Barriers of social discrimination have been lowered here at the University of Colorado, and Jewish students have been invited to join the “non-Jewish” fraternities and sororities this year. Members of the university’s Board of Regents, and Dean of Men Clifford Houston, have been persuading fraternity and sorority heads to wipe out their old racial discrimination policies, and the move to make all fraternities and sororities here truly democratic has made great progress.
The university’s regents postponed a vote on an anti-discrimination motion, scheduled for August 27. Instead, the regents asked the university to gather further information about anti-discrimination rulings at other colleges. A motion by Regent Vance Austin of Sterling, Colo., would have required fraternities and sororities to have minority group members on their rolls by June, 1958. Austin said he wanted student groups to express themselves on his motion before it came up for a vote.
A survey revealed only nine CU social fraternities have discrimination clauses in their constitutions. Every Greek-letter group would be required to have a member of a minority group on its membership rolls in order to comply with Austin’s motion.
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