The fraternity and the undergraduate, with twelve additional papers on fraternity life

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Clark, Thomas Arkle,

1862-1932. The fraternity and the undergraduate,
with twelve additional papers on fraternity life,

39090002401251

The Fraternity

AND

The Undergraduate

With Thirteen Additional Papers on
Fraternity Life

By

Thomas Arkle Clark
Urban a, Illinois
University of Illinois

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George Banta Publishing Company
Menasha, Wisconsin

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CONTENTS

•Preface . 5

xThe Fraternity and the Undergraduate 7

**The Greek and the Independent . 84

\ '•Rushing and the Rushee . 51

After the Pledging . 82

The Freshman’s Time and Money . 97

v The House Party . 118

Photo Plays and Vaudeville . 133

vThe Chapter Letter . 147

" Building a Chapter, House . 168

The Man Who Does Not Join . 188

The Transfer . 206

The Men Who Do Not Graduate . 220

Faternity Expansion . 232

\ The Future of the Fraternity . 244

PREFACE

In this second volume of essays on fraternity life
I have brought together the papers written dur¬
ing the past two years. The connections between
them is not always close, and there has been no
thought in my mind of covering the whole field of
fraternity activity. Six of the papers have pre¬
viously been published: “The Chapter Letter”
and “Building a Chapter House” appeared in the
Alpha Tau Omega Palm; “Vaudeville and Photo
Plays” was published in Banta's Greek Exchange ;
“The Man Who Does Not Join,” in the Carnation
of Delta Sigma Phi; “Rushing and the Rushee,”
in Delta of Sigma Nu; and “The Future of the
Fraternity” was delivered as an address before the
twenty-sixth biennial Congress of Alpha Tau
Omega.

March 10, 1917.

Reprinted 1923.

THE FRATERNITY AND THE UNDER¬
GRADUATE

The history, the organization, and the purpose
of a college Greek-letter fraternity are about as
vague in the mind of the average native of my
state as are his ideals of Greek life and customs in
the time of Sophocles, and I do not believe that the
natives of my state are in great degree more igno¬
rant than are the citizens of adjacent states. Un¬
fortunately the large majority of those who have
written about fraternities, more especially those
who have written against them, have had very
little first hand information. What they say ought
not to be given too much weight in discussing fra¬
ternities. Their invectives remind me of an ex¬
perience of my undergraduate days.

The state university which I attended was, in
fact, a pretty orderly, quiet, steady institution
whose faculty almost to a man held no unorthodox
views, but placed the highest ideals before us and
themselves worked in the churches as regularly as
taxes. There could not have been a safer place
theologically to send a boy. Most of us went to
church and the Y. M. C. A. meetings regularly and
said our prayers without molestation as we had
done at home. Among the religious denominations
throughout the state, however, an opinion had be-

7

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

come extant that at the State University atheism
ran riot. In my junior year there was a gathering
at the seat of the university of the state organiza¬
tion of one of the Protestant churches. A few of
the more venturesome delegates, led by deviltry
and curiosity, wandered over to visit the university.
As they stood on the first floor of the main build¬
ing awed and fearsomelike because of their sur¬
roundings, I heard one of them say, “One can
simply feel the spirit of infidelity here as he enters
the building.” And yet up on the third floor an
undergraduate prayer meeting was going on at
that moment. Their ideas of the awful life stu¬
dents were living at the state university had about
as much foundation and were entitled to about as
much credence as what men write about fraternities
who have not themselves had a reasonable expe¬
rience as members. A large part of the opposition
to fraternities is the result of jealousy and ig¬
norance.

A young fellow was telljng me recently that
wheniie. came tq r.rdlpgp it, was with the id pa tjmt
the Greek-letter fraternity was simply a breeding
place for loafing, and extravagance, and immorali¬
ty When he was asked later to join
a fraternity he hesitated, but finally he consented.
In his senior year his father came to visit him and
found him as president of the Young Men’s Chris-

8

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

tian Association living in the Association dormi¬
tory. The old man had by this time become
acquainted with the fraternity and was consider¬
ably attracted by the fellows in it. When he
looked over his son’s surroundings in the Associa¬
tion building, concerning which there was no
reasonable ground for legitimate complaint, he
became thoughtful for a time and then said very
seriously, “You know, Jack, I believe you’d be bet¬
ter off down at the fraternity house.”

There are boys in the secondary schools, also,
who look upon the fraternity as an organization
in which they can have the greatest moral and
social freedom. The fraternity house is a place
where they can study when they like, sit with their
hats on and their feet on the mantel, and engage
in rough house until the plaster falls. They know
the college man only as they see him on the stage
in his most exaggerated forms. A freshman in
one of our fraternity houses was being called to
account not long ago for his rough and boisterous
conduct when he seemed quite astonished that any
one should object to his breaking up the furniture
and acting like a savage.

“Why, I thought that was what a fraternity
was for,” he ventured quite apologetically. His
view is not an unique one.

“I don’t believe I want my son to be a fraternity

9

I ' m

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

man when he gets to college,” the father of a high
school senior remarked to me recently, when I was
calling at his house.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s an undemocratic life,” he said, “and one
very different from what he lives at home or from
what he will live after he gets out of college.
Besides, there are a good many new dangers likely
to be encountered.”

“Well, is it,” I replied, “and are there? What
is he doing now?” He was, as I supposed, out with
his chums, the regular group of boys with whom
he associated and who formed a regular part of
his daily life. He was following the same sort of
procedure as he would follow if after he got to col¬
lege he should join a fraternity, excepting that in
the

organized one. It need not be less normal and it
usually is not less so than the life he lived at home
in association with his friends and his home folks.

Fathers write me every fall in an endeavor to
find out what fraternities are like, what they stand
for, how the men live, what influence the organiz¬
ations are likely to have on their sons should they
join. They drop into the office with their fresh¬
man sons to discuss the relative merits of various
organizations, and the relative advantage of going
in or staying out. The amount of parental ignor-

fraternity the life would be a more definitely

10

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

ance that I have a chance to dispel is really
remarkable. Boys confused and embarrassed by
the strangeness of the new life and the new problems
of living see me daily at the opening of each new
college year, and I have many a chance to put
them right as to college customs, college tradi¬
tions, and college organizations. I should like in
this paper to give college sons and college fathers
some intelligent idea of what a Greek-letter fra- ■
ternity is, and what it does or may do for the boy
who goes into it.

I have not yet got quite to the point of advising
freshmen to join a fraternity any more than I
feel like advising my next door neighbor to buy an
electric for his wife or to install a pneumatic
cleaner in his house, but I feel sure that there are
advantages and benefits likely to accrue to the one
who joins, and I am frank in saying to the fresh¬
man as he enters college that if I were in his posi¬
tion and were beginning my college course, know¬
ing all that I now know about college fraternities,
their weaknesses and their strong points, I think
I should want to join one, just as, if one is religious,

I think he is foolish not to join a church, and if he
is interested in politics, not to ally himself with
some political organization. If I had a son in
college, I should offer no objection to his joining.

The Greek-letter fraternity in college is of com¬
il

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

paratively recent origin. The oldest fraternity
cannot look back quite one hundred years, and a
good many of these years were pretty dull so far
as educational development was concerned. The
most of the Greek-letter fraternities are less than'
sixty years old. The., purpose of their founders
was usually -self-developmojit, the cultivation'll
ideals, good scholarship, and good-fellow ■shipr
Many of these organizations at first were smuTai
in character to our modern literary societies and
encouraged and cultivated debating and public
speaking and literary composition. The idea of
furnishing a home and of developing home life for
its members was at first unthought of and unneces¬
sary. The living conditions in the college in which
fraternities were first organized were satisfactory.
In many instances students lived in dormitories
provided by the college, and it was not necessary
for the fraternity to furnish the home life for its
members. During the last fifty years conditions
have been rapidly changing. Colleges everywhere
are providing in the regular curriculum the train¬
ing for which the fraternity originally stood, and
the fraternity in a large number of cases must now
look after the housing and feeding of its own mem¬
bers, and so provide its own home life — a duty
which the college formerly performed.

There is little that is subtle or unusual in the

12

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

organization of the modern college fraternity. It
has a ritual — simple, dignified, and full of high
ideals usually, but the ceremony of initiation when
carried on seriously as it now is in most frater¬
nities worth consideration is one which tends to
inspire the initiate and to make him thoughtful
rather than otherwise. It has its secret work —
innocent, harmless, and appealing to the imagina¬
tion of youth for the most part; but if all the
secrets which are a part of the initiation cere¬
monies of such fraternities were published in the
daily press, if all the grips and signs and pass
words were forgotten, the fraternity would not be
materially affected. These details are not a vital
influence either for good or for evil. They simply
appeal to the youthful imagination; they throw
a certain glamour of mystery and romance about
the organization, that makes a strong impression
upon youthful minds. Anything that is locked or
that is hidden by a curtain always arouses curi¬
osity. It is the same sort of innocent appeal
that is made to every young person by the so-
called secrets of the fraternity.

A good many fathers look upon a fraternity
merely as a lodging house and a boarding club, \
and though it is both of these it is much more; it
is a home. The college student, young, inexperi- ]
enced, and away from home usually for the first I

13

i . in

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

time, lives under peculiar conditions. He wants
friends, companionship, and the associations of
home; he wants sympathy, encouragement, and
direction, and it is these which the fraternity can
give him. It is the most natural and normal thing
that the young man in college should develop his
own peculiar organization for the cultivation of
such characteristics of the home as are in college
possible. The Greek-letter fraternity is such an
organization.

The criticisms that are made upon the frater¬
nity by those who are not members of it or who
know little or nothing about it, are that it is
undemocratic, that it encouarges extravagance
and immorality. Men argue that in college,
especially in an institution supported by the state,
no organization should be allowed to exist which it
is impossible for any student to belong to should
he so desire. I read a letter not long ago from the
father of two boys who had graduated from col¬
lege protesting against fraternities on the ground
that, though he did not want his sons to join and
could not have afforded to have them do so even
if he had desired it, it was unjustifiable that there
should be any organization at a state university
which was not open to his sons and to every other
student. It seems to me as reasonable to argue
that if I belong to the Presbyterian church or to

14

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

the Republican party, I am under obligations to
have the most intimate social relations with every
member of each one of these organizations, and if
I give a dinner party, I must ask each one of them
to my house.

The number of intimate, close, personal friends
which any one man can have is limited by his time,
by his tastes, and by his temperament. He has
a right to choose who these shall be, with whom he
shall live, and with whom he shall associate, and
the fact that he does not find it convenient or
desirable or pleasing to choose me does not argue
against me or against his democracy. With the
marriage laws as they are no one is likely to be
able to marry all the attractive girls he knows,
nor can any fellow in college develop an intimate
friendship with every one else. There is no lack
of democracy in such a situation nor any sane
reason for thinking a man exclusive because of
these limitations.

The charges of immorality and extravagance
have little foundation. The extravagances and
dissipations of an organization are much more
evident than are those of an individual, and much
more talked about. For that reason, they are
more readily corrected. If they are not corrected,
then the college authorities who permit these
things to continue are to blame quite as much as

. 15

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

are the organizations which are guilty of them.
I should be foolish to argue that there are not
immoralities in college fraternities, and I am
willing to grant that when these exist among the
members of such an organization the evil result
may be more far reaching than when such irfegu-
larities are seen in an individual, but these things
are not inherent in the fraternity any more than
they are in our public schools.

It costs more to live in a fraternity house than
in the ordinary boarding-house, because men
usually live better, live more comfortably, have
more privileges. But priviliges bring obligations
in this case as in others, so that the undergraduate
who joins a fraternity will find himself restricted
by this action. When he chooses a certain group
of men for his particular friends, for his college
family as it were, he shuts himself off naturally
from a similar association with other men or at
least with many other men. This does not seem
to me more deplorable or regrettable than the fact
that when my friend, Tom Brown, married Jane
Bailey and thereby acquired Jane’s mother as a
mother-in-law he made it impossible to hold Mrs.
Babb in the same relation, though Mrs. Babb was
a delightful lady and from my point of view rather
more desirable as a parent-in-law than the person
Tom acquired. It is a pity, but one cannot under

16

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

circumstances existing at present, have every
attractive, middle-aged woman as a mother-in-law.
Well, there are limitations in college, and the man
who thinks there should be none must have rather a
thin coating of gray on his brain.

The fellow who goes into a fraternity takes the
group for better or for worse, just as when one
gets into a family he finds that the fortunes and the
reputation of the family are his. I know' a lot
of fellows who have gone ahead with the idea that
when they say “I will” to the minister’s questions,
it applies only to the girl at their side, but they
soon wake up to find that it took in the whole
family even to the most remote and most disrepu¬
table second cousin. It is just like that in a frater¬
nity; the group you elect is yours, good or bad;
and having chosen, you must make the best of it.

There are those who feel that this fraternity
relationship should be easily broken just as they
might feel that our divorce laws are too stringent.
They argue that if a member of a fraternity
proves himself undesirable, it ought to be a simple
matter to get rid of him. I cannot feel so. It
seems to me that the relationship is such a close
and binding one that only under the most critical
circumstances should it be severed. The home
relations in the fraternity should be considered
sacred relations.

17

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

It is just as well to keep in mind that a frater¬
nity man is held responsible for what every other
man in his chapter does and that the character of
the chapter is determined by what the worst man
in it does. A very good chapter of one of the
oldest and most respected fraternities at the Uni¬
versity of Illinois is at present about as unpopular
and about as thoroughly disliked as any chapter
on the campus, and all because a few of its men
are always on hand to recount tales of personal
deviltry at the popular loafing places, and are
eager to be known as “men of the world,” what¬
ever that suggestive phrase 'may mean. The whole
chapter has the name of being loafers and rounders,
just because three conceited men have taken
courses in public speaking and are able to put
their stories across.

I have sometimes thought that I should be
better satisfied if the method of picking out the
brothers in a fraternity were characterized by a
little more sanity. The rushing systems of most
fraternities with which I am acquainted are on the
whole unlikely to give the freshman a true con¬
ception of the real character of the fraternity and
its members, as I shall show later. In choosing
between the local organization and the national
fraternity, I have often advised fellows to join the
former if the make-up of the latter organization

18

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

seemed not likely to be congenial or helpful to
the best development of character. A man’s fra¬
ternity life is lived largely while he is in college,
and he should go with the group that will give him
the best chance to live a healthy, happy, effective,
undergraduate life.

‘ Why should a boy entering college join. a, fra-
ternity?” I am asked again and again. “What\
does he get out of it, and what does it do for him?” j
As the system is now in most of our colleges, only
a limited number of entering students can join
such an organization, because the number of such
organizations is small and the membership of each
must be kept within reasonable. limits. The presi¬
dent of a large institution said to me not long ago,
“When are you going to stop increasing the num¬
ber of fraternities? Do you think it is a good
thing to have more and more fraternities in col¬
lege?” My answer then was in the affirmative, and
as I have since then given the matter more serious
thought, I have not felt like changing my mind. I
wish that every boy who comes to college might
find an organization suited to his particular needs,
and might have done to him and for him the service
which a well-organized and well-managed frater-j
nity does for its members.

First of all ^fag-fraternity gives the undergradu-
ote^riendsyj ush as~he is needing. them most. The

19

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

thing about which parents usually concern them¬
selves when their sons leave home to enter college
is that thev will be thrown at once upon their own
resources .T I think this is a good thing, but inde¬
pendence"^ and isolation are not identical nor
equally necessary. / The fraternity man does not
run his own affairs/but he is associated closely with
the fellows of his own age and tastes who are
doing the same thing. Not long ago a young fellow
came into my office, lonesome, homesick, pretty
close to friendless. He had come from a country
home a thousand miles away from the college, he
had entered the second semester, he knew no one,
and he had no one with whom he could talk, no one
with whom he might spend his leisure time, and
no personal means of recreation. A fraternity
man saw him talking to me, picked .him up, and
took him to dinner. A few days later he came into
the office wearing a pledge button. He was happy,
contented, interested in his studies, interested in
the college because he had found friends and a
home. The fraternity had furnished for him the
center of a new life.

The fraternity throws at once upon the under-
graduate certain responsibilities about the house,
and I believe in no small measure prepares him for
the duties which he will later have to assume or
direct when he has a home of his own. The young

20

v

(

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

fellow freed from the tasks incident to keeping up
a house often becomes indifferent to these things
and almost unconscious that they have to be per¬
formed. It is a good thing for a boy to learn early
that no house furnace has yet been designed that
will long successfully stoke itself, that floors need
to be polished occasionally if they are to look re¬
spectable, and that dust and dirt and litter of all
sorts must have someone’s personal attention if
they are to be discouraged or materially abated. I
have never been strongly an advocate of the system
which permits upperclassmen to order freshmen
about just for the sake of showing that they can,
or of beating them just to keep one’s muscles in
shape, but I believe the system is a helpful one
which requires each underclassman in a frater¬
nity house to take his share of the responsibility:
in doing; the chores about the house and in seeing
that the house is kept m_arder. It is simply
another" opportunity to impress upon^the under¬
graduate! the obligations^ of good citizenship. A
man appreciates better the siz e of a yard after
he has run the lawn mower over it for a few times ;
he has more civic pride after he has rak^d-the
parking into condition and picked up the loose
paper about the premises. ) He has an altogether
different idea of life from what the undergraduate
has who lives in a mere boarding-house and who

21

; y JJIM

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

can be made to assume none of the responsi¬
bilities. _l'When our towns have a “clean up” day
in the spring, I am never surprised to see what a
large percentage of fraternity men get out and
help, for these men have had a thorough local
home training in such matters and have learned
to take an interest in them and to appreciate their
importance.

One of thefir&t thing^ddiat..a-yoemg-ielhrwk^yns 1
when he get^ into a fraternity is that if he would
be happy, he must know how te~get-on with people. . \
The boy who at home has run the household, and J
the only child who has never had to yield his rights
or his playthings to anyone, the sensitive or the
selfish fellow, will be taught a good many things
before he has been in a fraternity long. While
I was writing this paragraph the mail brought me
a letter from a worried father begging me to ask
the officers of the fraternity of which his only son
was a member to be kind to the boy, to humor his
idiosyncrasies, and to say nothing to him unkind
concerning his personal peculiarities which I,
before he had been in college a wTeek, had discovered
were not few. It wras a foolish letter for a father
to write, and a useless one. The fraternity officers
would have paid no attention to such advice had I
been silly enough to give it to them ; their purposes
are t.q. educate. • One of the main functions of a

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

fraternity is to mould the -to cour

rect his faults, to change his peculiarities, and to
help him to become normal and to live comfortably
and happily with normal people.- It is largely a
matter of observation and adjustment, of yielding
one’s own preferences or prejudices for the com¬
fort or good of others. The fraternity is a help¬
ful agency in the development of this sort of
unselfishness. If the young boy whose father
wrote me stays in college long enough, he will be
pretty sure to learn how to stand in with the
various members of his fraternity or how to
manage them ; he will learn by experience that his
sensitiveness and his selfishness and his peculiar
manners hinder him and handicap him, and if he
has sense he will correct all these personal
peculiarities in order that he may apomplish his
purposes — in order that he may get on with
people.

