Welcome to Derby Days, the Most Spectacular Con in All of Frat Philanthropy
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We recently received a tip about a couple of banners hanging on the Sigma Chi fraternity house on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. “We never stop at third base,” one says, over an all-American MLB banner showing a woman playing dick-baseball in heels. “KKΓ<3 SΣX,” says the other banner, which features another sexy baseball player, 69 on her jersey, flanked by the words “It’s always a home run when a Kappa grabs the bat.” (KKΓ is Kappa Kappa Gamma, and ΣX is Sigma Chi.) The tipster attached YikYak screenshots from the area, with people commenting on the spectrum between incredulity, scorn, and sexist outrage—the type of reactions inspired by other publicized fraternity banners this year, like these reading “Freshman Daughter Dropoff” and “Go Ahead and Drop Moms Too.” Except these banners are different. They’re interesting not because they’re offensive—they’re about as “problematic” as a truck stop bumper sticker—but rather because the sororities in question almost definitely made them.
Welcome to the spectacular con of Derby Days.
Derby Days is the signature philanthropy of the Sigma Chi fraternity, and to be clear, it’s an effective and aboveboard philanthropy as far as fraternity efforts go—more so, for being so widespread and energetic, legitimately significant in terms of money raised, put on by the vast majority of Sigma Chi’s 239 chapters each year.
In general, frat philanthropy operates on a sort of indulgence system, in which the boys host one or two large party-centric fundraisers per semester and thus earn permission to carry on as they like. And they always draw on the community; frat fundraisers mostly rope in the wealth and effort of the rest of the Greek system (or the Greek system’s parents). What’s notable about Derby Days—the almost laudable con of it—is that Sigma Chi has figured out a way to earn an enormous institutional remission by getting thousands and thousands of sorority women to do all the work.
As a member of Pi Beta Phi at the University of Virginia, I participated in Derby Days in 2006 and was sort of embarrassingly excused from participating thereafter, once I emailed out a modified version of our Derby Days schedule that I felt was more true to the spirit of the event (“psychic blowjob competition”) than the bill we were actually being sold.
Ostensibly, Derby Days is the exact kind of thing the Greek community loves to be proud of: an extended charity event, during which one might very well “cultivate leadership skills” and “make lasting connections” and “give back to the community” or whatever it says on all those IFC brochures. But, in essence, Derby Days is an emblem of what the mainstream, white Greek system really teaches its participants, which is how to couch a wide spectrum of unseemly behavior under the twin masks of tradition and philanthropy. And no fraternity does this with such monolithic chutzpah as Sigma Chi.
The specific deal with Derby Days: it’s a week-long philanthropic marathon, in which a single fraternity chapter will put every sorority chapter to work raising charity money and earning nuggets of formalized Sigma Chi approval. It’s an opt-in situation in which not opting in is often unthinkable; sorority girls willingly, enthusiastically forgo their own pursuits to engage in Sigma Chi-branded dance competitions, lip-sync performances, coin drives, contests, walkathons, banner-making, playground cleanups, and intramural sports.
These are all cute, good things to do, if you’re into them. The fact that hundreds of girls are doing these things at the beck and call of one fraternity creates a certain vibe, sure—Sigma Chi has repeatedly found itself in trouble for their dance and lip-sync competitions, whose atmosphere often hits a surreal fleshly intersection between summer camp and strip club. But it’s really not the specifics that are interesting—those banners up top are forgettable—but what they build up to, the contours of the situation: the fact that almost no one on the inside understands that the whole thing is deeply weird.
College students today (like maybe all of us in general) zigzag between being unfathomably lazy and unbelievably overworked. They can’t get out of sweats to go to the dining hall; they’ll write a 20-page paper in a night. When true effort has to be so strategically allocated, it gets increasingly interesting to see where it goes. And so Derby Days—which Gawker’s Allie Jones, former sorority girl, recalls that “people failed midterms for”—is a true testament to both Sigma Chi charisma and the astonishing degree to which young people—young women—in the Greek system will allow themselves to be told what to do.
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