Six months after the campus newspaper reported on apparent racial discrimination in the University of Alabama pledging system, the student government on Thursday failed to pass a bill to support full integration of the school’s system of Greek fraternities and sororities, according to AL.com.
The Senate of the Student Government Association (SGA) sent the measure to committee, where it is likely to die with the end of the 2013-14 Senate session, the report says.
In September, university President Judy Bonner released a video statement announcing plans to diversify the school's sororities after The Crimson White, the campus's student news organization, published a piece detailing how the daughter of a state senator and granddaughter of a trustee—a student with high grades—was denied a chance to pledge 16 of the primarily white sororities on campus. The report painted a picture of a staunchly segregated campus Greek system heavily influenced by alumni.
Some members of the student Senate subsequently drafted a resolution to promulgate the integration of the university’s entire Greek system. But Cole Adams, speaker of the Senate, told AL.com: “Many senators felt the resolution was not ready to be debated in its current form and were loath to suspend the rules on a resolution that seemed to be thrown together at the last minute without thought to the implications of its language or without gathering evidence to support said language."
Adams did not specify exact concerns about the measure. But Katie Smith, a co-author of the bill, said she was fairly certain that the problem was not about language and precision; the proposal had had been thoroughly reviewed by several professors and students, she said. It failed because of social and racial divisions, she said.
"Our SGA represents a small population of a campus full of diversity," she told AL.com.
Read more at AL.com.