A little fellow I knew once, an only child, had
had no restraint at home. He was ill tempered,
bad mannered, profane, and generally disagreeable
to every member of his family, all of whom humored
him, waited on him, and endured him. It was only
when he started to school and saw that these traits
of character made him unpopular and disliked,
ostracised and isolated him, and so made him un-
happy, that he corrected his faults and did for

23

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

■f

I

himself that which neither his parents nor his
friends had previously been able to do. It is some
such service as this that the fraternity performs
for the undergraduate.

“College has made a wonderful change in Fred
Gates,” one of his townsmen said to me not long
ago. “Every one notices that he is. quieter, more
thoughtful, less selfish.” “It was his fraternity
that did it,” I replied, and I knew how difficult a
task it had been to accomplish.

In a peculiar way, I think, the fraternity teaches
the undergraduate to respect the rights of others.
If twenty-five or thirty men are to get on happily
in a house there must be some regard on the part
of everyone for “mine” and “thine.” The care¬
lessness or thoughtlessness of one man may annoy
or injure all of the others. The man who sleeps
late in the morning or comes noisy into the dormi¬
tory at night, who plays the piano when other men
want to study, will not live long in a fraternity
house before he is called by the umpire. In the
use of other men’s time, or dress shirts, or theme
paper, or tobacco, the fraternity man ultimately
learns that the fellow who does not respect the
rights or preperty of others is not a good member
of a fraternity household.

The , fi^iiier.nity teaches the undergraduate a
good many things about social conventions vduch

W"

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

he would be long in learning in the ordinary board¬
ing house. • Not every freshman who comes to col¬
lege, and not every freshman who joins a frater¬
nity. has a perfect working knowledge of t.l^
conventionalities of life. I have seen the freshman
even in a fraternity house reach for a slice of
bread with his fork, pass the toothpicks, or fail
to “ship his oars,” but he did not do it often
before some thoughtful brother called his attention
to the error. A man may be goocl fraternity
material without having polished manners, but if
the fraternity is well organized and well managed,
an undergraduate cannot be a member of it long
without learning to show more respect for the
proper sociaTconventions, without cultivating self-
possession and developing poise, j I was not long
ago with: a friend at dinner at a fraternity house.
My friend was a woman of broad experience who
had traveled widely all over the world and who
had associated with cultivated people everywhere.
The young men met her without embarrassment,
they talked easily, and their dinner was served
in the utmost good taste. She marveled to me at
their finesse, and I, who am used to seeing frater¬
nity men do these things so well, have scarcely
ceased to marvel myself. They were country boys,
many of them, or boys from country towns. Some
of them, it is true, had been brought up in the city,

25

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

but these, in many cases, had had quite as little
social experience as the others. There is a certain
tradition about it all ; it is a kind of ritual handed
down from one generation to the next. The fresh¬
man learns from the upperclassman and then in
turn passes the lesson on to succeeding undergradu¬
ates. However it is done, the man wTho goes into a
fraternity of the right sort is sure to- learn some¬
thing of Social form, of politeness and courtesy
and good manners that will be to him in later life
no mean asset.

It has been a criticism upon the fraternity, and
it has not been an altogether unjust one, that it
has led its members rather more actively into
social activities than was good for many of them.
If I were arguing on this side of the question, I
should not be at a loss to find illustrations to
prove my point, but I believe as I go back over my
experience that the instances in which the social
life and activities of fraternity men were a benefit
to them are so far in excess of those in which they
were a detriment, that it can safely be held that
the social activities into which the modern Greek-
letter fraternity introduces its members are, on
the whole, an excellent thing. Most of the men
who enter our Middle West educational institu¬
tions are from very modest homes in many of
which the social life is unconventional and in not

26

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

a few crude. If these men do not get proper social
training in college, they are little likely to acquire
it after they get out. A member of a good fra¬
ternity has an easier entree into the best social
life which the college offers than does any other
man. In no college with which I am acquainted
do the fraternity men usurp the best social life,
but the fraternity man always has someone to
introduce him, someone to help him plan, someone
to push him if he lags back or lacks nerve. We
may be emphasizing social life too much in our
colleges at the present time, and especially in our
coeducational institutions, but be that as it may,
a healthy, moderate social life no one in college
can afford to omit, and the fraternity furnishes the
undergraduate the easiest aproach to it. I heard
a well-known successful engineer say at one time
that more engineers had failed in getting a job
because of soiled collars and badly selected neck¬
ties than from any other reason. I should not be
inclined to take

am convinced that, social assnrLoJdrms nf tha-rlfftft

sort-do teach a man manyJhina&.«^

dress and . manners and s n cU]

these lessons, will .b^,p.i,qfitaUk-.to him as long as he

lives.

The fraternity, in the Middle West at least,
leads its members pretty generally into all forms

27

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

of student activities. In the University of Illinois
the extra-curriculum activities of students are
fully three-fourths, I believe, in the hands of fra¬
ternity men. The fraternities urge their men to
get out, keep after them constantly, and help
them in every way possible. The man who does not
belong to a fraternity has no organization behind
him, no one to goad him if he gets lazy, so even
when he has a good chance of winning, he often
becomes discouraged and drops out. There again
in this matter of outside activities there is often
a difference of opinion. Some conservative college
officers hold that the fewer extra-curriculum activi¬
ties in which the student engages the better
off he is. If the only object of a college educa¬
tion were to teach a man facts, to acquaint him
with scientific principles, and to fill him with book
knowledge, I should agree with this view fully.

I am convinced, however, from my own experience f
as well as from a long period of observation, that J
.though study and books are the main thing, the

value . of a college training lies almost as mucj

in what the undergraduate gets outside of the
srocm as in what he gets within it. • Associa¬
tion with men, the solving of the practical prob¬
lems of life, independence, self-reliance, poise,'
finesse are all developed through outside activities.

I believe that the number of activities into which /

28

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

any student may go and the amount of time which
he may spend upon such work should be limited
by the college, but I believe that most students
who stay entirely out of extra-curriculum activi¬
ties ijiake a mistake, and I think that the frater¬
nity in urging the undergraduate to spend a
reasonable amount of time in such work is doing
him a service.

The effect of the fraternity upon the studies
of the undergraduate has not been until within
recent years all that it should be. Interest in
scholarship, however, is increasing everywhere
among the faternities, and fraternity averages
all over the country are coming up. One of the
difficulties to be met, and one which has not previ¬
ously been given the consideration it deserves, lies
in the fact that it is not an easy matter to have a
high scholastic average among groups of men
exceeding twelve in number. Even men of the
highest scholastic standing seem to lower their
average when they get into groups exceeding a
dozen. It has been remarked at the University
of Illinois that the members of Tau Beta Pi, one
of the best known of the honorary engineering
fraternities, very often have a drop in their
scholastic standing when they move into the Tau
Beta Pi house. Whether this drop in their
scholarship may be attributed to the fact that,

29

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

having proved their worth by their election to an
honorary society, they become self-satisfied and
relax their industry, or whether it may be
explained by the fact that the most of the men
have previously lived in houses where there were
few students and so find it difficult to work among
so many, it is difficult to say; at any rate it is
certain that the scholarship in such cases does
usually drop. Statistics show this year at the
University of Illinois that the scholarship stand¬
ing of men outside of the fraternities who lived in
houses accommodating more than a dozen men was
not so good as that of the fraternities whose mem¬
bership with us averages about thirty. This fact
of lower scholarship was seen in the Young Men’s
Christian Association dormitory, in College Hall,
and in practically all the places where a large
number of men are housed. It seems evident from
these facts that if a man is going out for high
scholarship, he will most easily attain this result
by living by himself. Only three or four of
the twenty-five men ranking highest in the Uni¬
versity of Illinois last semester lived in houses
containing more than a half-dozen students, and in
not a few cases there were no other students in
the house.

It can be seen from the facts given also that
the fraternity is solving its scholastic problems

SO

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

better than are other groups of men whose difficul¬
ties are not so great as those of the fraternity.
The fraternity has house rules and fixed study
hours, and so far I can see there is a reasonable
and serious attempt to enforce these rules. The
scholarship average of our fraternities last semes¬
ter was as high as the average of men living outside
of these organizations and, as I have said, consider¬
ably higher than that of other men living in large
groups. The scholarship of fraternity freshmen
was also higher than that of other freshmen. The
fraternity man who wants to study learns to do so
even if the conditions surrounding him are not
ideal. He comes to the point of not being disturbed
by a little noise or confusion. Before he gets
through college the fraternity man is usually so
immune to the effects of having people about him
that he could write his theme or solve his problem
in mechanics as easily in the trenches of Verdun as
in his own room.

From my point of view this is a good thing.
It is one of the regrets of my college life that I
lived alone and that I learned to study and to
work alone. Now I find it next to impossible to do
any serious work with people about me. I have
powers of concentration, but I can control these
powers only when I have complete isolation. This
fact is a great handicap. If in college I had lived

31

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

in a fraternity house instead of living at home with
my mother, I am quite sure, that I could have
learned to adjust myself to other conditions, and
that such adjustment would be to me today a great
help.

I ought not to ignore the fact in this connec¬
tion that there are dangers to young fellows,
i especially to those who are easily led, or who have
no strong definite purpose in coming to college,
in living in a fraternity house. There are easy
1 chairs and open fires, and pleasant companions
\ about. There are inducements to loaf and oppor-
| tunities to spend money, and temptation on all
I sides to take life easy. The fraternity, like every-
\ day life, is a test of character. If a man is weak
and purposeless, he may have a hard time of it ; but
df he is weak . and purposeless, he has little place
mi college at all and little chance anywhere. Fra¬
ternity life is no more severe test of his character
than any boy finds who goes away from home as
a boy should and tries to make for himself a place
and a home among other men.

I believe that the greatest service that the fra¬
ternity does for the undergraduate is to set before
him high ideals of living. It is true, for youth is
thoughtless and impulsive, that these principles
are not always adhered to ; they are frequently
ignored or forgotten, but ultimately, I am Presby-

32

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

terian enough to believe, they sink in, they leave
their impression, they have a greater or a less
influence upon the moral life of every man who
has taken the oath of the organization. One can
not hear the ritual read or go through the cere¬
mony of initiation without having a greater regard
for truth and honesty and virtue and brotherly
love, and this impression one unconsciously carries
into the routine of the business of his every day
life. As I came back from the biennial congress
of my fraternity some time ago, I could not help
noticing the impression which the meeting had
made upon the undergraduates who were on the
train with me. All of them were young, and some
of them were careless, and a few were controlled
by the passions of youth; but just then they were
serious, thoughtful, impressed with the obligations
which membership in the fraternity placed upon
them, and determined, too, to go home and more
conscientiously to live up to the principles for
which the fraternity stands. The fraternity had
done them all good.

And so I say, as I said at the beginning, if I were
an undergraduate in college again, I think I should
want to belong to a fraternity; and if I had a son
in college, I should be quite contented to have him
a member of such an organization.

33

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

THE GREEK AND THE INDEPENDENT

With us at the University of Illinois, although
the fraternities have been in active operation for
thirty years and are constantly increasing in
number, there has been no general quarrel or ill-
feeling or jealousy between the Greeks and inde¬
pendents. We have tried to look ahead and solve
our problems before they became too complex, so
that the disagreeble situations which have arisen
at some of our neighboring institutions we have
fortunately escaped. We are, perhaps, more
democratic than are the students of some other
colleges. A man seldom loses standing by not
having money, and very often gains none by pos¬
sessing it. We are a friendly group ; everyone
speaks to everyone else when he meets him on the
street. I am often pleased when walking with
some companion through the student district in
the evening, disguised by the enveloping shadows
which soften the differences between youth and
middle age, to be greeted on all sides with the
salutation, “Hello, boys,” or “Good evening,
fellows.” Not knowing who I am, they speak any¬
way, and reveal by so doing a friendly cosmo¬
politan spirit, which, to a westerner like myself, is
very gratifying. At the dignified New England

34

The Greek and the Independent

institution where I did my graduate work, such a
custom would have been unthinkable. No one
spoke to his seatmate there without an introduc¬
tion. I sat by a man in an English course three
days a week for two-thirds of a year without
his giving me a sign of recognition, only for us to
find out later that we came from neighboring towns
in Illinois and were really only simulating the
conservatism of the environs of Boston. As I said,
with us it seems unfriendy not to speak to every
one, whether he be Greek or independent, whether
he come from southern Asia or northern Scandi¬
navia. One man with us is as good as another,
provided he is a gentleman who has some charac¬
ter.

Fortunately for us, I believe, the fraternities
have never been politically a unit. From the time
when the literary societies were the only real
fraternities existing, there have been divisions, two
factions, two political parties opposing each other
in every contest and at every election. The opposi¬
tion is seldom unfriendly or bitter, but it is keen
and definite. It is comparable to the feeling
which exists in this country between Democrats
and Republicans, or between a man and his wife,
who, though they may have different political
views and affiliations, yet live a congenial, peace¬
able life together. No matter how many intra-

35

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

fraternity organizations have arisen to bring the
fraternities closer together, and to unify frater¬
nity interests, no matter how many Helmets and
Klu Kluxes and Yoxans have been organized to
draw their material for membership from the fra¬
ternities in general, when the fraternity men have
come to the polls the party lines have been closely
drawn, and the split has come in about the same
place that it did twenty years ago. I am sure that
this condition of affairs has worked profit to the
fraternities, and kept them far more in general
favor than they might have been had they all
regularly lined up upon the same side of an issue,
for the fraternities to win have had to make friends
with the independents, and if an independent
wished to win, he must get the support of at least
one faction of the fraternities. This state of
affairs has made it necessary for anyone running
for office, and our fraternity men are regularly
office seekers, to make friends pretty generally, if
he expected election, both among fraternity men
and men independent of such organizations. There
is little snobbishness, therefore, and little inclina¬
tion to draw social and organization lines closely.
A good illustration of this condition was seen last
semester in the politics of our senior class. The
president of the class, a well-known and well-liked
fraternity man, was elected without opposition.

36

The Greek and the Independent

He was supported on all sides by Greek and inde¬
pendents alike. When it came to the appointment
of his committees, instead of selecting a fraternity
man for the most important position, as he might
very well have done, he chose the strongest and
the most influential independent in the institution.
The selection was satisfactorv to everyone because
it recognized real worth, and put into an important
place one of the most respected men in college.

I am, perhaps, for this reason just mentioned,
not so well qualified to discuss the relationship
between those men who belong to fraternities and
those who do not, it may be argued, as someone
might be who is familiar with the dissensions that
have arisen in various localities or as someone who
may have been a part of these disagreements ; I
am not directly familiar with the petty quarrels
that have arisen in too many institutions between
the Greeks and the independents, though I have
read many of the details in fraternity journals
and in the daily newspapers. On the other hand
I am not so sure but that I am better qualified
than some other man might be who has lived in an
atmosphere of dissension and jealously because I
know that it is possible for these two classes of
undergraduates, conflicting and discordant as they
are in some institutions, to get on happily, to
recognize each other’s merits, to have no ground

37

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

of disagreement, and in the various political games
which are played in the college community to work
together harmoniously.

Coming in contact, as I do daily, with all sorts
of students and student difficulties, I am most
likely to know immediately about all the differences
which arise between individual students, between
different student organizations, and between
Greeks and independents. I am most likely, also,
to become entangled unpleasantly in these, and,
whether I wish to do so or not, to become a part
of them. It often requires a skilful steering
between Scylla and Charybdis. I have sometimes
been surprised at the relatively small amount of
criticism which I, as a college officer, am subjected
to because of these relationships. Only this week
a rather hot-headed junior said some pretty
caustic things to me, because in helping to carry
out the details of a quarantine which had been
imposed upon a fraternity and a private dormi¬
tory, I was somewhat more rigid with the men in
the dormitory than I was with the men in the fra¬
ternity. His claim was that I trusted the men in
the fraternity and put a policeman to watch the
comings and goings of the men in the dormitory.
I was able to show him that the fraternity was a
responsible organization which I had learned to
depend upon and which the members themselves

88

The Greek and the Independent

took pride in ; that when the head of the organiza¬
tion agreed to a line of conduct I was confident
that for the good of his organization he would
see that it was carried out. The men in the dormi¬
tory were not socially or morally inferior, but they
were not in any true sense organized; what one
man or one group of men would agree to do would
seldom affect the rest of the men. There was so
little unity, so little concerted action, that I knew
it would be quite unsafe to depend upon the fact
that they would all abide by any regulation that
might be imposed. It was not that the men them¬
selves were different or more entitled to considera¬
tion; they lived in a different way, they were
controlled by a different organization, and so they
must of necessity be managed differently by me.
It was not difficult to make my critic see all these
things, and to get him to agree that it was quite
just that the men in the fraternity should not be
treated quite in the same way as the men in the
dormitory.

For a good many years we had every fall at the
University of Illinois a pretty severe physical con¬
test between the members of the freshman and
sophomore classes which involved many hundreds
of contestants. Because of their superior experi¬
ence, even though their numbers were ordinarily
inferior, the sophomores usually won. In one

39

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

instance the tables were turned, and the fresh¬
men came out of the fray victorious. Two exultant
freshmen were walking down Green Street dis¬
cussing the victory and offering each other mutual
congratulations. “I don’t see how we ever did it,”
the first one ventured. “Well, I know, kid,” the
second man explained, emphasizing each syllable
by a slap on his companion’s back. “It was
or-gan-i-za-tion.” Whether the freshman was
correct or not, it is quite evident to any unpreju¬
diced onlooker that the main difference between
the fraternity man and the independent is, as I
have said, that one is a part of a coherent organiza¬
tion, and the other is not. Inherently, there is
no difference, and it is upon the basis of organiza¬
tion only, and how best to manage men in it, that
distinctions should be made. Perhaps this is as
good a place as I shall find to say that the theory
that all students should be treated alike is as foolish
a one as could be promulgated, though I have
heard it emphasized since the time when as a child
I entered the public schools. The teacher or school
official who treated one boy differently from what
he treated another was the subject of much com¬
ment at home and on the playground, and the
subject, also, of biting criticism. The theory
would be all right if students were all alike, but
since they are not it is the height of folly and

40

The Greek and the Independent

verges on imbecility for parents or teachers or col¬
lege officials to treat any two young people alike
in any situation where the conditions are affected
by the personality of the individual. Even
children can see this if it is put up to them intelli¬
gently.

There are those who argue that a member of a
fraternity has more show than an independent,
that he is given more consideration, that college
officers discriminate in his favor. In point of fact,
I feel that the opposite of this is true, barring
the fact that organization is one of the first ele¬
ments in attaining success, and that the frater¬
nity man takes advantage of this favorable condi¬
tion. I have sometimes felt that possibly a college
man occasionally lost favor by being a part of an
organization, because one has a tendency to blame
him for the sins of his fellows. “Does Brown
belong to a fraternity?” the chairman of a com¬
mittee diliberating over a freshman’s intellectual
future, asked me over the telephone the other day.
“I think so,” I replied, “but that fact ought not
to determine whether or not he is allowed to con¬
tinue.”

