college), I hadn't really planned being one of them. On the other hand, I wasn't one of those people who had a built-in negative view of fraternities; the most common views of which were "it's a bunch of people who party all the time" (not accurate at my chapter) and "it's people paying money to have friends" (which I thought was a weirdly reductive view that nobody ever applied to any other group that had dues, just fraternities).
I think at the end of the day it boiled down to "Ok, why not? Might be fun. Let's try it." I'm sure my family was surprised, because I was surprised myself by accepting. I don't know how many bids were given out in total that semester, but six other people accepted, and so the Fall 1996 Associate Member Class of the Ohio Alpha Beta Chapter of Phi Kappa Theta was comprised of seven people. Besides myself, they were:
1. Susan - the only junior in the group, Susan had lived in the house over the prior summer and met most of the chapter then. From Canton. Class of 98.
2. Hsia - from New Mexico, Hsia sometimes seemed like a stereotypical Chinese-American pre-med student, but he was probably more devoted to the fraternity than any of us. He even worked for the National Office after graduation. Class of 01.
3. Rowan - from the greater Cleveland area. Davey was arguably more beloved than anyone else in the house. I think he was a groomsman in more fraternity weddings than any two of the rest of us combined. Class of 01.
4. Frank - from Holland, Michigan, Frank was on the varsity soccer team but only played one season. He was one of those people who made pretty much everything seem effortlessly easy, whether sports, classes or video games. Class of 01.
5. Dolan - from the Pittsburgh area, Dolan very nearly made true the "That's seven years down the drain" joke from Animal House because he essentially worked full time for most of those seven years. Class of 03? Maybe? I know he graduated eventually!
6. K-Rob - my roommate in the dorms, from the Boston area. He went from being Kevin first semester to wanting to be called Robert (his middle name) the later on. Nowadays, I doubt any of us would have blinked at that, but back then he inevitably became K-Rob, which I feel a bit guilty about now. He dropped out sophomore year and moved back to Massachusetts. He is the only member of the group that I am not friends with today.
Note: associate member was the politically correct official term for "pledge" (as in pledging a fraternity), which was perceived as being too closely associated with hazing. We pretty much always used "pledge" amongst ourselves unless it was official business of some kind.
As a junior, Susan graduated early compared to the rest of us and K-Rob dropped out. Frank, Dolan, Rowan and Hsia were my more or less constant companions throughout college, starting with the associate member program that fall.
- The chapter votes on who gets a bid and who does not. As we've seen from me attending two rush events, there wasn't necessarily a correlation between event attendance and getting a bid. Sometimes people who'd been to every event didn't get a bid, and other times someone who only attended one event got one. Some votes were unanimous, and others were very contentious. I found that we acted like we had higher standards as the membership of the house got larger, but I also have to note that there were some people we thought would be exemplary brothers who weren't, and others that had strong opposition who became mainstays of the chapter. It sometimes led to some heated discussions, but at the end we had a list of bids to deliver.
- Each bid would be written up into a nice card.
- At the start of bid night, two brothers in formal attire would be sent out to visit each person who was getting a bid. They'd usually start by looking for them in their dorm room unless we had specific knowledge they'd be elsewhere. I personally helped deliver a bid to a future brother who was sleeping on the floor in a room in Norton House, which at the time was the sole female-only dorm (it's a long story). In at least one case I can remember we sent a whole host of brothers over to deliver a bid to someone we really liked (he didn't accept).
- Upon finding the person, we'd invite them back to the house. Most accepted, but if they didn't the two brothers would deliver the card and do a welcome speech. I should mention that it wasn't uncommon for someone to get bids from 2 or more houses, so if we could bring our candidates back to the house so other fraternities couldn't find them on bid night (remember: this was before mainstream cell phone usage so finding people was hard!), so much the better. We lost a candidate or two to other houses over the years, but generally most people were only rushing one fraternity if they were rushing at all, so it wasn't a major consideration for our strategy.
- Most candidates, including me, came back to the house. There they were treated to a fancier version of the welcome speech with a little more ceremony around it. In my case, I and the other candidates waited in the formal living room (aka, the Red Room) and were brought one at a time into the study room, where Dave (President), Zuck (Associate Member Educator) and Davis (...secretary? Honestly, I don't recall why the hell Davis was in there) presented the bid with some ceremony.
- A few people accepted immediately. Others waited a day or two to think about it before accepting or declining. And then there was me, who was completely not expecting a bid to join any fraternity and was somewhat dubious about the entire thing. This is why I uttered the immortal words "so what do I do if I won't want this?" which I asked mostly because I wasn't planning to ghost them (note: this was also before ghosting was common terminology). This apparently was not a common question because Dave doubled over laughing before Zuck politely said just to give him a call either way.
I am not sure to this day that I could clearly articulate the reason I joined a fraternity. I was playing football, I was taking 18 credits and was generally incredibly busy. I hadn't even considered the idea of the Greek system before I went to college, and while I was aware that roughly 1/3 of the male undergrads were in the Greek system (a number that held steady throughout college), I hadn't really planned being one of them. On the other hand, I wasn't one of those people who had a built-in negative view of fraternities; the most common views of which were "it's a bunch of people who party all the time" (not accurate at my chapter) and "it's people paying money to have friends" (which I thought was a weirdly reductive view that nobody ever applied to any other group that had dues, just fraternities).
I think at the end of the day it boiled down to "Ok, why not? Might be fun. Let's try it." I'm sure my family was surprised, because I was surprised myself by accepting. I don't know how many bids were given out in total that semester, but six other people accepted, and so the Fall 1996 Associate Member Class of the Ohio Alpha Beta Chapter of Phi Kappa Theta was comprised of seven people. Besides myself, they were:
1. Susan - the only junior in the group, Susan had lived in the house over the prior summer and met most of the chapter then. From Canton. Class of 98.
2. Hsia - from New Mexico, Hsia sometimes seemed like a stereotypical Chinese-American pre-med student, but he was probably more devoted to the fraternity than any of us. He even worked for the National Office after graduation. Class of 01.
3. Rowan - from the greater Cleveland area. Davey was arguably more beloved than anyone else in the house. I think he was a groomsman in more fraternity weddings than any two of the rest of us combined. Class of 01.
4. Frank - from Holland, Michigan, Frank was on the varsity soccer team but only played one season. He was one of those people who made pretty much everything seem effortlessly easy, whether sports, classes or video games. Class of 01.
5. Dolan - from the Pittsburgh area, Dolan very nearly made true the "That's seven years down the drain" joke from Animal House because he essentially worked full time for most of those seven years. Class of 03? Maybe? I know he graduated eventually!
6. K-Rob - my roommate in the dorms, from the Boston area. He went from being Kevin first semester to wanting to be called Robert (his middle name) the later on. Nowadays, I doubt any of us would have blinked at that, but back then he inevitably became K-Rob, which I feel a bit guilty about now. He dropped out sophomore year and moved back to Massachusetts. He is the only member of the group that I am not friends with today.
Note: associate member was the politically correct official term for "pledge" (as in pledging a fraternity), which was perceived as being too closely associated with hazing. We pretty much always used "pledge" amongst ourselves unless it was official business of some kind.
As a junior, Susan graduated early compared to the rest of us and K-Rob dropped out. Frank, Dolan, Rowan and Hsia were my more or less constant companions throughout college, starting with the associate member program that fall.