Whew, what a relief! I thought colleges were going to emphasize substance . . .

Please be careful, or you’ll slip on the dripping sarcasm.

 God love the girls at DePauw University’s Delta Zeta sorority – somebody’ll have to after this little gem of on-campus life.

From the Associated Press:

By MARTHA IRVINE, AP National WriterSun Mar 11, 1:45 PM ET

With a reputation for emphasizing brains over conventional beauty, the women of the Delta Zeta sorority at Indiana’s DePauw University endured the jokes and unkind nicknames: their chapter was widely known among students as the “dog house.”

“As a sorority, they had a different image on campus,” says Cindy Babington, the university’s dean of students. “Student culture was not kind to them.”

Obsessing about looks has long been a rite of passage for young people — well before the days, nearly two decades ago, when tennis star Andre Agassi brashly proclaimed that “image is everything” in an advertising campaign.

Today, though, some worry that the fixation on outward appearance has gotten out of control — with young people’s ever-increasing focus on everything from celebrity and skinny jeans to marketing themselves on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

The women of Delta Zeta know all about the pressure. With chapter membership dwindling, sorority leaders recently took drastic measures. They kicked out 23 members from the stately brick mansion near campus, drawing accusations that the women’s weight, looks and race didn’t fit the image the sorority was going for.

Sorority leaders insist that those who left weren’t committed to recruiting. “It was not a beauty contest,” says Casey Jolley, the chapter’s interim president and one of only five members who remain at the house.