Usually I am convinced that the man in an
organization is helped. We see it in business, in
politics, in the church, in society — why not in col¬
lege? The independent fights against odds

41

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

because he fights alone. “I don’t want anyone to
help me out,” I heard an undergraduate say not
long ago. “If I get anything or anywhere I want
to do it by my own efforts and upon my own
merits.” But no one is likely to get very far alone,
and more and more we are coming to recognize the
fact that it is team work that counts. Even the
self-made man is not so much in vogue as he once
was, because we see what a crude, freakish, incom¬
plete product he often is. It is better to employ
organization and “piece work” in turning out a
successful man. The fact that a fraternity man is
allied with a group of other men who are working
for approximately the same thing as he is working
for, who are in sympathy with him, who are willing
to help him and advise him, does usually give him
an advantage over other men. His condition
reminds me somewhat of an experience which I
had yesterday. I attended a baseball game between
our home team and that of a nearby state uni¬
versity. The odds were pretty even, if I may be
permitted to use so paradoxical an expression, and
more than once our pitcher seemed in a rather
tight corner. At each instance of this sort there
always came from all sides of the bleachers the
encouraging cry “We’re all behind you, Red,” and
I have no doubt it was that friendly fraternal
word that helped “Red” to pull himself success-

The Greek and the Independent

fully out of the holes into which he seemed to be
slipping. It is the same sort of help that the fra¬
ternity man has behind him that many men count
an unfair advantage.

There are few communities in which the intellec¬
tual differences, great as they sometimes seem to
be, are so slight as they are in a college community,
and especially as they are in a college community
in the Middle West. The young men who enter
such an institution are, for the most part, from
middle class homes. Their fathers and mothers
have usually attained some business or community
distinction in the neighborhood in which they live,
but they very seldom have as broad an education
as they hope to secure for their children. These
young people themselves have been quite similarly
educated. The preparation which one receives in
a good country high school is not materially dif¬
ferent from that which he would get in a good
city high school ; at least it can be shown that the
young fellows who attain intellectual distinction
after coming to college are quite as likely to have
had their preparation in a small high school as in
a larger one. There is little difference, there¬
fore, intellectually, between these boys who come to
college, some of whom may join a fraternity, and
a larger number of whom will not.

Socially, also, the difference is not so great

43

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

as one might suppose. It is true there are some
pretty wide extremes and some rather striking
contrasts, but as I have seen through many years
the procession of fathers and mothers that come
each autumn with the opening of college and each
spring at commencement time, I am convinced that
the great mass of our students, in the Middle West
at least, come from a quite similar social environ¬
ment. I have been given a jolt often at commence¬
ment week when meeting for the first time the
parents of some well-known fraternity hero, as I
have been delighted when I have been introduced
to the friends of some modest independent. The
Greek, as I have known him, has very little on the
independent so far as social prestige is concerned.

Nor is the distinction between these two classes
of students in any large degree based upon the
relative amounts of money which they or their
parents have. It is true that ordinarily it requires
somewhat more money to live in a fraternity house
than to live outside, but the mere fact that a man
has money seldom decides whether or not he
will become a fraternity man when he enters col¬
lege. As I write these sentences the names of a
score of wealthy boj^s who were in college this year
come to my mind, not one of whom belonged to a
fraternity. Some of them did not care to do so,
and some of them could not have got in had thev

44

The Greek and the Independent

wished ever so much to do so ; and on the other
hand there are in my mind the names of a large
number of fellows with scarcely moderate means
who were rushed off their feet by a half dozen
organizations eager to pledge them. There is
little or no difference between them so far as
financial standing is concerned. I have in mind
two boys, friends from childhood, who came to
college two years ago. The parents of one were
wealthy, and the parents of the other could with
the greatest sacrifice send him to college. They
joined the same fraternity, have enjoyed the same
privileges, and have attained about the same dis¬
tinction and popularity.

I realize that there are many people who do not
agree with me in these statements which I have been
making. On the one hand there are those who
look upon fraternity men as made of somewhat
more refined and better glazed clay than are other
men. These men, if pushed, would be willing to
grant that the fraternity man, perhaps, is no
grind, that he is more likely to make the loafer’s
club than Phi Beta Kappa, but when it comes to
social prominence and finesse, they are sure that
he has it on every other fellow in college. I have
heard the occasional fraternity man talks as if he
were making a great concession when he associated
with an independent, but fortunately such men

45

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

are not numerous. On the other hand there are
independents who look upon fraternity men with
complete disfavor. They consider them snobs,
loafers, and men of generally loose principles.
One of our honorary societies prided itself for
years that when it came to the election of members
no fraternity man ever got by. It was not
until a fraternity man came along who was intel¬
lectually so undeniably superior to the other avail¬
able men that the old custom was abandoned. Since
that time candidates are considered upon their
merits, whether they are fraternity men or not.

When such an attitude of mind exists as I have
just mentioned, all sorts of difficulties are likely
to arise. Social differences and political factions
develop, and independent fraternities whose sole
purpose is to fight fraternities not unlike them¬
selves are organized and begin a campaign of
opposition which results in the grossest and most
exaggerated statements. The few college clubs
which I have known, as well as those which I have
heard of, that were organized with the determina¬
tion to fight fraternities, or not to become frater¬
nities, were the most radical of fraternities as soon
as they were organized. The fact that they wrere
known by English names rather than b}^ Greek-
letters made not the slightest difference. The
procedure resembles very much the ordinary poli-

46

The Greek and the Independent

tical campaign, where opposing candidates go the
limit in making unsupported accusations against
each other.

The newspapers do not help the situation; they
exploit eagerly every trivial circumstance or dif¬
ference which arises between Greeks and indepen¬
dents. They enjoy a fight. The public believes
what it reads, and forms its opinions upon false
data. With regard to these things as with regard
to many similar ones, it is not difficult to prove
almost anything if one does not demand too many
illustrations. The most worthless loafer I know
in college this year is a fellow who is working his
way and dependent upon his own resources for
every cent he spends. Neither this one instance,
nor a half dozen others would prove, however, that
the man who works his way through college is a
loafer. The most dissipated, extravagant spend¬
thrift with us last semester was an independent,
but no one thinks of blaming his conduct upon the
fact that he did not join something; no more
should we usually blame another man’s downfall
upon the fact that he did.

It will not be very difficult to conclude that from
my viewpoint there seems little that is pertinent
to say with reference to the relationships which
exist or would exist between fraternity men and
those who are not affiliated with such an organi-

47

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

zation. They are all made of the same sort of
dust; socially, intellectually, financially, and mor¬
ally there are no appreciable differences between
them. Their interests are identical; their
environment is in no large degree dissimilar; there
is no difference excepting that one is a member of
an organization and the other not, the only way
we can make a real difference is by imagining one
and talking about it. It is this talking about it
that does the most of the damage and stirs up the
useless trouble. A good deal of it comes from
silly jealousy.

Many of us found ourselves in a similar
situation with reference to the late terrible
European war. My father and mother were of
English birth as were my older brothers and
sisters. All my life my sympathies have been
drawn more or less unconsciously, no doubt,
toward England. America in my mind was
always first, but England was second. I can
scarcely see how it could be otherwise. During
the last thirty years I have formed many
close friends among Germans and men and women
of German ancestry. I can very well see that their
feelirtg toward the country from which their
fathers came is not unlike that which I feel toward
England. I could not expect it to be otherwise.
We have gotten on together, and our friendship

48

The Greek and the Independent

has not weakened because we have been sensible
enough not to exaggerate our differences, not to
extol one set of friends to the exclusion of another.
Each side, no doubt, has its justification, but on the
whole it is better to let it go at that and not
waste useful time in discussing it. We are not
different in our hearts because our ancestors came
from different parts of Europe. In a remotely
similar way I feel toward fraternity men and those
men who do not belong to fraternities. It is only
when they insist on recognizing that there are
differences and disagreements, and are determined
to discuss them and to exaggerate them that these
differences and disagreements actually exist. The
men themselves are not different in ideals or in
purposes.

“How shall I treat my old friends, after I have
joined a fraternity?” I am constantly asked by
young fellows who somehow get the idea that when
they become members of a fraternity they at once
sever all diplomatic relationships with every one
outside. I presume it is the same sort of question
which presents itself to many a young fellow who
is about to be married, and who feels that such a
ceremony entirely alienates him from all other
friends whom he may have previously counted as
his own. Neither marriage nor joining a frater¬
nity necessarily changes a man, and if either act is

49

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

instrumental in causing differences or disagree¬
ments to come between friends, something is wrong
with the marriage or with the fraternity. The
fact that one takes a new obligation does not in any
sense absolve him from an old one. The answer to
the question as to how a fraternity man should
treat his independent friends is a simple one ; he
should treat them as he always has done; visit
them at their houses and invite them to his own;
keep up his friendly associations with them in the
classroom and out of it, on the street and on the
campus. To do otherwise is to prove oneself a snob,
and to emphasize differences which do not exist.

If there is ill feeling and jealousy and misunder¬
standing on any college campus between fraternity
men and those who are independent of such organi¬
zations, it is largely because men have exaggerated
trifles. When we begin to draw social lines, or poli¬
tical lines, or intellectual lines between these two
classes of men we are making a mistake ; we are no
more justified in doing so than we should be in
insisting upon similar distinctions being made be¬
tween those men who live at home and those who
live in a boarding-house; between the philanthro¬
pists who belong to church and those who do not.
We shall wipe out the differences which are said to
exist between Greeks and independents, when we
refuse to recognize the fact that there are any.

50

Rushing and the Rushee

RUSHING AND THE RUSHEE

I have always felt that some of the strangest
and most curious phenomena connected with fra¬
ternity life and fraternity customs have to do with
the processes and procedures of rushing. In try¬
ing to explain to the fathers of prospective fresh¬
men just what fraternities are and what customs
they follow, I think there is nothing more difficult
of elucidation than those details which connect
themselves with the preliminaries to bidding a man.
I hear the sounds, and look on at the struggles, and
detect the same old subterfuges every fall, but I
have never yet been quite able to look upon the
procedure wholly seriously. I hear the same argu¬
ment recited to me every year by the freshman who
has listened to it in the chapter houses, the whole
purpose of which is to dazzle the coveted man and
to make him decide at once to take the pledge
button.

Perhaps some one may essay to read this paper
who is so ignorant of fraternity parlance as not
to know what “rushing” means. For his benefit I
may say that rushing is that conglomerate process
by which the members of a fraternity in theory
attempt to study a new man’s character, to get
acquainted with him, and to let him get acquainted

51

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

with them, in order that both the fraternity and
the freshman may decide intelligently whether or
not either wishes to continue the friendship and
cement it into brotherhood —To'^those engaged
actively in this process of eating and drinking, of
talking and drawing people into talk, of picture
shows and joy rides, of vaudeville and house dances,
it is really a serious business, verging often upon
tragedy; to an unimpassioned and disinterested
spectator the results are often serious, but the
methods not infrequently suggest farce comedy.

Until within a few days before term time the
college town is dead. One walks down silent desert¬
ed streets. Sleepy merchants in the University
district sit in front of their places of business,
yawning and without a customer. The middle of
September arrives, and then everything changes.
Fraternity officers come to town, fraternity help
arrives, yards are cleaned up, houses are set in
order, the student district in general takes on a
look of life and activity, and some evening after
the freshmen have begun to come in, if I chance to
walk down fraternity row, or if I am invited out to
a fraternity house dinner, I find that the whole
community looks and sounds like a carnival in full
sway. The air is full of college songs and vaude¬
ville melodies ; pianos are pounding out rag time,
ukuleles are strumming, and victrolas are giving

52

Rushing and the Rushee

expression to all sorts of vocal efforts from Harry
Lauder in Roamin' in the Gloamin * to Tetrazzini
in the Mad Scene from Lucia . I do not need this
familiar sound of revelry by night to recognize the
fact that the rushing season is on.

I have always been interested in the large part
which music, or that which passes for music, plays
in the rushing program. I have never visited a fra¬
ternity house during the period of rushing that I
did not come away hoarse from my efforts to carry
on a conversation in the face of the storm of music
that thundered and roared constantly on. Very
few chapters are content with a mere piano played
by a single performer. They try duets and trios,
they gather round the piano with horns and drums
and shout the latest rag time. At one house which
I recently visited they had formed an orchestra
with two drums that made noise enough utterly to
drown any attempts at conversation. I leaned
over and shouted at my companion with whom I
was trying to carry on a simple conversation
until I was red in the face. One organization I
visited last fall had borrowed for the season a
musical horror that really fascinated me. It com¬
bined under one mahogany roof a regular orchestra
—piano, violin, flute, and so on. All you had to
do was turn a crank and press a button and you
were off. The man who operates the musical

53

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

machinery at the fraternity house during the fall
rushing season must come back in good physical
condition, or he will be as completely exhausted at
the end of the first week as a green freshman after
his first scrimmage in football.

“Why do you regularly carry on these wild
musical incantations during the rushing season?”
I asked a fraternity officer recently.

“It’s the custom; every one up and down the
street is doing it,” was the reply; “and you have
no idea, unless you’ve been through the strain, how
it fills in gaps in conversation, and helps to relieve
self-consciousness.”

I am quite well aware that it not only helps to
fill in the gaps in conversations, but that it usually
makes conversation impossible. How it aided the
fraternity to get at the real character and worth
of the fellows they were studying, however, I could
not see then, nor can I now. I believe that one of
the ways in which fraternities could help them¬
selves on to more intelligent rushing would be to
have less music, and more quiet well organized con¬
versation. I believe this because *bf the real pur¬
pose for which the processes of rushing are carried
on. The new man is usually very little known. He
has been recommended by some one who knew his
father, or who had met his sister at a summer
resort, or who has some social ax to grind.

54«

Rushing and the Rushee

Usually the one who recommends him most strongly
knows least about him directly. It is, or it should
be, the purpose of the fraternity in rushing him to'
find out something about his social and intellectual
training, to discover his purposes, his ideals, his
initiative, his adaptability. If he is initiated, the
members of the chapter will have to live with him
for four years, he will be a member of the family ;
he will help to give the chapter character and repu¬
tation, or he will do his part in bringing it to dis¬
favor or disgrace. It is no trifling matter which
a fraternity is undertaking when it begins to rush
a man, but I have seen fraternity men give more
thought and attention in going into the pedigree,
history, and winning points of a bull pup they were
about to take into their household than they did to
the qualities of the young fellow they were about to
pledge as a brother.

I think it would be a helpful proceeding for every
member of the active chapter to ask himself before
he goes into the work of the rushing season just
what rushing is for, and govern his conduct accord¬
ingly. Years ago, before the University had rid
itself of hazing, it was the custom of the unregen¬
erate sophomores to run in any isolated freshmen
who might be out alone after night, and force them
to take an immediate bath in the Boneyard, a dirty
sluggish little stream scarcely more than a ditch

55

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

that flows through the campus. I was out one
night about nine o’clock walking through the stu¬
dent district when I came unexpectedly upon a
group of sophomores putting three freshmen
through this ceremony. One husky second-year
man was standing on the bank of the stream, and as
he pushed each freshman into the slimy depths, he
called out lustily, “What’s the Boneyard for?
What in the hell’s it for?” As I have sat by each
year for the past thirty years and watched the
processes of rushing, I have asked myself more
than once, with reference to rushing, the same
general question that the sophomore asked about
the Boneyard, “What is rushing for?”

Perhaps one of the first things which a frater¬
nity should attempt to discover when rushing a
man is how long he expects to remain in college.
The purposeless man, the man who has not decided
what he is coming to college for, who expects to
stay for a year or so and then get into some real
work, is useless to a fraternity. It is time wasted
taking him in. It is that sort that brings down
the scholarship average, that fails to pay his house
bills, and that gets fraternities generally into dis¬
repute. Many a good man may have to leave col¬
lege before graduation, but the fellow who comes
with the avowed intention of hanging around only
for a year or two ought not to be considered.

56

Rushing and the Rushee

One of the surprising features of rushing is the
rapidity which it is carried on and brought to
a finish. “How quickly is a young fellow pledged ?”
an old college mate of mine, whose only son expects
to enter the University next fall, asked me at Com¬
mencement time. “Within a few minutes, some¬
times,” I answered in all seriousness. I have seen
men wearing a pledge button at inter-scholastic
time before they had been in the chapter house
over night; I have known men to be approached
with a pretty definite proposition of membership
while for the first time on the way from the railroad
station to their boarding houses. Freshmen come
in to see me every fall with some curiously wrought
pledge button, to which they have become attached
during the night, and it has often all been brought
about so suddenly that they want someone to tell
them what has happened to them. The rapidity
with which membership is offered and accepted is
frequently appalling. It is like conversion at
a Billy Sunday revival ; it comes without warning
or seeming deliberation.

There is nothing that urges on this rapid work
like competition. In fraternity affairs, as in other
business, it is the life of trade. Business may be a
little dull as regards Smith and the Beta’s ; several
of the brothers mav be indifferent, and one or two
stubbornly “not ready to vote,” but if one of the

imj

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

officers of the fraternity happens to drop in to my
office and finds a Deke asking me for Smith’s
address and history, Smith’s stock picks up im¬
mediately in Beta circles, and ten to one he is wear¬
ing their pledge button before morning. I have
heard one man, pretty wise and experienced in fra¬
ternity affairs, offer to bet that he could take
almost any man, inconspicuously dressed, moder¬
ately good looking, and not too hopelessly unso¬
phisticated, and get him pledged within a week just
by introducing him to a few fraternities during
rushing season, and starting a little competition.
It would be an interesting experiment, and I should
not be at all surprised if it worked. If I dared,
I could myself tell some entertaining tales of
men who were rushed through in order to keep the
other fellows from getting them.

Another reason alleged for rapid work in rush¬
ing is the fact that the chapter can not bear to lose
a man whom it is seriously after. One of the most
frequent boasts in chapter letters after the rushing
season, is the statement that “We rushed ten and
never lost a man.” “Why did you bid Savage so
quickly?” I asked a fraternity officer not long
ago. “You know little about him, and he is not
you type of man in any sense.” “I know that is
true,” he replied, “but the Psi U’s were after him
hard, and we didn’t want to lose him.” And yet

58

Rushing and the Rushee

in many cases these men under discussion are of
such a character that it would be a credit to any
fraternity to lose them.

I have been interested in studying rushing
methods to see how strongly undergraduates are
influenced by insignificant or trifling details. If a
man talks too much or too little, if his ties or his
shoes or the intonations of his voice are not just
right, he is likely to be thrown into the discard.
“Cole is an awfully good man,” a senior said to me
in speaking of a prominent junior who was not a
member of any fraternity. “Yes,” I answered;
“you fellows rushed him pretty hard when he was
a freshman; why did you never bid him?” “Well,”
was the senior’s reply, “most of us were strong for
him, and thought him a prince of a fellow, as he
is, but Hill simply couldn’t stand for the way in
which he shakes hands, so we had to let him go.”
Here was a fraternity that had turned down one of
the strongest and most influential men in college —
forceful, aggressive, a real leader — just because he
did not hold his arm at the approved angle when
he was shaking hands. The fellow who confessed
to the reason was ashamed of it, as he should have
been.

