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The most active thread yesterday was titled, "University of Alabama - ‘ peak neo-antebellum white Southern culture’ - NYT" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. As I have been required to read a great many threads from the college forum in order to produce these blog posts, I've noticed that discussions of southern universities almost universally devolve into culture wars. Conservatives tout the schools as having lenient Covid policies, a lack of "wokeness", and inviting campus atmospheres. And, yes, there is one fanatical University of Alabama supporter who is obsessed with the attractiveness of the women. Roll tide my good man, roll tide indeed. So, I guess that it shouldn't be a surprise that we now have a thread that skips the pretense of addressing academics and goes directly to the cultural war. The original poster of this thread critiques a recent opinion article in the New York Time by Tressie McMillan Cottom, "a sociologist, professor and cultural critic". McMillan Cottom takes a side-eyed look at the phenomenon of the University of Alabama's sorority rush. This is something that I had hitherto not known about, but which has become popular on TikTok. The original poster is clearly not a fan of either the article or McMillan Cottom. To say that his summary of the article is rather sophomoric is being generous. His primary point is that McMillan Cottom is "big mad". The irony is that I suspect the original poster agrees with nearly all of McMillan Cottom's points. But, whereas McMillan Cottom sees the situation as disappointing, the original poster likely takes pride in it. This thread is 21 pages long so I can't read the entire thing. But, I've read enough to see that, as expected, there are posters who don't like the article and posters who agree with much of it. The thrust of McMillan Cottom's article seems to be that Alabama's rush tradition is an unapologetic rebuttal of "woke" northeastern universities, though she doesn't use that word. She sees the sorority system has a means for women to get "close to the women who are close to the men who tend to dominate the state’s network power." According to McMillan Cottom, the system demands conformity, which leads to a lack of diversity and, as such, non-White women are largely left out. Reading the article I had two thoughts. First, McMillan Cottom was taking a very cheerless view of something that is generally considered to be full of fun and joy. Regardless of the validity of her critique, she had no hope of coming off as anything other than a scold and that is how many of those responding viewed her. Second, underlying much of McMillan Cottom's analysis is the fundamental fact that a system such as she portrays cannot simply be reformed by adding diversity. This is a point that she makes explicitly. The idea that women should seek power through the men they marry rather than due to their own accord is not one that modern feminism can accept. That is true for women of color as equally as it is for the blond, haired, blue-eyed, White women rushing in Alabama. The more of the article I read, the more that I understood that McMillan Cottom could not be simply seeking the doors of the sororities to be opened to a wider group of recruits, but rather the complete abolishment of the system. Therefore, I was not surprised to read — in the very last sentence of the article — McMillan Cottom's suggestion that Alabama Rush is a tradition that should be left in the past.