Traditionally, when students are greeted by sorority members at the organizations' houses during recruitment, they're not only welcomed with smiles and salutations, but also with enthusiastic jumping and banging on the walls. But a recently-implemented policy may be putting a damper on the excitement by prohibiting sorority women from carrying through with the latter actions.

The new policy — decided by the sororities' active alumni groups and local housing directors — forbids sorority women from jumping up and down or banging on walls during recruitment events in order to prevent wrecking the houses.

LSA senior Kimberly McCraw, judicial vice president of the Panhellenic Association, the student-run umbrella organization for 16 sororities on campus, said for the past few years a lot of damage has been done to the sorority houses during recruitment.

“Sororities are really big and old historic buildings and all the banging and jumping in the past broke windows, cracked window frames, chipped the paint off the walls and caused issues with the basements by ruining the ceilings,” McCraw said.

Nursing senior Stephanie Conn, Panhel’s vice president of public relations, said the sororities' House Corps — organizations composed of local chapters' alumni — and housing directors met during the summer and decided they no longer wanted the women in the sororities to jump or bang on the walls during recruitment events.

All of the chapters in Panhel agreed to follow the new guideline, which Panhel supports but doesn’t directly enforce, Conn said. If the chapters like the new policy by the end of recruitment, they may vote to add it to Panhel’s policies, McCraw said.

Recruitment seems to be going well, McCraw said, with no reports of violations of the policy. McCraw said she speculates this may be due to the sororities’ emulating each other’s behavior.

“For example, if one house isn’t (jumping or banging) then the house next door won’t be either and so on,” McCraw said.

To compensate for the lack of physical displays of excitement, the women have instead been using noisemakers, cowbells, whistles and cans filled with dice. McCraw said the purpose of those activities is to get the sorority members “pumped” to meet the new women and to get the potential members excited for each house.

“It’s basically a morale thing,” McCraw said.

In addition to this new policy, a new rule has been implemented to improve the variety of snacks and themed decorations by allowing the sorority members to mix prepackaged foods.

McCraw said even though the rule sounds silly, it allows themed recruitment events to have a greater range of detail and decorations.

“If there were an under-the-water themed party, they could put Goldfish and blue M&Ms in the same bowl,” she said. “They can create trail mix basically and they couldn’t do that before.”