“I am convinced,” I heard a gray haired frater¬
nity man say in a public address not long ago,
“that fraternity men in rushing freshmen pay

59

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

altogether too much attention to the cut of the
fellow’s clothes. If the chapter would scrutinize
the men’s characters a little more and their clothes
a little less, fraternities would advance more
rapidly than they are now doing.” In illustration
of this point is the story of two men who, a few
years ago, came to a little college in the Middle
West. One was well dressed, smooth, and self-pos¬
sessed. He was bid at once. The other was a
green, awkward country lad, ill-dressed, and inex¬
perienced. He had beeen recommended to the same
chapter as the first man, but when the fellows looked
him over they laughed; he was undeniably im¬
possible. A little later, however, as the men came
into closer contact with him in class, in spite of his
ill-fitting common clothes, he grew on them. He
had a charm and a strength of character which
made a vital appeal to their good sense. His name
was brought up again, and after much opposition
it went through. The first man proved to be com¬
monplace; he never disgraced the fraternity,
though he never did it any good. The second was
adaptable ; he learned quickly to break away from
his crudities. The chapter looks back upon him
and counts him the best president it ever had.
Today he is one of the leading ministers in one of
the leading Protestant churches of the country,
and the head national officer of his fraternity. The

60

Rushing and the Rushee

overlooking of certain unessentials, and the recog¬
nition or real merit, saved to his fraternity one of
the best men it has ever had.

Too often, in a coeducational institution at
least, in looking a man over, the fraternity judges
his fitness too much from the social impression
which he is likely to make upon the girls. The
fellow who wears the hand-me-downs picked from
the stock in father’s country store, has little
chance with the sporty chap who runs a charge
account at Capper and Capper’s. The fear that
the chapter’s social standing might be damaged, or
that some one might laugh at them for picking a
“rube,” has kept man a good fellow from getting
a chance to show himself in the right light. It is
a good deal easier to teach a young man where to
buy his clothes and when to get his hair cut, than it
is to teach him moral principles and intellectual
alertness. The impression which a pledge makes
upon the girls has very little to do with his use¬
fulness and influence in the chapter.

Rushing is not going to be done very success¬
fully if the work is left to one or two members of
the chapter. It is true that some one must be in
charge to plan the campaign, to direct the details,
to invite the new men to the house, but the responsi¬
bility of seeing that the men are entertained, that
they get acquainted with every member of the

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

chapter, and that they see the chapter at its best,
should be upon every member. Often the responsi¬
bility is thrown upon two or three members only,
they are given very little support, and when it
comes to the time for making a decision, half the
men are not ready to vote or vote without intelli¬
gence, because they have loafed on their duty, have
not seen the new men enough to have any opinion of
them, and so delay the decision or render it im¬
possible, by having failed to do their part at the
right time. Possibly this failure results from a
lack of definiteness in planning the business — for
it is a business as important as any which the fra¬
ternity does. I have seen a good deal of rushing,
but for the most part it has seemed to me pretty
purposeless and unorganized. Half the members
of the chapter often do not meet the men, and the
new men in these cases of course do not have a
chance to form a definite opinion of even half the
chapter. The whole process is largely a scramble.
The men are invited to dinner, there is an hour or
so of vigorous pounding of the piano, the crowd, or
so much of it as has not sneaked away, is rounded
up and rushed to the vaudeville or the movies, and
following this a few soft drinks at a downtown
refectory closes the session. The process is not
one calculated to give either party to the pending
agreement an intelligent knowledge of the other.

t

62

Rushing and the Rushee

After the members of the chapter reach home there
is usually a discussion, however, and men who have
been seen in this inadequate way are not infre¬
quently elected. I have known cases where men
voted for fellows whom they had scarcely seen, if,
indeed, they had seen at all. “What does that
fellow look like, that we voted in tonight?” I heard
an indifferent “rusher” ask last fall; “I don’t
remember wThether he was a blonde or a brunette.”
And all the information that his companions could
give him was that the prospective brother was
decidedly a “good looker.”

A mistake which many fraternities make in their
selection of men seems to me to be seen in the
tendency to rush men of one type or from one town
or locality. The fraternity, a majority of whose
members are athletes, is likely to be a weak one.
The fraternity which chooses a majority of its
members from a single town or locality is likely to
be a narrow one. Such a tendency is sure to
develop clannishness and factions. “Our frater¬
nity has been almost broken up this year,” a fra¬
ternity officer confessed to me, “by our Chicago
men. Half of our men come from one high school,
and they always hang together and defeat any¬
thing which the other men may propose. We
might with propriety be called the Hyde Park
Club. We should be far better off if we chose our

63

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

men from a wider range of localities.” I have been
forced to the conclusions through long experience
that any fraternity that allows a majority of its
members to be made up of men from any one city,
or even from a number of large cities is making a
mistake. I have never known a fraternity that
followed this practice that did not ultimately
regret it.

Experience has led me to the conclusion that
when, during rushing season, two or more organi¬
zations allow themselves to get into a wrangle over
any man who is being rushed, no one of them is
likely to lose much if they drop the man altogether.
Of all the men I have known during the last score
of years who have been mixed up in a rushing mis¬
understanding, and who have created ill feeling
among organizations, I can not think of a half
dozen who have been worth the price of admission
to the fraternity which finally got them. A new
man who allows himself to get into an embarrassing
position during rushing season, or who draws into
such a situation the organizations which are rush¬
ing him, is usually a man lacking force or finesse.

The practice of rushing only immediate or
remote relatives of present or former members of
the chapter is one which would require a con¬
siderable number of pages adequately to discuss.
With us it seems to have the greatest vogue among

64

Rushing and the Rushee

those fraternities whose history is the oldest. “My
father, or my Uncle William, was a Beta Psi,”
seems to many a young fellow an adequate reason
why he should be likewise. I have no prejudices in
this matter, but I believe I could go over the
records of the chapters at the University of Illinois
and easily establish the fact that those which have
followed this practice of nepotism have more fre¬
quently had cause to regret it than otherwise. An
energetic father is with no assurance followed by
a hardworking, energetic son ; brothers are as un¬
like often as if they hailed from different planets.
“Puny’s brother is coming next fall,” a senior
informed me at inter-scholastic time. “Punv,”
besides being what his name indicated, was a ner¬
vous, impulsive, tricky sinner, who would slip from
your grasp like an eel. He was imaginative, talka¬
tive, irresponsible. He studied only when he had
to, and went to class with the most regular irregu¬
larity. His brother was a husky athlete, studious,
dependable, regular, and steady as clock work. He
had nothing to say ; I was scarcely able by the most
subtle means to pry a dozen words out of him dur¬
ing the fifteen minutes he was in my office. The
boys were alike in nothing I could discover, except¬
ing that each had black eyes.

“We look them over, but we don’t take them un¬
less they measure up pretty well,” one man ex-

65

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

pressed it, and that seems to me the more sensible
procedure to follow. There are few things, how¬
ever, in fraternity affairs that cause more trouble
and more heartaches. The chapter that follows the
practice of bidding relatives of its former members
frequently takes in a weak brother, and the chap¬
ter that does not do so, often alienates some of
its best alumni. It is a loyal alumnus who can
see his son or his wife’s brother turned down by his
college fraternity, and still keep up his annual
payments to the house fund. I could easily fur¬
nish a long list of those who have not been able to
stand the test.

There are fraternities, I am sorry to say, though
I do not know many of them, who, like some politi¬
cal organizations, rather than lose a man, will
employ methods in rushing which are neither
honorable nor creditable. I think I need hardly
discuss such details here. The organization that
is not honest and above board in its methods that
descends to that which is low and coarse, that wins
its members through the telling of risque stories,
or through “showing them the town” is not worthy
of the name of fraternity, and the freshman who
is beguiled and attracted by such things is no asset
to the organization that wins him.

A good many people who deplore the evils of
rushing as it is now carried on in many of our

66

Rushing and the Rushee

institutions have the feeling that we could modify,
if not entirely do away with these evils, if the facul¬
ties or the local fraternity conferences should pass
regulations controlling the methods of rushing. I
know a great many people who have the feeling that
if an evil exists, all that is necessary is to enact a
law or pass a regulation prohibiting it, and the
matter is settled. My only knowledge of how these
matters are regulated by rules comes from my
observation of the results which have been attained
at the University of Illinois by the young women
of the sororities, who have had very definite regula¬
tions for a number of years. These regulations
have been changed at intervals, as it was found
how inadequate or impossible they were or how
easily they might be evaded. From my observa¬
tion of how the girls get on, I am not convinced
that by their regulations they have as yet solved
the diffiulties of rushing any more satisfactorily
than have the fraternities without rules. I am
confident, however, that if the representatives of
local fraternity conferences could first come to the
point of trusting each other, and would then formu¬
late a few simple, sensible regulations which all the
fraternities would agree to, and which all would
abide by conditions might be considerably im¬
proved. Most of the rules which I have seen are

67

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

too complicated and offer no easy and adequate
means of enforcement.

The prohibiting of rushing during the first
semester would not solve the problem. Men would
always violate the spirit of such a regulation. The
normal time for men to get acquainted and form
friendships is when men first meet, not six months
afterwards. The pledging of men before they
enter college I think ought not to be permitted.
The limit of a few days, at least, within which time
men might not be bid would I think help matters,
and I feel sure we shall come to the time when all
fraternities will abandon the “sweat box” system
of bidding a man still employed by many organiza¬
tions, and instead of pushing him into a corner,
gagging him, and forcing the pledge button on him
whether he is eager for it or riot, the proper officer
of the fraternity will write him a courteous, dig¬
nified note, and will give him an adequate time to
come to the decision which, for every college man
who must decide whether he will join a fraternity
or not, is one of the most important decisions he
is called upon during his freshman year to make.

Having said some things with reference to rush¬
ing, and the members of the chapter itself, there is
much advice and many suggestions that I might
give to the rushee. The man for whom these
snares are being laid, for whom the wary lie in

68

Rushing and the Rushee

wait, is more often than otherwise ignorant of the
ways of college, and more completely ignorant
still of the ways of the fraternity. He is most fre-
qently in dire need of advice, though he may not
be eager to accept it. He is often as completely
confused as is the country boy who finds himself
for the first time alone in a great city. Experi¬
enced undergraduates know all this and take
advantage of it in the tactics they use in making
an impression upon the man they are rushing.
Ever}^ year I see dozens of boys who are taken off
their feet by the suddenness with which all these
new experiences come to them, and by their inabil¬
ity at once to decide just what they should do. I
could wish that it were all a little more deliberate.

First of all I should say that the man who is
being rushed, should not allow himself to be put,
at the outset, under obligation to any fraternity.
Fellows often ask the new men in whom they are
interested to come to the fraternity house and live
for the first few days while Ihey are getting settled.
The boy who accepts such an invitation is foolish,
even though he hopes to become a member of the
fraternity which has invited him. He makes it
difficult for other fraternities who may want to get
acquainted with him, and he makes it very embar¬
rassing for himself, should he later decide that he
does not care to become a member of the organiza-

69

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

tion whose hospitality he has accepted. He may
feel inexpressibly chagrined, also, if the members
of the fraternity ultimately decide that they do
not want him, and are in need of the room which
he is occupying. He need not feel, however, that
he is placing himself under any undue obligation
when he accepts invitations to meals, for that is a
regular part of the conventional program by which
fraternities get acquainted with new men, and if he
joins he will later be given a chance to help foot
the bills for his own entertainment. He will be
wise, even if he has certain prejudices in favor of a
definite organization, not to make too many dates
even with it. The easily won man is frequently not
desired; it is fatal to his chances of membership
for him to reveal the fact that he would like to be¬
come a member. It is better not to make too man}r
social obligations until he is on the ground. No
matter how well pleased he may be with an indi¬
vidual or a group of individuals he should scatter
his dates, for if he gives himself a chance, he may
meet others whom he likes better, and by seeing the
men of two or three organizations he has a better
perspective by which to judge of their relative
merits. The facts are, also, that even the brightest
freshman needs to reserve a few hours for study at
the beginning of the semester.

The man who is being rushed should use his head.

70

Rushing and the Rushee

If the rushing is being done well, he may observe,
if he keeps his eyes open, that every member of the
chapter has had some direct contact with him dur¬
ing a single evening — has asked him a question, or
engaged him in conversation, or hung over his
chair as he was expressing some opinion. If he is
wise, he will not stay in one part of the room all
evening, and ^allow the passing show to file by him ;
he will himself study the individuals who may wish
later to have him as a brother as carefully as they
are studying him, and so far as it is possible, he
will get their names, hold to some detail about each
one, and form an estimate of his character. If
he gets into the game in this way, his self-con¬
sciousness will very quickly wear off, and he will
be gathering valuable facts upon which later to
base a judgment. He should try to make a study
of their character as they are probing into his.

It has always interested me to see how quickly
the rushers play up to the lead of the rushee. If
he expresses an interest in football, the brothers
who are on the squad gather round and show them¬
selves ; if he shows a religious turn, some one
immediately offers to take him to church the next
Sunday ; if he seems interested in scholastic attain¬
ments, the one “Tau Bete” or “Phi Bete” in the
house takes him on. Ever word that he drops is
utilized as an index to his character. If there is

71

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

some brother who is feared will mar the favorable
impression which has been made or is being made on
him, he is kept in the background, or sent down
town on an errand. And when it comes to the time
of bidding him, the brothers are most carefully
selected who, it is thought, will impress him most
strongly. He should, himself, then keep this all in
mind, and so far as possible make as careful a study
of the members of the chapter as they are making
of him.

Nothing is so unwise as to talk too much, unless
it be to talk too little; the happy medium is the
summum bonum of the freshmen’s desires. Worse
by far, however, than too fluent or too meager
speech, is the awful error of showing eagerness or
interest. “I like you fellows better than any others
• I have met,” I heard a freshman confess last fall
to a senior as he was bidding him good night after
an evening at the fraternity house. I turned cold
with horror at the confession. It was precisely the
way the senior wished him to feel, but it was the
baldest sort of bone-head work for the freshman
to admit it. It almost cost him his invitation to
join the organization. It was to the senior as it
might have been if the young woman whom he was
expecting to invite to the Junior Promenade had
expressed to him, before he asked her, the happi¬
ness which she would feel in accompanying him

72

Rushing and the Rushee

there. It is interesting what strange conventions
grow up about us.

The boy who has been asked to join a fraternity
may safely take a reasonable time in making his
decision. Most fraternities give the rushee the
opposite idea, but there is little to it. If a fra¬
ternity wants a man whom they have asked, they'
will give him such time as he needs to make up his
mind what he wants to do. “We never hold a bid
open” is the conventional bunk which most frater¬
nities use to force a man to an immediate decision.

“I don’t know what to do,” a freshman said to
me last fall. “I must give my answer by six tonight
to the fellows who have asked me. I want to join a
fraternity, but I’m not yet sure that this is the
right one for me. If I don’t join this one, I may
never get another chance. What shall I do?”

“Be a good sport,” I answered, “and take a risk.
If you are not prepared to give them an answer at
six, they’ll give you another week if you insist on
it.” He insisted and got it. I have seldom known
an organization to turn a man down when he called
that sort of bluff. I asked a junior fraternity
man yesterday what special advice he would give a
freshman being rushed, and he answered smiling,
“Well, if it’s any other fraternity than ours, I’d
say to him to look them over pretty carefully, and

IS

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

to take all the time he wants in making up his
mind.”

A freshman ought not to join a fraternity or
any other organization just because he is asked,
any more than he should be willing to marry every
girl who seems pleased with him. Men say that if
they do not join when they are asked, they may
never be asked again. What of it? It is infinitely
better not to live an organization life at all than
to be forced to live one that is not pleasing. If the
men with whom you associate yourself are not
congenial, if their intellectual and moral ideals are
not the same as your own, it is better not to join
at all than to form such an affiliation. “I really
should like to be a good student,” a freshman said
to me while we were discussing a group of men
which had invited him to become a member. “Do
you think I could be and join this organization?”
“Pretty small chance,” I had to reply. Three
months later he came to me and thanked me for my
frankness. He had waited and got in with the
right crowd, and was happy.

I have never known a fraternity that did not put
itself at the head of the list in the college in which
I it is established. When the various organizations
are metaphorically put upon the witness stand To
explain their failures and weaknesses and possible
low standing, they do it with the utmost facility.

74

Rushing and the Rushee

They remind me of a student I once knew in mathe¬
matics whose instructor, in commenting upon his
frequent absence from the class exercises, remarked
that the boy had presented an excuse seventeen
times, and that they were all good and all differ¬
ent. I have never seen a fraternity unable to give
an excellent reason for its coming short of its pos¬
sibilities in any detail — social, moral, or intel¬
lectual. I suppose their is nothing strange about
such a situation, however. It is a characteristic
of youth. As I remember being called up before
father when a boy to explain my derelictions, I do
not recall that I ever lacked a first rate excuse.

In view of this youthful genius for explaining, it
is just as well for the freshman to take with a
little seasoning the arguments which every frater¬
nity bidding for his membership will lay before him
to convince him of its superior claims to his favor.
The first and the most frequently used of these
arguments is “national standing.” Which are the
five fraternities having the best national standing
in this country? I don’t know, and I am not at all
sure that you do. In order to answer such a ques¬
tion we should have to determine the various points
to be taken into consideration. Are these age, or
location, or number of chapters, or exclusiveness,
or the number of prominent alumni, or what ? I
can not say. The question is about as easily

75

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

answered as one which was presented in one of the
Kansas City high schools to a young freshman with
whom I am acquainted. He was asked to name the
five greatest educators in the country, and gave
as his list, Woodrow Wilson, our athletic coach, the
Commissioner of Education of the State of New
York, the man who asked him the question, and
myself. He may have been somewhat influenced
in his choice by his interest in athletics, the Demo¬
cratic party, and the Presbyterian Church, but I
am not sure but that his list is as good a one as the
average fraternity man would make if asked to
name the first five fraternities of the country. If
a young fellow can go into a fraternity which has
excellent national standing, whatever that may
mean, and which has other desirable qualities, also,
' he is certainly wise in so doing. The fundamental
thing for him to decide is whether the group of
fellows who make up the active chapter of the
organization which desires him as a member is
such a group as he would be happy to live with
during the four years of his college course, and be
helped by living with. ♦ If hecan answer this ques¬
tion in the affirmative, then he can later go into
the subject of local influence and national stand¬
ing. The national standing business counts for
j very littl^^if th^mtike up of the local chapter is ob-
. jectionablej If called upon to make a list of the

76' —

Rushing and the Rushee

best five fraternities in college, it is not at all likel
that any two men would make the same list. The
freshman need pay very little attention to th
“national standing” argument.

Leaving out the point just mentioned which
almost every fraternity emphasizes heavily, there
is always a number of other details which each
organization considers as fine rushing stuff. Col¬
lege activities of all sorts are made a great deal of.
The fraternity that has the baseball captain or the
captain of the football team among its members
usually lays it over every one else when it comes
to showing the importance of activities ; but every
sort of activity is dragged out and made to pass
for its full value. The importance of a corporal
in the regiment, or of a cub reporter on the college
daily, is exaggerated beyond all reason when
being used as a rushing asset. Scholarship, social
prestige, moral standing, are all thrown into the
balance, and made to weigh as heavily as possible.
If a fraternity happens to lack any one of these,
the fact is passed over entirely, or made to seem of
little value. The freshman should not put too
much confidence in the statements with reference
to any of these points, as they are being presented
to him at the time of rushing. They are all impor¬
tant, but their importance is mot infrequently
exaggerated when the rushers are presenting them.

