Following extensive media coverage of a DePauw University sorority whose members said they they dismissed sisters for being overweight or not white, critics are saying the controversy is overblown.

Last month, Delta Zeta dismissed 23 of its 35 active members in restructuring its chapter. A Feb. 25 New York Times article quoted former members accusing the Indiana sorority of discriminating on weight and race.

Following the dismissal, six of the 12 remaining members quit, and the DePauw chapter of the sorority made the news as having been restructured in hopes of changing its image.

The Times article stated the national headquarters moved to improve the chapter’s “socially awkward” image, but members said sisters were chosen for dismissal based on a lack of commitment to recruiting for the sorority, which faced a financial crisis without more members.

The local chapter’s struggle has since received coverage on “Good Morning America,” CNN and in newspapers nationwide.

DePauw spokesman Ken Owen said the media attention on the university has been so intense one student had to leave campus.

“The young women have been under the media microscope for days now,” he said. “One student called her professor and said she wouldn’t be in class because she needed to get away from campus. What happened to these young women should never happen to anyone.”

Owen said he received 327 phone calls on Monday alone relating to the Delta Zeta reorganization.

DePauw senior and former Delta Zeta member Cindy Geiger said she did not support the national headquarters’ decision to dismiss the girls because many had expressed unbending devotion to recruiting. Geiger, who was one of the 12 women asked to remain active in the sorority, resigned after the review. However, she still said the methods were not were not race- and body-fat-based.

“Race is not applicable,” she said.

Former Delta Zeta at DePauw secretary Rachel Pappas, who left the sorority before its reorganization, said members told her the national headquarters forced the chapter to vote on how it would survive, first telling the chapter to close for four years.

“In a few years, it would open with a new image,” she said.

Though Pappas questioned the need for reorganization, she said allegations of discrimination when the chapter had to “weed out” some members were overblown.

“Why is ‘image’ such a big deal?” Pappas said.

DePauw psychology professor Pam Propsom, who was cited in the Times article as having conducted a survey defining the sorority as “socially awkward,” said an annual informal survey she used for class purposes was blown out of proportion.

Propsom said the survey was not involved at all with the Delta Zeta controversy — though she served as an academic adviser to the sorority and resigned in January with the wake of the reorganization.

Since then, she said she has received countless angry emails blasting her for the audacity of her purported research.

“[The exercise] was a way to start talking about stereotypes in the context of [a social psychology] class. It is not research,” she said. “It is not to perpetuate stereotypes.”

Delta Zeta National President Debbie Raziano criticized the Times article as inaccurate in a statement released Feb. 26, saying the sorority only apologized for not better communicating its decisions to members.

“We misjudged how these communications would be received,” Raziano said in the statement.