77

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

77

I

The rushee will be a wise boy if he keeps in mind
the fact that if he joins a fraternity he is to live*
during his entire college course with the men who
make up the membership. They are to be his
friends, his daily and hourly companions ; they are
to be present at practically every social function
he at tends, })i e-will take them home with him and
introduce them to his mother and to his sisters, and
gradually he is himself to be influenced by their
AZZ~ characters and to become like them. It is not a
picnic he is being invited to join himself to; it is
a college family that he is becoming a part of.
“Do you know why I did not accept the Gamma Psi
bid?” a young fellow asked me not long ago. “I
meant to do so when they asked me, but as I
thought it over, I couldn’t quite see some of those
men fitting in at home with mother. They aren’t
her sort.” He was a sensible man, and so will
others be who stop long enough to give serious
thought to this phase of the question.

Going into an organization is not wholly a matter
of sentiment ; it is quite as much a matter of busi¬
ness. I know young men who marry because they
A are in love, and who give no thought as to how the
increasing bills are to be paid. So men often join
a fraternity because they like the crowd and never
stop to ask themselves how much it is going to
cost. Before assuming any obligation it is the

78

Rushing and the Rushee

wisest plan to have a definite understanding as to
just what is involved. The freshman is not over
curious who wants to see the rooms in which he is
to live and to work, if he becomes a member of a
fraternity. He is showing admirable good sense if
he finds out what his living expenses are to be, and
how many “extras,” as they say in Europe, he will
be called upon to stand for. Both he and his
father have a right to know this, and they may
calculate with complete assurance that it will not
be less than the members of the fraternity allege.

There are a few things which it is safest to avoid.
There is a possibility of being too wise, of knowing
too much of fraternity conditions, of playing one
organization against the other, and of finally
losing out. The high school fraternity boy who
comes to college is not infrequently this sort. He
has had a fraternity experience, he thinks, and you
cannot show him anything. He is in reality the
greenest and the most transoarent of them all.
The wisest freshman is quiet, observant, dignified.
He appreciates what courtesies are offered him,
and says so, but he does not show himself boastful,
or smart, or self-satisfied. He keeps himself in
hand, and he knowTs his own mind. The man who
vacillates is making a mistake, and laying up for
himself a heritage of unhappiness. If on Monday
morning he makes up his mind that the Phi Gam’s

79

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

are the only fellows, and Monday night concludes
that he just must be a Sigma Chi or be forever
unhappy, by Tuesday noon he has probably become
strong for the Phi Psi’s, and by the end of the
week he does not know whether he is afoot or horse
back, and no one wants him. The comfort of it all,
however, is that when a man consults his own best
judgment, thinks the thing out, and comes finally
to a decision, he is usually contented and happy
for all time. There are few freshmen who get the
button on, no matter what hieroglyphics it bears,
who would have it different. He sees few faults
in the brothers, he begins at once to make heroes
out of them, and from the outset is confident that
he is in the “only fraternity.”

I have always felt that when a man had made up
his mind to accept the invitation of a fraternity
and still has other social obligations unfulfilled,
there are certain conventions which he ought to
respect. With us, often when Brown is pledged
and still has dates with other organizations which
he has not yet met, it is the custom for some mem¬
ber of the fraternity instead of Brown himself, to
call up these organizations over the telephone, and
announce the fact of his having been pledged, and
ask that his social obligations with them be can¬
celled. I do not know how common such a practice
is, but whether common or otherwise, it has always

80

Rushing and the Rushee

struck me as bad manners. It may be less embar¬
rassing to Brown to have some one else explain his
situation, but I think he could get no better social
experience than with one of his new friends to go
around to the various fraternity houses and make
his own explanations, and himself ask to be allowed
to break the engagement which he had made. He
will by so doing increase his own self-respect, and
if he does the business courteously, he will win the
lasting regard of the other fraternity men who
were interested in him. He can hardly square
himself in a gentlemanly way by doing less.

If the man who is being rushed thinks that those
who are rushing him are having a more hilarious
time than himself he is mistaken. It is a nerve
racking process for all concerned, from the man
who plays the piano or leads the conversation to
the freshman who must always be prepared at any
time to be thrown into the discard and to give no
indication that he cares.

81

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

AFTER THE PLEDGING

The young fellow who has just been through a
strenuous rushing season and who has accepted the
pledge button of a fraternity which satisfies him
and measures up to the ideals which he has
cherished with reference to such an organization,
like a young lover who has just become engaged to
the girl of his choice, usually feels that the worst is
over and that the future will see only smooth sail¬
ing, congenial associations without disagreement
and without friction. The very opposite of this
is too often true, for the freshman is quite likely
to find the period intervening between his pledging
and his initiation a time of trial and discourage¬
ment, a time of uncertainty and of difficult adjust¬
ment to new conditions.

During the rushing season he has seen only the
most attractive features of fraternity life; every
member of the chapter has presented his best side,
his most engaging manners, his strongest personal
assets. Before his pledging he has been made to
see his prospective brothers as beings far above
and beyond ordinary men; they are to him more
like young gods than commonplace mortals. “I
have never met a bunch of fellows who seemed to me
so altogether admirable and perfect,” a young

82

After the Pledging

pledge remarked not long ago. “There is not one
of them that I should have different if I could.”
But he waked up very shortly, as every neophyte
must if he is mentally alert, to the fact that he was
not associating with gods but with men — men full
of impulses good and bad, possessed of prejudices
and harrassed by selfish passions and desires as
other mortals are. It was with these men with
whom he had to live and it was to their idiosyncra¬
sies and varied personalities that he had to adjust
himself. The task is not an easy one, and it is not
strange that the new man, suddenly and rudely
disillusioned, should often fall into a morass of
uncertainty and discouragement.

“Do all pledges have their faith tried and grow
discouraged?” a despondent freshman asked me
only a short time ago. “Things are made to seem
so rosy at first, and then we wake up to find that
we are part of an organization made up of fellows
just like ordinary men.”

“I presume it is a common experience,” I an¬
swered, “and it is just as well so, for the work of
the world is done by ordinary men associating with
men equally ordinary. The sooner we learn to
adjust ourselves to the peculiarities ‘of all sorts
and conditions of men’ the better.”

One could not go far in a discussion like this
without saying something concerning the practice

83

The Fraternity and the Under gradtiate

of lifting pledges — a practice which is still not
uncommon and which is not confined to any college
or to any educational community. It is a possible
temptation at the outset for a man to feel that
having made a choice he might possibly have made
a better one if he had waited, or that even now, if
he had the courage to do so, he might give up one
and take another. Such a feeling though common
and human, perhaps, is weak. It shows indecision ;
it breeds unhappiness and discontent.

In the early history of the fraternity the lifting
of pledges was not an uncommon nor an unpopu¬
lar practice. Chapters went even further than
that and lifted whole groups of men. It was not
unheard of for a man to join one fraternity with¬
out going through the ceremony of being released
from another. It was a sort of fraternity mor-
monism or bigamy which was extant at the time.
It was a practice which was not conducive to gen¬
eral good feeling among Greeks, and one which has
come to be looked upon with pretty general dis¬
favor. He is a pretty brave man if not a nervy
one who can bring himself today to defend the
practice even in the most seemingly justifiable
cases.

The cause of lifting may be laid in the main, per¬
haps, to the rapidity with which rushing is done in
many institutions and to the fear of the rushee

84

After the Pledging

that if he refuses the first bid that comes to him
he may not get another. He seizes the bird at
hand, doubtful of being able to grasp the more
attractive ones in the bush. If the rushee were not
pushed so hard, if he were given more time to delib¬
erate, if the whole matter of fraternity member¬
ship were not sprung upon him suddenly and
forcibly, he would be more likely to come to a
settled and final judgment than he now is. At
present he is made to decide before he knows what
he actually wants, and he does not realize that if
he gets what he does not want it would be better
not to have anything at all.

Indecision on the part of fraternity men them¬
selves is another prime cause of lifting. A frater¬
nity may have been indifferently rushing a man or
perhaps may only have been considering the pos¬
sibility of doing so. When they see that while
they have been dallying another organization has
pledged him, their interest and his worth are
immediately exaggerated beyond all reason, and
they soemtimes feel that they must under such a
circumstance have him at any cost. I have in
mind now a man who was being lukewarmly con¬
sidered by three organizations. No one of them
was particularly enthusiastic or interested in him.
One of the three without much elation brought
itself to the point of bidding him ; immediately the

85

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

other two developed a frenzy of interest and the
man was ultimately persuaded to break his first,
pledge and assume a second. No self-respecting
fraternity will tamper with a man who is already
pledged. The excuses for doing so which are
sometimes offered by men who otherwise seem
reasonable and sane are on the whole flimsy. The
strongest of these is, perhaps, based upon the
argument of “national standing,” and practically
every fraternity which I have known has been able
by one specious argument or another to establish
the fact that its national standing was quite superi¬
or to the standing of every other similar organiza¬
tion with which it was associated. I was speaking
just the other day to a fraternity man with refer¬
ence to a freshman who had just been pledged to an
organization whose standing so far as I can judge
is as good as that of the one I belong to or the one
he belongs to.

“What a darned shame,” he exclaimed, “I’m
sorry he couldn’t have got into a good fraternity,”
which in his mind meant his own. This idea in a
man’s mind that his own fraternity is superior to
any other and that his own fraternity is superior to
any other and that the fellow who does not join
it makes a grave mistake, — is about the only rea¬
son which justifies him in his own mind in lifting
a pledge to another fraternity. His assumption is

86

After the Pledging

usually a false one, and even if it were not, it would
in no sense excuse his persuading a student to break
his pledge.

“We couldn’t see a good man join a fraternity
like that,” a fraternity officer suggested in an
attempt to iustify his action in lifting a pledge.

“Why?” I asked.

“They have no standing,” was his reply.

But the facts were they were cleaner fellows,
better students, more active in the college com¬
munity, and better respected than the organization
which was guilty of the lifting.

There is the reason alleged, also, that the man
concerned will be happier with one group than
with another, and that any means are justifiable
which will rescue him from an environment that in
the end will mean to him misery and maladjust¬
ment. I am reminded in this instance of a friend
of mine who made an usually happy marriage
and who has lived a life of rare contentment.

“I was a lucky man in getting Mary,” he admit¬
ted to me, “but I can’t quite see how one is going
to be sure about the outcome of such a union until
he tries it.” And so I say about the fraternity;
the organization that is willing to descend to a
disreputable act in order to save a man from un¬
happiness has no convincing evidence that the man
so rescued would have been unhappy, and, besides,

87

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

the thing is up to the man anyway, and the average
man would be happy and find it possible to adjust
himself to the living conditions in any one of a
score of organizations. It is about as foolish for
a man to think that his fraternity is the only one
in the world suited to a particular freshman as it
is to believe that he is the only man in the world
who could make a definite girl happy.

There is the point of view of the fraternity, also,
that because of their relationships and because of
the localities from which they come certain men are
in a way the property of one fraternity more than
of another if that fraternity chooses to claim its
rights. “We have always taken the men from
Rockford,” or “His cousin was a member of our
fraternity at Wisconsin,” are sometimes con¬
sidered quite good and sufficient reasons for any
sort of procedure in the acquiring of pledges.

The character of the men who will allow them¬
selves to be lifted in my experience is seldom such
as to make them of any real worth to an organiza¬
tion. As I look back over my relationship with
such men I can think of but one man who was
worth the price of admission to the organization
which lifted him. They have been, with this excep¬
tion, selfish or vacillating, or easily led, — men with¬
out judgment who did not know their own minds,
who had no power of leadership. They were not

88

After the Pledging

worth quarreling over; they did not warrant the
tarnishing of fraternity honor in order that they
might be acquired.

And there is no doubt in the minds of serious
thinking men today that the fraternity which lifts
men or allows them to be lifted for any cause is
lowering its dignity, is in doing this less entitled to
respect that it would otherwise be, and cannot in
the eyes of sensible people justify its action. Lift¬
ing clinchs one of the strongest arguments against
fraternities and strikes a knockout blow at frater¬
nity progress. The fraternity that has any stand¬
ing does not need to do it, and the fraternity that
has none should not be allowed to do it. The
pledge who allows himself to be lifted has by that
act shown a weakness of character which should
bar him from initiation.

Fraternities will continue to make mistakes in
pledging men, but in most cases these mistakes are
possible of correction. Such men can be released
in a dignified and orderly way. New men in col¬
lege will, also, under even more favorable condi¬
tions than at most institutions exist at the present
time, continue to pledge themselves to the wrong
fraternity. There is a way open to any such to
correct the error. No fraternity will hold a man
if he is dissatisfied. If the fraternity to which you
have pledged yourself is not what you thought it

89

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

would be, if the men have low ideals or are uncon¬
genial; if the conditions of living are not such as
to commend themselves to you, or if for any reason
you feel that you have made a mistake, the only
wise thing to do is to say so frankly and to ask for
release. The member of another fraternity, how¬
ever, who comes to you and either by open state¬
ment or by more subtle suggestion attempts to
bring about dissatisfaction in your mind as to your
choice or tries to persuade you that you should
join his fraternity because it is a superior organi¬
zation, is doing a dishonorable thing no matter who
he is or what fraternity he represents. Before you
are pledged any one may enter the contest for your
favor; after you have put on a pledge button of
any social fraternity, whether it be national or
local, anyone who approaches you in an attempt
to win you away from the organization of your
choice is doing wrong, is not playing the game fair¬
ly, and he should not be listened to. If you break
your pledge, it should be your own act.

If social conventions require that a widower wait
a decent length of time after the death of his
former wife before he takes another, so fraternal
conventions are best honored when a man who has
broken his pledge with one organization shows his
good sense by not rushing headlong into another.
Having made a mistake once, he might better give

90

After the Pledging

himself time and opportunity for consideration
before risking a second error. A good many inter-
fraternity organizations have recently passed
regulations which prohibit a man released from one
organization from being pledged by another within
six months, and some go so far as to require a
year to intervene. Neither the pledge nor the
fraternity can suffer by the enactment of such
legislation. A fraternity which refuses to abide
by the rule is scarcely worthy of respect, and the
pledge who is not willing to pay a fair price for
his mistakes, is not likely to profit by experience.

Granted, however, that the pledge is satisfied
with his choice that he has neither opportunity nor
desire to go to another organization, difficulties
will arise, disappointment will come, and adjust¬
ments will need to be made. It is no easy matter
to get on amicably with twenty-five or thirty men,
most of whom, very likely, one has never known
before. Especially is this true of the boy who,
before coming to college has had his own room and
exclusive use of his own possessions. Fraternity
men are too likely to consider the property of any
brother common property, and the freshman who
finds his bureau drawers rifled and his favorite
studs in another man’s shirt has at once something
to learn when he moves into a fraternity house.

A young fellow who had been invited to join a

91

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

fraternity came to see me only a few weeks ago to
ask my advice. “I think it would help you, Dave,”
I said. “You have always had your own way, you
have always followed your own desires, and though
that way has been in the main a good one, and
those desires excellent, you have yet to learn the
lesson of adjustment to the wishes and the comfort
of others. It would do you good to join a frater¬
nity.”

“That’s just it,” he responded, “I’m afraid I
don’t want to be done good.” His better sense
controlled him, however, and he is learning the
lesson which every young fraternity man must
learn if he is to get the best out of the organiza¬
tion, and that is to give up, to submit, to adjust
himself to new conditions.

After the pledging a good deal of the glamour
of the fraternity life disappears, and the new man
finds that he is expected to do a considerable
amount of work that is not wholly pleasant or clean
or easy. If he has not previously been used to
such tasks they may seem galling and they may
even strike him as being imposed more for his dis¬
cipline than because of any real necessity for their
accomplishment. If he is a wise young man he
will take these duties cheerfully, he will, at least
externally, perform them willingly, and he will

92

After the Pledging

receive such adverse criticism as may be imposed
without resentment.

“How does it happen,” I once asked a cheerful
freshman at a fraternity house, “that you who are
so apparently willing to work are seldom asked to
do anything, while Rogers, who growls when he is
disturbed, is constantly being sent on errands?”

“That’s the secret of the whole thing,” the fresh¬
man exclaimed. “I got on to the fact right at the
outset that the more I kicked, the less I accom¬
plished. So I decided never to complain, always to
volunteer, and regularly to do my tasks cheerfully.
The result is that I’m seldom disturbed because I
seem so willing.” It was the reward of seeming
virtue which he was receiving.

The fraternity house is often a crowded house.
When the freshman wakes up as he ultimately
must, to the fact that the college life is a life of
study, he very soon after this realizes too that
study in a fraternity house is something that must
be accomplished with others around him and often
others who, at the time when he himself must work,
are not themselves so inclined. He must learn a
sort of independence. While not forgetting others
in allowing himself to get out of sympathy with
them, he must yet manage his own affairs, look
after his own interests, and see that, amidst all the
confusion and bustle of the house, his own work is

93

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

done. This business of utilizing his time to the
best advantage, I shall leave to another paper.

The man with the right attitude, after his pledg¬
ing, will do what he can to get into the spirit of
the house. He may have no special work assigned
to him, and yet if he keeps his eyes open he will see
without being told things which he can do, and
ways in which he can help to keep things going
right; to keep his room and the rest of the house
in order, to promote good feeling, and to bring
about harmony among the different members of
the household. It is a far cry from pledge to presi¬
dent of the chapter, but I am sure that many a
freshman has in the first few weeks of his connec¬
tion with his fraternity settled his claim to that
remote and coveted office by the way in which he
has got on to the work and into the spirit of the
house. He has found happiness by helping those
who were in trouble ; he has made friends by being
friendly, and almost at the outset he has become a
standby, a prop upon which even an older man has
learned to lean. *

I remember a young freshman who was a mem¬
ber of my own chapter only a few years ago. We
had been having a gathering of the older alumni,
the new men had all been introduced and had been
looked over and discussed.

94

After the Pledging

“Which one,” I asked, “will be at the head of
the chapter when he is a senior?”

“Brockton,” they all said at once, “because he
gets into things, he takes hold, he has the spirit of
the house already,” and they were right, and
Brockton today is making one of the best of officers
we have ever had.

I remember as a graduate student in an eastern
university of being admitted to a special class in
English Composition.

“No one who is admitted to this class,” the old
instructor informed us at the first meeting, “need
ever expect to have anything complimentary said
of his literary composition. The fact that one is
admitted at all is sufficient proof that he has shown
more than average ability as a writer. Granted
that, it will be my business in the future to discover
to him his faults and weaknesses.”

I have no doubt that the fraternity pledge often
feels as discouraged as I did when I got back my
first long theme mutilated and scarred, covered
with red ink and scrawled over with vituperative
criticisms. Nothing that I did seemed right or
good. The new man in the house gets little praise ;
he is bawled out if he violates or evades rules ; he
is seldom commended if he does well. “Don’t
praise them,” is the suggestion, “or you’ll make
them conceited.” The freshman does not realize

.95

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

that the head of the house most often employs a
gruff and surly manner to mask his inexperience.
He is afraid that if he is gentle and soft voiced and
kind that the pledges and the underclassmen will
not recognize the fact that he is in control. He
often feels more kindly than he seems, and this fact
if the pledge will do his duty, if he will keep up his
part of the work, he will soon come to realize. The
time will go rapidly, the arduous duties will soon
be done, and the pledge before he knows it will be
a real brother.

96

The Freshman's Time and Money

THE FRESHMAN’S TIME AND MONEY

If there is one excuse offered more often than
another for failure on our part to accomplish a
result or to accept an obligation, or to perform
a service it is the conventional one that we have
no time. The more shiftless we are, the fewer
obligations and duties we have, the more convinced
we are that it would be disastrous if not impossible
for us to take on anything more. St. Peter, if he
holds up any eager entrant to the pearly gates
with an inquiry as to why he has not accomplished
more is met, I have no doubt, with the ready reply
that the sinner in question did all that he had time
to do. I have scarcely ever talked with a fresh¬
man who wished to omit some unpleasant duty or
to get out of some irksome task or to drop some un¬
interesting study who did not allege that his main
object was to get more time to put on his studies.
When I propounded the direct question as to when
he studies and just how much time he does actually
give to the business, he seldom if ever knows, and
for this there is a very good reason.

“Why did you fail?” I asked Hawkins who
managed last semester to get by with only two
hours in military and physical training out of a
schedule of eighteen hours.

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The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

“I suppose I did not have enough time for
study,” was his reply; and yet no one has more
time for the accomplishment of the tasks at hand
than the freshman.

I am always disappointed at the close of each
semester to find how many freshmen fail, and how
many others who do not actually fail are yet satis¬
fied to attain less than commonplace intellectual
results. They come to college ambitious, with
good preparation, and yet they fail; indeed it
seems sometimes that those who come with the best
preparation apparently, if the well-equipped city
high school offers the best preparation, fail the
most dismally.

The college course is planned for the average
man with an average secondary training ; its sched¬
ule is arranged so as to give him ample time in the
preparation of his work, and yet one third of the
young fellows who enter college each year, with
us at least, fail in something. Why? It can not be
because freshmen are dull or ignorant, because
they are not, it can not be because they are badly
taught in college, for though it can not be denied
that there is some inefficient teaching in college, yet,
if he would work, the average student could pass
any course in college without being taught at all,
and the inefficient teacher is not always the one who
fails the largest percentage of his students. The

98

The Freshman's Time and Money

real reason seems to me to be not that the fresh¬
man has too little time, but that he does not know
how best to utilize his time. He fritters a good
deal of it away instead of using it energetically or
systematically either in the pursuit of normal rec¬
reation or pleasure, or in the mastering of his
studies. He does not know where his time goes to,
for he follows no schedule.

One of the main difficulties seems to me to be the
fact that before entering college very few boys
have learned the first principles of concentration,
or know anything about study; nor do many
realize that college is fundamentally different in
its demands and requirements from the academy
or the high school. I have no doubt that there
are preparatory school boys or high school boys
who have learned to concentrate their minds upon
their work until they have actually mastered it,
but I do not happen at this moment to recall the
names of any. It has been my privilege recently
to be an observer for a few weeks of the mental
travail of two boys, students in one of the high
class academies of the Middle West. They study
like squirrels at play. They are quiet for scarcely
a moment. They are restless, talkative, kittenish
while they are supposed to be at work. They
tease each other more persistently than they ap¬
ply themselves to their books. They are constantly

99

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

changing seats or books or getting into more com¬
fortable positions or lighter attire. They stick
at nothing long; they carry nothing to a conclu¬
sion. They chatter and hop about like wrens, and
all the while they deceive themselves with the
delusion that they are getting their lessons, and
having done this sort of thing for four years they
will go to college with the idea that they know
how to study when all they really know is how to
fool away time.

The opportunities in college to waste time are
infinite, and some of them are so alluring, and
others seem to contain so many elements of real
improvement and training to the individual that
it is not strange that the freshman, ignorant of
the exactions of college life, should fall into error.
The fraternity freshman, surrounded as he usually
is by a large group of congenial companions is
more likely than other first year men to fall into
this error of misusing his time. If he desires to go
down town there is always some one to bear him
company; if he draws up his chair to join the
circle of fireside bums, there is so much that is
interesting going on that it is hard at the proper
time to break away ; even if he goes to his room to
study, there is his roommate usually to engage him
in conversation. The fact that in most fraternities
the freshmen are sent to their study-rooms at half

100

The Freshman's Time and Money

past seven is no conclusive evidence that from that
time on for the rest of the evening they are engaged
in study. There is quite as much time wasted by
college students during study hours as at any other
period.

Because of the fact that the freshman is often
for the first time having a taste of individual free¬
dom it is harder for him to bind himself by rules,
to set for himself a schedule for the disposal of
his time, and yet such a procedure is for him the
only safe one. If at the outset he will divide the
day into three parts, giving two-thirds of it to
sleep, eating and recreating and the remaining
third to class attendance and study, unless he has a
more than ordinarily heavy schedule of drawing
or laboratory work, he will have made a pretty
sensible and workable division. The freshman
who is carrying a schedule made up in any large
degree of drawing or laboratory science will need
to retrench somewhat more upon his recreation
time than I have indicated,

If the freshman could only realize that he is tak¬
ing up a regular business as exacting and as im¬
portant as any in which he will ever engage, if
he could only see that if he is to get on in it he
must work at it regularly, seriously, and with all
the energy and interest he can summon, there
would be fewer failures, fewer underclassmen

101

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

leaving college, and fewer upperclassmen working
up too late to what college really means. The
freshman who really recognizes that his first duty
in college is his work and who plains his pleasures
and his recreations with this thought in mind will
be very unlikely to fail.

One of the first questions which the freshman
will have to decide with reference to the disposal
of his time will have to do with the question of
outside activities. Most fraternities urge their
men, including the freshmen, to go out for some¬
thing. I have no particular quarrel with this
practice excepting as it has to do with the fresh¬
man, and no particular quarrel here if the
freshman could only be made to see that any extra¬
curriculum activity into which he may go is of min¬
or importance as compared with his college work,
and that if his class standing begins to drop down
because of his activities even though those be
athletic his immediate duty is to eliminate the ac¬
tivity. One football coach I know always says to
the members of the freshman squad “Get your stu- .
dies first: you will have three years later to learn
football ; but if you fail in your studies you are no
good to the team no matter how well you play.”

One of the first temptations which the fresh¬
man in activities has to encounter is the templa-
tion to cut class, and such a temptation is a grow-

102

The Freshman's Time and Money

in g one, that has the most disastrous and depress¬
ing effect up jhis college work. I believe fhe
freshman will be the wisest who goes little into ac¬
tivities until the end of his first semester or at least
until he has learned well how to study.

I was talking to a young fellow only a few days
ago concerning his irregular class attendance.

“I never cut class merely for the pleasure of
cutting,” he said.

“Why do you cut?” I asked.

“Usually to study for another recitation,” was
his reply.

“Are you carrying an over-schedule?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

“Then you waste your time in some way. I
want you to do one thing for me,” I said. “Keep
an accurate record of how you spend your time
for the next three days accounting for the whole
twenty-four hours ; then we’ll talk it over.”

When three days later he came in there was lit¬
tle I needed to say. The process of setting down
in black and white how he had disposed of the
various hours of the day had taught him very
thoroughly how his time was going, and it was
not difficult to see that it was mostly going to
waste. He was trifling it away and accomplishing
little or nothing.

The freshman who desires to get the most out of

103

1

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

his college life whether it be pleasure or profit will
accomplish his purpose best by having a schedule
from which to work and by following this schedule
with pretty careful regularity. He would be
foolish never to allow himself to deviate from
such a plan, but he should not do so excepting for
really adequate reasons. First of all such &
schedule should contemplate no omission of class
exercises. When unexpected engagements must
be made they should be arranged so as not to con¬
flict with regular recitations. The dentist or the
doctor or your roommate can each adjust him¬
self to your convenience or necessity if you will
insist upon it. When a friend says, “I will meet
you at ten,” it is quite easy to explain that you
have a French recitation at that hour and can not
see him until eleven. This all seems trivial and
childish, perhaps, but the records of the college
office will show that the young fellow who begins
cutting class for any reason very soon develops
the habit and needs only the slightest pretext to
cause him to omit an exercise. Still another thing
the college records will show and that is that high
scholastic standing and regular class attendance
are closely related. The twenty men who last se¬
mester made the highest averages at the Univer¬
sity of Illinois had either no absences from class
exercises or their absences were negligible, and

104

The Freshman's Time and Money

ninety per cent of the men who were dropped for
poor scholarship or who went on probation for
poor scholarship were habitual cutters. The stu¬
dent who cuts a little during his first year gener¬
ally keeps it up with greater regularity during
his succeeding ones, and his grades suffer ac¬
cordingly. The man who will go to class every
day and pay close attention to what goes on there
ought to pass almost any course even though he
studies little.

The sensible freshman, however, will have regu¬
lar hours of study, for he will not be quite satis¬
fied merely to pass. In the adjusting of these
study hours it seems to me that most freshmen
make their gravest mistake in that they relegate
most of their study if not all of it to the evening
hours. Every student, and especially every
freshman, should have some time for study during
the day. His mind is most alert at this time, it
is easier during the day to find a place for study
where he can be quiet and undisturbed, and by pre¬
paring at least one lesson during the daylight he
taxes his eyes less and leaves for the evening an
amount of work not impossible of accomplishment.
The freshman is still pretty young, he has not
been accustomed to late hours, and however much
he may like the habits of the night owl such hours
are good neither for his studies nor for his health.

105

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

I suppose I shall be laughed at when I say that
every freshman, excepting on rare occasions,
ought to have his work done and be in bed by
half past ten o’clock. The student who prepares
one lesson during the day will never under normal
conditions need to study more than three hours
any evening and so can get to bed as he should
do at a normal time.

One of the most useless as well as the most
vicious student habits is the keeping of late hours.
Living in a community of college students as I do,
I have never arisen early enough nor gone to bed
late enough to find the lights out in the students’
rooms about me. At whatever hour of the night
or morning one may walk down John street or
Illinois street he may always see some student’s
light brightly burning.

I remember a young fellow who some years
ago lived next door to me and into wrhose room
I could look from my own study window. He
was dull in the classroom, and if he passed at all
did so with very low grades. At night his light
was seldom out. He goaded himself to work far
into the morning hours. I have wakened at three
in the morning to find his study light still shining
in at my window, and to see him nodding over
his books. If he had worked hard one hour in
the day time and put in two or three good hours

106

The Freshman's Time and Money

in the evening, and then had gone to bed early he
might have learned something. As it was he never
had time for anything, never got anywhere, never
seemed to be awake. He utilized time badly while
priding himself that he was working hard.

“We send our freshmen up to their rooms at
half past seven every study night,” the fraternity
man proudly asserts in proof of the fact that a
fraternity house is a good place for a freshman to
be in ; but what do the freshmen do after they get
to their rooms? Some of them study it is true,
but more of them waste their time in unconcen¬
trated effort, get down to their work about the
time they ought to be going to bed, oversleep in
the morning, and miss an eight o’clock because
they have been up studying so late the night be¬
fore. The man who got the highest grades of any
student I have known in thirty years seldom stu¬
died more than two or three hours during an even¬
ing, but when he went to his books he banished
every other thought and occupation; dynamite
could not have turned him from the solution of a
problem in calculus or from the writing of an
exercise in rhetoric after he once got set at it.
He wasted no time in looking for his pipe or dis¬
cussing politics or the last dance; he had learned
concentration, and so the freshman must learn
if he is to get the most possible out of his time.

107

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

Procrastination is the bane of the intellectual
lives of most students. They falsely argue that it
does not matter if they get behind a little; there
is always plenty of time in the future. The only
time one can safely count on is today, and that is
the reason why, in the midst of a very enjoyable
vacation, I have stopped long enough to finish this
article which I have promised for next week. I
know that I have the time today, and experience
has taught me that in all probability I shall not
have it next week when I get back to the regular
duties of my office.

“Are your themes all in?” I asked a freshman
whose adviser I am.

“I think so,” he replied, “at least I am not back
more than four or five.” He did not see that lack¬
ing the four or five he would probably fail the
course, and that having them in he might pass with
a creditable grade, nor did he realize either that
if he came to the end of the half year lacking a
good percentage of his work, it would be entirely
impossible for him to make it up. It is a safe rule
never to get behind, for in that case one is always
ready for an unexpected emergency. The fresh¬
man, boy-like, too often takes his pleasure first
and promises himself that he will find plenty of
time after he is through with the show or the
game or the dance to get up the neglected work.

108

The Freshman s Time and Money

Such plans almost always go astray. One of the
best freshmen I know this year, and he is in reality
a boy of only ordinary attainments, has made
high grades and has found time besides for all
sorts of recreations and pleasures, by always
doing his college work first. If he is going out
at night, he stays in during the afternoon and
writes his theme or his French exercise, so that
when he comes to the party he has nothing on his
mind, he is not goaded with the thought that he
must get up early in the morning to prepare a de¬
layed lesson, but can give himself unreservedly to
the pleasure at hand. He is one of the high men
scholastically and he has Imd time for both athlet¬
ic activity and social pleasure because he does his
college work before he goes at anything else.

The gist of my sermon to the freshman so far is,
plan your work, never put it all off until evening,
otherwise you will grow dull and sleepy ; attend
every class exercise ; learn concentration early in
your course, and see that all assignments are
kept up to date. Do your work before you give
your time to pleasure. Such a course of action
will raise your class standing ten or fifteen per
cent and give you more time for sleep, exercise,
and pleasure than you could possibly have if you
go at your work in a hit and miss, haphazard way.

109

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

You have twice as much time as you really need
if you will only utilize it sanely.

Nothing is more closely connected with the
proper utilization of the freshman’s time than the
use he makes of his money, and the way he handles
it.

“How much money should I give my son?” is
a question which I am constantly being asked by
fathers who are sending their sons away from
home for the first time. It is a hard question
to answer and a question the answer to which is
not in all cases the same. What is ample for one
boy is too little for another, and vice versa. In
most fraternities there is a flat monthly rate cov¬
ering board, house dues, the social affairs in which
all of the members participate, and a few other
details. This amount should be a good index of
the total monthly allowance necessary for the
boy’s expenses while at college. A reasonable al¬
lowance will usually have to be larger than one
might calculate or infer from reading the college
catalogue, for a college student, like the average
newly married man, finds that the extras count up
about as much as the regular expenses. A proper
allowance will vary with the individual. I have
in mind two brothers who, while they have been
in college, have had the same monthly allowance,
and it is quite an ample one. The older boy never

110

The Freshman’s Time and Money

has any money, is usually in debt, and never seems
to be able to meet any unexpected financial obliga¬
tion. The younger seems to go to as many social
affairs as his brother, has as many and as expen¬
sive clothes, always meets his financial obligations
as soon as they are presented to him, and always
has money in the bank. The only difference that
I can discover between them is a temperamental
one. The older man has no system as the younger
has, never plans for the future, spends a dollar
whenever he has one in his pocket, and constantly
cherishes the hope that an allowance which has
up to the present time proved wholly inadequate to
his needs will grow into more gratifying propor¬
tions next month. He never learns by experience,
never gives up hope that a wind fall will drop at
his feet, that a rich uncle will die and leave him a
fortune, or that in some way he will stumble out of
his financial difficulties. However much or little
the student spends it should be a definite sum each
month, and it should come to him regularly on a
definite day of the month.

“Father complains that I spend too much,” a
freshman said to me not long ago, “but the fact
is I don’t know how much I do spend. He sends
me a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars and
when that is gone I ask for more. It is a kind
of a game now to see how much I can get. If he’d

111

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

give me a definite allowance each month and tell
me I had to live within that, I should do it, and
take pride in the accomplishment even if the
amount were much less than I now spend. I have
nothing on which to plan now.” The fellow who
leaves college and gets a job will usually have to
live on a definite monthly salary; he might much
better learn to do the trick while he is in college.

The freshman should begin at once to do busi¬
ness in a business-like way. He should open a
checking account at some reliable bank and should
pay his bills regularly by check. He should car¬
ry his check book with him always, and should
number his checks consecutively. One of the
greatest difficulties which I have to encounter is
with the college fellow who writes checks without
having his regular book with him and who then
forgets to make the entry when he gets back to
his check book. The result is an overdrawn ac¬
count and a blot on the man’s credit.

College students are so notoriously careless in
keeping their bank balances and yet are ultimately
so sure to pay up that merchants and even banks
in a college town have grown more lenient with
such derelicts than is wise. Students often learn
to count on this leniency and purposely overdraw
their accounts and so make a small enforced loan
until such time as their next allowance shall arrive.

112

The Freshm an s Time and Money

Merchants and bankers have often told me that
before a vacation, especially, when students are
going home scores of “phoney” checks are turned
in, the student arguing that he may be back and
his depleted account replenished before the over¬
draft is discovered. I could write a list of stu¬
dents now who may be regularly counted upon to
do this sort of thing. The excuses they offer
when called to account for their dishonesty, for
such a practice is nothing less than dishonest, is
that they made an error in calculation, or that
they have done business enough with the bank to
entitle them to a little favor once in a while.
One man told a merchant of my acqaintanec not
long ago that he had to have the money somehow,
and that writing a check seemed the easiest way
to that end. The freshman who starts out doing
business in this irregular way will sooner or later
find himself in disrepute if not in jail, and he will
never have any money.

The freshman should use his money with an eye
to the future. I have in mind now a young fellow
whose monthly allowance comes regularly on the
first of the month. Such of it as is not already
disposed of through bills due and debts contracted
melts in his hands like snow before an April sun.
He does not give a thought to the future or a sigh
for the past; he thinks only of the present, and

113

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

his money is usually gone and he is comfortably
broke before the end of the first week of the month.
He lives a hand to mouth existence from one month
to another and is convinced that his allowance,
which is in reality a much more generous one than
that of most of his companions, is wholly inade¬
quate to his needs. Like all men of his class, while
he is engaged in the rapid disposal of his funds,
his studies are going to the bad, for no man can
spend money and study to advantage at the same
time. Either one takes a mans’ best efforts to
accomplish creditably.

As I have frequently found that a student is
helped in the disposal of his time by keeping for a
few days an actual record of just how the twenty-
four hours of the day are spent, so too I am sure
that, if for nothing more than his own personal
benefit, he will find much that is suggestive and
helpful in keeping an accurate expense account.
I remember very well what a shock it was to me
when I first began to live on a salary to find upon
casting up my accounts at the end of the month
what a disproportionate percentage of it was
going for things that were useless in themselves
and that gave me little real pleasure. Even though
a boy’s parents do not require him to keep an
expense account, he will find an education in the
practice just for himself.

114

The Freshman's Time and Money

Beyond a certain point, the amount of money
which a young fellow has to spend in college does
not add to his pleasure, to his popularity, nor to
his success in any way. The man is never really
popular who is courted merely because he has
money, and the pleasure that comes from spending
money is always greater when it must be planned
for, when it comes as the result of a little sacrifice.
If we could go to a formal party every night or
see a circus every day the interest in these forms
of relaxation would soon wane. We often give our¬
selves more pleasure by having a little less. A man
ought to plan not to spend quite all the money
that he has. The wise man, even if he be only a
freshman, should keep an eye out for the unex¬
pected, should be prepared for the emergency,
should save a little for the rainy day which is quite
as likely to come in college life as in any other with
which I am acquainted. Nothing gave me more
satisfaction than to find recently that a young
boy with whom I am associated had saved enough
out of his regular allowance to buy for himself an
article of clothing which he very much wanted but
which his guardian did not quite feel like advanc-*
ing the money for. It is never pleasant to meet
a pretty girl near an ice cream refectory and find
that you are broke or to come upon a group of
fellows going to a good show and realize that your

115

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

pocketbook is empty and the first of the month a
week off.

Nor is it a good plan to borrow. The easy
borrower has a distressingly poor memory of his
obligations, never pa}7s when he says he will, and
seldom ever pays, and so falls into bad repute with
his friends. There are not many bad habits which
a freshman can learn that are worse than the habit
of borrowing money, or of going into debt for
something that is not absolutely necessary. Bor¬
rowing money to be paid out of your next month’s
allowance is like cutting one class to study for
another.

No student should spend more than the family
at home can afford. I have known too many cases
of cruel sacrifice at home, when the- boy at college
was having a good time, wasting his opportunities,
and spending lavishly money that was coming only
through the greatest economy of the older mem¬
bers of the family. The freshman at college ought
not to be unwilling to make his share of the sacr i¬
fice.

Every fraternity that I have known has its new
men, and its old unfortunately, who, being a little
short of money are quite willing that the fraternity
should carry them. “We hope Granger will not be
dropped from college,” a fraternity man said with
reference to an uncertain brother. “He owes us

116

The Freshman's Time and Money

a lot, and we want to get it out of him before he
has to go.” There was no regret expressed at the
boy’s going except the possible financial regret,
and there seldom is much in such cases. No self-
respecting man, freshman or upperclassman, will
allow himself to be carried in this way. He will so
plan his expenditures that such money as is at his
disposal will be sufficient to meet his obligations.
Hundreds of freshmen whom I know who can re¬
ceive from home only a moderate amount of money,
by some sort of outside work are able to meet the
added expenditures which they want to make. I
know any number of such men who by the exercise
of one talent or another pay easily and willingly
for their own pleasures and enjoy them more fully
for so doing.

I have always had the greatest respect for the
student who by his own efforts pays his way
through college, but I have come to feel also that
the young fellow who spends wisely and conserva¬
tively the money which is sent him from home is,
entitled to almost as much credit as the man who
makes his own way.

117

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

THE HOUSE PARTY

There are some institutions, I know, which will
not stand for the fraternity house party. Some¬
times there is a rule against it ; sometimes it is an
unwritten unexpressed law; but whether the pro¬
hibition is down in the book of undergraduate rules
or not, there is no getting by with this particular
form of social function. The argument is that the
house party overemphasizes social life, that there
is moral danger in it, that it takes most of the
undergraduate’s time for an indefinite period prior
to the function in making preparation for it, that
it takes all of his time and more than all of his
money during its progress, and that it leaves him
an intellectual and financial wreck at its close. I
could bring illustrations to prove that all of these
alleged evils have more than a mere foundation of
truth. I know one organization that had a house
party some years ago, that was written up in all
the city papers and that is still the talk of the
simple country community in which our institu¬
tion is situated; the chapter enjoyed the advertis¬
ing that it got from this function, but it is still
struggling to pay the bills, that were incurred
in giving it.

Besides all this, there are delicate problems of

118

The House Party

social conventionalities that frequently arise, and
that require skill in solution ; there are the wounded
feelings of the local girls, caused by the presence of
too many “imports,” to be considered. In fact
there are a considerable number of dangerous rocks
to be avoided, so that I think, very wisely at times,
a good many colleges, as I have said, do not permit
the fraternities to give house parties. We shall,
possibly, ere long come to this decision ourselves,
but at present we have not done so.

Every year in my own fraternity, when on
occasion I drop in on the boys, I hear the rumbling
of this discussion as to whether or not the annual
formal dance shall this year be in connection with
a house party. The older fellows whose incomes
are not unlimited and whose memories of the last
function of this sort given by the chapter are still
fresh, recall the fact that we are as yet scarcely
free from the incubus of debt which was left us as
a heritage by those who staged the last show of
this sort, and that it would be a matter of wisdom
and sound judgment to move with a little social
conservatism. “We simply can’t afford it,” they
say and gloomingly recall the past and the weeks of
“oleo” and beans that the commissary department
forced upon them in order to cut down expenses
and save something to meet the extra bills that
seemed to rain in for months after the party was

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over. They allege that such a party always costs
twice as much as, when it is being planned, any one
imagines it will cost.

Then the mathematical geniuses who are quick
at figures and able to prove anything when they
get busy, take the floor and show that it is really
economy to give the house party. They demon¬
strate the fact that with the girls in the house
there is neither the opportunity nor the necessity
for the fellows to spend money that there is when
just a formal dance is held. The facts are pre¬
sented so alluringly, and the details are shown so
convincingly, that the freshmen, innocent of this
sort of guile and eager for the excitement of things
new, believe the sophistry and are ready at once
to vote for the party. They need only the argu¬
ment of the socially ambitious to the effect that
this is the one and only way to put ourselves right
before the girls and to give us a center position
upon the local social map, to make them, as the
girls say, really crazy for it. A vote of this sort
is often very much like a Sunday school election —
the children are sure to vote for anybody or any
thing that is put up.

They had had some warm discussions this year, I
am quite convinced, before I was called in to give
my opinion and to make suggestions. The argu¬
ments pro and con were well presented, for there

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The House Party

are few matters which give better training in
extempore speaking and which more completely
perfect the brothers in oral debate than the pro¬
posal to give a house party. The advocates of the
scheme showed how simple it all was, how little it
would cost, and how easily the expenses could be
kept down if the fellows would do the work. They
were willing for any personal sacrifice — to sleep in
the hay loft or the bath tub or to camp out in tents
on the front lawn.

I arrived on the scene not completely carried
away with enthusiasm over the scheme, for I have
been through a good many house parties, and I am,
besides, the treasurer of the corporation, and I
remember with what difficulty and reluctance the
house rent comes in following these social de¬
bauches. I know, too, how the class attendance
deteriorates and how the studies suffer. After I
heard the discussion, however, I realized that all
other plans were chimerical; this was the only
simple one, the only sensible one, the only one that
was really economical and that would win for us
the social prestige to which we were entitled. They
assured me that “Cap” had figured it all out, that
“Cap” was a mathematician, and that he knew
that one dollar would not pay a bill for five ; so I
was won over.

The time for the party was set and the prepara-

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tions began. They persuaded me at the outset as
treasurer of the corporation to have the house
painted — it would look so much better and besides
it was needing a new coat of paint pretty badly.
The painting of course necessitated the fixing of
the gutters, the pointing of the walls, and the
repairing of the roof, until I was somewhat in the
position of the woman who, having yielded to the
temptation of buying new curtains for the parlor
ended up finally by being compelled, in order to
make things harmonize, entirely to refurnish the
house. I was not at all sorry, however, for I
realize that it is poor business policy not to keep
the house in excellent repair, and my painting the
exterior of the house stimulated the fellows within.
They organized a kalsomining corps and retinted
all the rooms from the basement to the dormitory ;
those artistically inclined mixed the colors, and the
skilled laborers applied them. All the wood work
was varnished or rubbed with oil, the rugs were
cleaned, new curtains were bought, and the beds
were thoroughly overhauled and put into shape.
The house had not had such a cleaning since the
last house party. Perhaps the greatest accom¬
plishment was the straightening up of the closets.
The fellows found things crammed into the remot¬
est corners of those closets that they could not
remember that they had ever possessed. They

122

The House Party

unearthed personal effects that had been lost for
years — textbooks, notebooks, sweaters, skates,
ball bats, and other athletic supplies sufficient to
stock a gym store. They even went so far in their
reforms as to clean up the kitchen and the back
yard. I am sure the cook had a shock when she
saw the kitchen range shining and the kitchen
utensils in mathematical order. But if nothing
else had been accomplished, the cleaning of the
closets would (as a sanitary measure) have been
worth all the time and money that the house party
cost.

The girls invited to the party were to arrive
Thursday noon. Wednesday evening I called at
the house to see how things were going and to offer
a little encouragement. It was really a sad sight
that met my gaze. The house was still in pretty
dire confusion. They had torn everything out of
its hiding place, had piled it in the middle of the
floor, and, tired and cross, they were sitting around
looking at the chaotic heap. If I had not seen
house parties before, I should have been sure that
no order would ever be evolved out of the mix-up,
but I had faith that they would burn what they
could not hide or get into some sort of respectable
shape.

Before going home I visited the hall which was
being decorated for the formal dance. The room

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The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

was filled with tired or active or irritated brothers
doing what they could to carry out the elaborate
plan for internal decoration of the room (infernal
decoration one of the fellows said it might more
appropriately be called) which had been prepared
by one of the artistically inclined brothers. The
windows, some of which opened upon a blank
dormitory wall, were to be filled with elaborately
designed panels in black and white of tall cypress
trees behind which a brilliant full moon was rising.
There was a dado of black and white about the
walls, there was a huge screen of black and white
to conceal the gallery, and huge lanterns hung
from the ceiling and great lamps stood on the
floor all designed to represent the shadowy grove
of cypress trees and the brilliant full moon rising
behind them. Of course any one not a novice
knows very well that to get these much desired
effects requires a considerable amount of wielding
of the hammer and the saw and the paint brush,
and running of electric wires and chewing of the
rag, and consequent weariness of the flesh. When
I arrived they were just at the stage where every¬
thing is confusion and nothing seems to be coming
out right. The whole lot seemed exhausted and
disgusted, and I am sure if at that moment a vote
could have been taken on the advisability of giving
a house party, there would have been no voice to

124

The House Party

champion the enterprise. It all reminded me of
the last rehearsal of an amateur play when every
one loses his temper and forgets his lines. It is
one of the sure indications of a successful outcome
of the performance. I knew for certain when I
saw how wretchedly things seemed to be going that
the result would be perfect.

I did not get to the party for an unfortunate
and an unexpected telegram took me out of town on
Thursday morning, and I did not get back to the
house until Sunday evening. The girls had come
and gone again, and the fellows were sitting around
the fireplace talking it over, physically wrung out,
but girding up their mental loins for the repair of
their disorganized and wrecked studies. Every¬
thing had turned out all right. There had been
no social blunders, no hitches in anything, nothing
to regret. The girls had been charming, all of
them, and pleased and complimentary beyond
expression. They had thought the house delight¬
ful and had left money enough to buy a new rug to
replace the worn one in the library, which had really
been the one thing that had kept the furnishings of
the place from seeming perfect. There was much
self-congratulation and self-satisfaction on the
part of every one, and much joy over the fact that
it was all over and every one was alive. They
had had a little time to take account of expenses,

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The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

and of course even under “Cap’s” careful manage¬
ment, the party had cost about twice what they
had planned. They were like the man, however,
who said that he did not get off as cheaply as he
had thought he would, and he did not think he
would. It had cost more than they thought it
would, and each one of them had always thought
it would, so they had been prepared for the worst
and were satisfied. They had established their
social prestige for a year or two, they had proved
their ability to put on a really high class social
function, and they were ready to have a good sleep
and get back to the real work of college.

Seriously, I have never known an organization
to give a house party that did not ultimately cost
nearly twice as much, when all the bills were paid
and the actual overheard expenses added on, as it
was scheduled to cost. It is difficult to use judg¬
ment and to practice economy when one is enter¬
taining a pretty girl. When we plan we are con¬
servative; when we are in the midst of expendi¬
tures and the actual money is not going out, we
are far less likely to hold ourselves down. There
are so many unexpected things to be done, so many
desirable ones, so much acting upon the impulse
that the bills rapidily mount up. My experience
has been that it is much easier in theory to keep
down the bills than it is in practice. Any frater-

126

The House Party

nity that is going to give a house party ought to
be prepared to meet expenditures twice as great
as the committee planning the party say will be
necessary, and it is not a bad thing to have the
money in the till before the party is given. Other¬
wise it is like paying a security debt or a bill for
something that has been long ago worn out.

It is usually an extravagant form of entertain¬
ment. The man who argues that it is cheap and
can be done for little more than the ordinary
formal party is either ignorant or an intentional
deceiver. It is a form of social entertainment that
has got more fraternities hopelessly into debt than
any other that I know. Any organization which
goes into it should not do so without seriously
counting the cost, and the cost is frequently more
than young fellows of modest means can afford.
One’s social standing is not dependent upon such a
function. In point of fact most of the young
women invited to house parties come from out of
town and their entertainment adds little or nothing
to the social prestige of the fraternity. Local
people get in very slightly on these things; the
social reputation which the fraternity develops is
usually one of extravagance. The cost of the
party, high as it sometimes is, is exaggerated by the
neighbors, deplored by the faculty, and protested
against by the home folks many of whom are

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The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

unused to such things. The house party is the
most difficult form of fraternity social dissipation
to explain to the outsider; from his point of view it
is little less than an orgy. It is a form of pleasure
that is undoubtedly hard on a man’s studies. The
theoretical time taken up by the party seldom ex¬
ceeds three days, but no house party was ever given
that did not consume two weeks of actual time in
discussion and preparation and participation and
at least a week after it was over in getting back to a
normal state of mind and emotion. A boy called
me up while I have been writing this paper to ask
my advice concerning his work. “What is the
trouble?” I asked. “I simply can’t get down to
work since the house party,” he replied. “We had
so much pleasure and excitement that I cannot get
it out of my mind.” To a middle-aged, stolid
parent or professor this may all seem like foolish¬
ness, but it is quite a regular and normal view¬
point for the young undergraduate.

I have never seen such a function where the pro¬
gram was not too congested. At the outset the
fellows mean to be conservative, to give themselves
a little time to think, to give their guests a few
minutes to rest; but by the time the preparations
have been fully completed the different events have
been planned so closely to follow one another that
there is little opportunity to eat and none at all

128

The House Party

to sleep. The girls are rushed from one event to
another until by the time things break up and they
are ready to leave for home they look as jaded
and haggard as a colony of convalescents. If I
were giving advice to a committee planning the
program for a house party, I should say plan to
allow the girls twelve hours a day for sleeping
and putting on their pretty clothes, and they will
bless you for your thoughtfulness and not go home
the physical wrecks that they usually are.

The house party has more possibilities for ris¬
que situations than any other social function the
fraternity can give. There is social danger in it,
if it is not conventionally managed and carefully
chaperoned, as many a fraternity has learned to its
sorrow when it was too late.

The extravagance of the fraternity almost
always leads to emulation on the part of another.
“You should have seen the Delt house,” one man
whom I was advising to be conservative said to me.
“They must have spent a heap of money. We are
to have some of the same girls at our dance, and
how do you suppose we should feel if our party
seemed cheap?” There is no logic that can meet
an argument of this sort. If you give a party, the
undergraduate thinks, it must be a little better
than the best, whether you have money to stand
for it or not.

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The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

There are some advantages. If it is done well,
it requires generalship, organization, and thought.
It gives social training and develops social experi¬
ence as very few other functions can. It takes no
little finesse for a group of young fellows success¬
fully to carry through a one day party, but when
the time grows into three or four the strain and
obligation are more than proportionately in¬
creased. Sometimes I have felt that this effort
was worth while, especially if the success of the
undertaking were not made to depend wholly upon
the expenditure of money, but rather upon a
thoughtfully worked out plan, in the carrying out
of which every man in the chapter did his part.
If the fellows could only realize it, there is so much
more to be gained in effect by using their heads
than by spending money. Anyone can spend
mohey if he has it or can get it, but it takes a good
man to plan an original and effective function that
can be carried out with the expenditure of a moder¬
ate amount of money. Some of the most delight¬
ful parties, however, that I have ever attended have
cost the least in the expenditure of actual money.
There are so many opportunities to show good
taste, and refinement, and thoughtfulness and
breeding that if the fellows get by with it, they
have had an experience worth while. There are
many dangers to avoid — dangers of overdoing

130

so

The House Party

the attentions paid to the guests, of wearing them
out by long programs and all night performances,
and by never giving them a chance to rest or to be
alone or to think over what they are doing, of
careless and unconventional manners that it gives
one a chance at moderation and self-restraint.
It is a severe test of a man’s ability to do two
things well at once — to keep up his college work
and not neglect his guests.

Leaving out of account entirely what it may
do to the undergraduate’s studies or social stand¬
ing or pocketbook, the house party is unques¬
tionably a good thing for the house. I have
thought sometimes that our corporation which
rents the house to the active chapter might well
afford for the good of the property to contribute
something every three or four years toward defray¬
ing the expenses of a house party or might give
a generous rebate on the rent every time one is
given, for there is such a cleaning and scrubbing
and polishing, such a painting and kalsomining
and varnishing, such a repairing and furbishing,
and beautifying within and without as gets the
house in condition, and keeps it from running
down at the heel, and as makes it perennially look¬
ing fresh and new. It is for this reason, perhaps,
that when I am asked to give advice about a house
party, I view the project with less serious objec-

131

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

tion than I otherwise might, for though I know
the dangers and the expense, I also appreciate
the compensations. It may not bring us social
prestige, and it may lower our scholastic average,
but it is thoroughly good for the house.

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Photo Plays and Vaudeville

PHOTO PLAYS AND VAUDEVILLE

There are many influences in and about college
which in one way or another affect undergraduate
life and undergraduate morals and scholarship.
Training, environment, tradition, example, extra¬
curriculum activities, all play a part, but in these
modern times I believe that at least so far as the
colleges which are situated in small cities or
country towns are concerned, there are few influ¬
ences which have done more to discourage and
vitiate scholarship and to soften character than
cheap photo plays and vaudeville. The effect is
a subtle one. The habit of patronizing these per¬
formances grows on one imperceptibly but surely.

I do not wish to minimize the good effects of
these two classes of amusements. I have only
recently heard much commendation of them from
people who ought to know what they are talking
about. I have no doubt but that moving pictures
have their place in education and that they will
come to have a wider and a more general use. One
can, without doubt, gain admirable effects by the
use of pictures which could be obtained in no other
way. These points have been discussed and are
being discussed by people whose education and
whose experience fit them far better than I am

133

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

fitted to discuss these matters. No doubt these
modern and cheap methods of presenting dramatic
compositions to the public have opened up new
fields of amusement to classes of people who could
not previously afford them.

Working people who live in unattractive houses,
who are busy all day, and whose evenings are free
to spend them as they please, should have amuse¬
ment, and, if they find it at all, they must get it
from an inexpensive source. For them photo
plays furnish a means of recreation and some little
education, perhaps, and vaudeville adds a touch
of humor and romance which they are quite to be
excused if they do not resist. With them I have
no fault to find. The college student is in a some¬
what different class. His evenings may with pro¬
priety and profit be spent in study; he can not
afford, if he would be more than commonplace, to
spend them regularly in cheap moving picture and
vaudeville theatres. Moreover, we have a right
to expect that his tastes be somewhat higher than
those of the average man. Anyone who attends
these plays in a college town or who simply watches
the crowds as they pour out of the play houses,
however, may well be astonished at the numbers of
students who regularly attend. Even mature
students fall into the habit. Only a short time
ago I had reason to inquire into the daily life of

134

Photo Plays and Vaudeville

a graduate student whose work was coming along
badly. He had been reported ill, and I inter¬
rogated one of his fraternity brothers as to the
condition of health of the supposed invalid. “I
don’t think he is dangerously sick,” the man
replied, “for he hasn’t missed going to a picture
show any day that I remember.” I was quite sure
I was getting the truth, for the undergraduate
who made the statement, so far as I could learn,
had missed none himself.

There is every reason, however, why boys should
come to college with the cheap show habit, or at
least there is every reason why those who come
from communities outside of the big cities should
do so. They are trained to it at home. With
four performances a day and half rates to all those
who attend the graded schools and the high schools,
there is a strong tendency for all such children to
develop early a decided picture show or vaudeville
taste. It is an allurement which they can not resist.
I know boys in the graded schools and in the high
schools wTho go to these shows practically every day
or twice a day, and who are under the spell of the
habit as one might be enslaved by a narcotic. No
wonder, then, when these boys enter college they
should continue the practice and should consider
Charlie Chaplin’s as the highest type of humor.

The temptation is like the temptation of ciga-

135

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

rettes — the plays are cheap and easy of access.

In the end, however, the cost piles up higher than
most boys will admit unless they keep a daily
expense account, for very often there is the street¬
car fare going and coming and soft drinks before
starting home. Next to a student opera, there is
no greater time waster than these same plays. If
one goes in the day time the whole afternoon is
wasted; if one goes at night the evening is gone,
for if in the evening one selects the first show it is
past ten before he can settle down to any real
work, and if he goes to the second it is midnight
before he can get himself into anything like a
studious frame of mind, and then he is too sleepy
to do anything and decides to get up early the next
morning and do his studying. There is no need ,
to tell anyone who has ever been to college that
the studying is not done at all.

The fraternity freshman perhaps more than
freshmen in general is started off on a congested
menu of picture plays and vaudeville. It is a daily
part of the routine of rushing that after a couple
of hours of rag time on the piano following dinner
everyone starts for the “Princess” or the
“Orpheum” or the “Park” or whatever the name
of the particular show house may be. Started out
in this way the freshman comes naturally to look
upon vaudeville if not as a regular and required

136

Photo Plays and Vaudeville

part of the college curriculum, at least as a very
worthy adjunct to it. I think I did not visit a
fraternity house during the rushing season last fall
without finding that at one time or another dur¬
ing the evening most of the active chapter and
all of the prospective pledges formed themselves
into a party and raced off to a cheap show of some
sort. What else could they do, they asked. It is
because of this early start with vaudeville and
the “movies” that the fraternity undergraduate
is more addicted to these time and money wasters
than are other college students.

Even after the rushing season was over when I
have been at one or another of the houses for
dinner, or when previous to show time I have been
down town on the car, I could see crowds of under¬
graduates starting out for the “Orpheum.” “Any¬
one going to the show?” is as familiar a cry at a
fraternity or rooming house almost every evening
as “rags and old iron” on a city street. Down
town nearly every afternoon and evening when
photo-play houses and vaudeville theatres dis¬
gorge, the streets are filled with undergraduates.
One who gives any attention to it also is impressed
with the fact that it is often the same undergradu¬
ates whom one can see in these show places every
day.

I was speaking only a few days ago with a young

137

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

fellow who for many months played the piano in
one of the picture houses for all four performances
each day, and he was saying that he used to break
the monotony of his every day routine by looking
for familiar faces in the crowd which gathered
for each performance. He was constantly im¬
pressed, he said, with the frequency with which he
could pick out the faces of the same under¬
graduates in the same places. How they could
afford the time was more than he could see. As
I have had a chance at the end of the semester to
glance at their scholastic records, I was convinced
that they could not afford to do it.

It is primarily as a time waster that I have
objected to this variety of amusement, but the
character of the shows themselves might well be
objected to. Even viewed purely as recreation
they do not rank high. The jokes and the pictures
are often coarse, the comedy is often wretchedly
low, and there is almost inevitably mixed up in
each bill constantly recurring and objectionable
sex complications. I do not myself very often
attend these plays but get my impressions from
what I hear the fellows say who are regular
patrons of the show houses. During the last few
weeks, however, I have seen two of what were adver¬
tised as the better class of picture plays. The
leading role in each case was taken by a well-known

138

Photo Plays and Vaudeville

actress, and I expected to see an excellent play.
The setting of both was beautiful and the acting
good, but in each play the heroine after a fierce
hand-to-hand struggle with the heavy villain barely
escaped public rape upon the stage.

The effect of such scenes upon growing boys
and young men can not at best be very wholesome.
The mother of one of our freshmen said to me only
a few days ago that in company with her son she
recently attended one of the so-called better class
plays of this sort. “If these are the best,” she said,
“I shudder at the thought of what the worst is, for
the whole thing was so vulgarly suggestive and so
common that I wondered how boys of any refine¬
ment could sit through such a performance.” And,
sad to relate, the boys do not make an effort to
choose the best, but the raciest.

The actual and ultimate effect upon the morals
of those who frequent these plays is bad, but,
perhaps, is not so great as one might at first think.
A few, no doubt, fall under the baneful influences
of the vulgar suggestions which are bandied about.
We hear more often than we would wish of the
irregular relations which are carried on or which
are attempted to be carried on between under¬
graduates and the performers in the vaudeville
cast, but these experiences are relatively infre¬
quent, I am sure. The large influence upon

139

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

character comes from the decreased sensitiveness
of those who form the play going habit, the thick¬
ening, as it were, of the moral skin. Their ideals
are lowered; they are coarsened and made more
common by the experience. Even the thickest-skin¬
ned boy could scarcely help but have his point of
view changed by a constant contact with such re¬
presentations of life. It seems to me, also, that the
forces of evil which are present in every town, or
at least in every one in which I have lived, recognize
the fact that vaudeville and coarse picture shows
help to prepare those who frequent them for lower
things, for, with us at least, these forces have
gradually begun to gather near, so that the fellows
making their exit from the vaudeville and picture
shows may have an easier and more direct back¬
door entrance to the houses where intoxicants and
evil women are to be found. How widely this
influence extends, I can only guess; and though I
cannot believe that it is far reaching, it must at
least be taken into account and reckoned with.

The effect of these dramatic influences on a
young fellow’s studies is not infrequently dis¬
astrous. The habit of attendance once begun
grows. Each new bill as it is advertised must be
discussed and analyzed, and seen. The bill at the
vaudeville theatres and the plays that are being
shown at the “movies” furnish a regular and time-

140

Photo Plays and Vaudeville

worn topic of conversation wherever the under¬
graduate loafers gather. It is like the talk about
automobiles in a country town. The sum total of
energy expended upon the various vaudeville bills
that appear weekly in the average town if turned
into intellectual directions would revolutionize
scientific discoveries, and if converted into physi¬
cal force might soon have ended the recent Euro¬
pean war. Unless they have had their attention
drawn specifically to this matter I am sure that few
undergraduates realize how much of their time
and thought are given to these trifling histrionic
matters. The boy who comes under the spell of
such an influence can with difficulty resist when
the invitation comes to see the show; he finds it
difficult or impossible to spend an evening or an
afternoon in study, and as for reading a book for
pleasure at one sitting as we used to do when I was
a boy, that is unthinkable. He becomes restless,
he lacks concentration, if he studies an hour and
a half he is in such a state of mind and body that
he grows desperate for the relaxation of the pic¬
ture show. The call comes, and his studies are for¬
gotten and his scholarship not strengthened.

With us the interest in vaudeville and moving
pictures has gone so far that very few student
gatherings are thought to show the finishing touch
of refinement unless there is introduced some

141

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

“cabaret stuff” or a few moving pictures. If a
class party is planned in the armory some bright
youth with an original mind at once suggests that
the management brings over an act from the local
vaudeville theatre to entertain the guests while
they are eating. Class smokers and house dances
and formal parties are not infrequently given a
touch of spice by introducing, when interest wanes,
a few snappy stunts from the local vaudeville
stage or a reel of two of moving pictures. We are
going vaudeville mad it seems to me and are grow¬
ing to think only in moving pictures. The Uni¬
versity of Illinois has recently tried in some small
measure to inhibit this tendency by stipulating in
a number of instances when a request for a student
gathering or a class party is granted that such
entertainment as might be furnished should come
from the members of the class or organization
giving the function and not from the local vaude¬
ville stage.

“But what can a fellow do?” an undergraduate
interrogated not long ago when I protested against
this debauchery in vaudeville. “One must have
some recreation; he can’t study all the time.” I
grant this willingly; but there are good plays
occasionally coming to town, and though they
cost more than the commonplace and often vulgar
stuff which is daily presented to the public, it is

142

Photo Plays and Vaudeville

better in the long run to see a few good plays
than to sit through all the worthless exhibitions
which appear uninterruptedly throughout the four
years of an undergraduate course. I can conceive
of a young fellow seeing a few of the low comedies
which for the most part hold the weekly boards
of our vaudeville and photo-play theatres merely
to satisfy his curiosity, but how an educated,
refined man can develop a taste for such things,
which can be satisfied only by daily indulgence, is
to me more difficult to understand. But there are
other sources of relaxation and amusement than
comedy open to undergraduates. Men can go into
athletic sports of which we are developing a con¬
stantly greater variety. No man is now so fat or
thin or short or tall or light or heavy but that he
can find some form of athletic activity to which he
is adapted and in which, if he has persistence and
develops interest, he may excel. This sort of
recreation has the advantage over vaudeville in
that, if it is not carried to excess, it really does
recreate and so tend better to prepare the partici¬
pant for the real work of college — that is, the
pursuit of his studies.

The student is not unknown, though I am forced
to admit that he is rare, who has found recreation
in reading an interesting book. Nor do I mean
by this the latest romantic novel, though some

143

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

undergraduates do once in a while read such a
book; I mean that the student who has been
rightly trained, who has been made to like books
as every student should, will find pleasure and
recreation and delight in spending an evening with
such old stand-bys as Dickens, and Thackeray, and
Stevenson, and George Eliot. There is more
romance and real life in an hour or two with one
of these authors than in a whole cycle of the
ordinary cheap photo-play and vaudeville. I was
surprised though pleased not long ago to have
a junior engineer tell me that he always kept an
interesting book at hand to read when he was tired
or had a little leisure. He has covered a range of
literature from Arnold Bennett to Robert Burns
and has developed a habit which will bring him
pleasure and profit as long as he lives. Our college
daily mentioned not long ago the case of a man
who when wishing to withdraw regularly from col¬
lege was directed to take his withdrawal permit
to the library to have the official in charge of the
loan desk certify that all books which he had
drawn out had been properly returned. The
student was confused for a moment, and then
recovering himself said with a gleam of something
akin to intelligence, “Oh, yes, that’s the building
across from the Arcade, isn’t it?” He knew the

144

Photo Plays and Vaudeville

bench where the loafers gather, but he did not know
where the books are kept.

I am not so old fashioned nor so far removed
from youth as to expect or desire that young
people in college will give up these dramatic
delights of which I have been speaking. All I wish
to show is that they are becoming too absorbing,
that they are exercising too great a domination
over the lives of undergraduates. There are other
relaxations and recreations which will better pre¬
pare students for their work and which are in them¬
selves more helpful and more fully recreating.
Vaudeville and photo-plays as they are in the
great majority of cases presented today are sug¬
gestive of unhealthy relationships ; they are often
coarse, vulgar, and must tend to weaken morals
and to lower ideals. Those undergraduates who
make a habit of attending, waste time recklessly,
squander more money than they think, and injure
the real work for which they come to college. Few
people whom I have seen come away from these
shows happier, cleaner minded, or in any way
better prepared to take up their daily work. Their
scholarship and their ideals would be strengthened,
I believe, if they saw fewer of such performances.
The danger to the fraternity man is perhaps
greater than to other men because his social rela¬
tionships are closer, it is easier for him to find

145

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

companionship, to pick up someone whom he likes
who has the inclination and who thinks he has time
to go to these plays. Recognizing the danger he
should take the warning.

hb

146

The Chapter Letter

THE CHAPTER LETTER

“We have the best bunch of freshmen this year
we have ever had and the best bunch in college,”
an alumnus of one of our leading fraternities said
to me early in the autumn.

“What do you think of Klein?” I ask( with a
desire to show interest and a willingness reveal
the fact that I knew some of his men.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I have nor seen any
of them; but I read about them in the chapter
letter in our quarterly.”

A considerable number of fraternity publica¬
tions come to my table during the year through
the courtesy of editors and fraternity men with
whom I am acquainted, and as I look them through
there is no department of these journals which
awakens in me more interest or gives me more
pleasure than that one devoted to the letters from
the various chapters of the fraternity. I do not
think that the most unsophisticated ever believes
what he reads in a chapter letter. It contains a
variety of fiction which is unique. The facts are
often drawm from the imagination, the pathos is
generally quite ingenuous, and the humor is more
often than otherwise entirely unconscious and
unintentional. The following, quoted from a

147

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

southern correspondent to one of the journals, and
breathing of soft music and palm trees, has the
tender sentimental touch:

“Haying given an unusual amount of smokers
and dances, we drew the scholastic year to a
glorious close with our annual Commencement Ban¬
quet. Were I to attempt to recount in detail all
the pleasure and glory given to Alpha that night
I would consume more than our space. Let it
suffice to say that there were more than forty
seated ‘round our festive board’ including our¬
selves and our ladies. The banquet hall was deco¬
rated with more than a hundred college pennants,
Florida palms, and pitcher plants. Soft music
drifted from behind the palms while we slowly, and
with dignity, sacrificed eighteen delightful courses.
Ever and anon the laughter of the girls and the
‘speel’ of the boys were silenced by the thundering
oratory of the toastmaster and his toasters. So
much for the banquet.”

I recall that 0. Henry has one of his characters
say with reference to a bibulous young fellow who
had kissed a plain-featured waitress and who after¬
wards apologized for his rudeness, “He wasn’t no
gentleman, or he’d never have apologized,” which
suggests to me that no one but a southerner ever
takes a “lady” to his annual dance.

I have never gone into the history of these

148

The Chapter Letter

letters which are almost universally at present a
part of fraternity journals, but I have no doubt
that if it were possible to do so it would be found
that the practice of requiring them grew up from
a desire on the part of officers and members to
become better acquainted with the entire member¬
ship of the organization, to know something of the
personal lives of the individuals composing each
chapter, and to bind the different chapters more
closely together. It is no doubt something of the
same purpose expressed in a broader way, perhaps,
that the members of a family widely separated
now have who write regularly to each other of the
personal happenings in their own lives, or that
personal friends have who through regular corre¬
spondence attempt to keep the fires of friendship
brightly burning.

In the early history of Greek-letter fraternities
there were few chapters of each organization, and
these few were usually close together. It was pos¬
sible for a wide-awake man in those da vs to know
personally a large percentage of the men who made
up the undergraduate ranks of his organization
and through the quarterly letters to know some¬
thing about every other man whom he did not
know personally. As the fraternity roll was
increased and the interests of the fraternity
widened the need of something to bind the various

149

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

chapters together, to strengthen unity, and to
bring the undergraduates more fully into personal
acquaintance with each other was more and more
felt, and the regular chapter letter was made a
requirement under penalty of a fine. There have
been many attempts made in committees, and con¬
ferences, and congresses to repeal this requirement,
but they have always been unsuccessful, as I sus¬
pect they are likely to continue to be. The letters
do a work in the fraternity which I think is worth
doing, and though I feel strongly that they do not
accomplish it as well as it could be done or as well
as it should be done, I should be sorry to have the
custom discontinued.

I have never been a very willing correspondent,
and having been called upon to write many and
various sorts of letters, I can sincerely sympathize
with the man who has laid upon him the unsolicited
task of writing letters to an editor whom he never
saw, at a time when he would much rather do
something else, and upon a subject in which he is
likely to find little personal interest. It is a task
which in the fraternity is too frequently, I am
sure, laid upon one of the younger members of
the chapter, generally a sophomore if my reading
of these letters is correct. Such a task might
very much better be undertaken by an older man
who has had more experience, who knows more of

150

The Chapter Letter

the history and traditions of the chapter about
which he is writing. The older man, too, should
have corrected or outgrown some of the sopho-
moric rhetoric with which these letters so much
abound.

For some months I have been carrying on a
weekly correspondence with a young boy at “prep”
school whose guardian I am and in whose intellec-
ual, physical, and moral progress I have no little
interest. His letters to me are full of the results of
football games, of parties, of “Bojack” parades,
of escapades off campus. I am interested in these
matters, of course, but the things I want most to
know he is not likely to mention. I was reviewing
his Latin with him at Christmas time and came to
a chapter of Caesar with which he was totally
unfamiliar. “They had that while I was in the
hospital,” he explained to me. “When were you
in the hopsital?” I asked, somewhat in surprise.
“Oh, in November,” he replied, “Didn’t I write you
about that?” And so incidentally it came out
during his vacation that he was taking piano
lessons, that there had been a fire in his dormitory,
that his roommate had had scarlet fever, and that
he had failed his mathematics. He was quite sur¬
prised to find that he had neglected to tell me any
of these things in his letters, or that I should be
interested in their recital. What to me was vital

151

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

was to him only a passing and a trifling incident
better forgotten than immortalized in print. His
letters have not truthfully reflected his real life.
I have felt as I have gone over these chapter letters
that in many if not in most cases they told very
little of what I should most like to know of the
lives and accomplishments of the men in the active
chapters.

The first thing that strikes me about these
letters is their oppressive optimism. They reek
with panygyrics ; they express nothing short of
superlatives ; they are turgid with laudation. One
who has had even a moderate amount of experi¬
ence with imperfect human nature must have some¬
thing of the feeling toward the writers of these
letters that a friend of mine had toward a mutual
acquaintance whom he characterized as “imagina¬
tive and expedient rather than rigidly and puri¬
tanically literal.” The letters that are before me
as I write these paragraphs are pregnant with
“brightest prospects for the year,” are full of
“the most promising material,” and “swell with
pride” as they introduce “the best freshmen in
college and the most brilliant that the fraternity
has ever pledged.” The semester that is closed
is “the most successful in the history of the fra¬
ternity,” and the one that is opening “bids fair to
eclipse those of former years.” As one reads them

152

The Chapter Letter

he hesitates to believe the baldest statement of
fact.

I recall a letter written by a member of a chap¬
ter with which I was acquainted which began
“After closing a remarkably successful college
year,” and continued with a page of similar enthu¬
siasm. The “remarkably successful college year”
for them had in reality been full of disaster. The
commissary through mismanagement had left the
fraternity nearly $1,000 in debt, one of their
prominent upperclassmen had been dismissed for
cribbing, the highest officer of the fraternity had
neglected his duty throughout his entire term of
office, and the freshmen had been allowed to run
wild so that they had brought down the scholastic
standing of the organization to the bottom of the
fraternity list and yet it had been a “remarkably
successful college year.” I wondered what the cor¬
respondent would have said if they had accom¬
plished something.

The following modest recital illustrates the sort
of stuff which I have in mind, and which everyone
discounts as he reads it. The only modification
which I have made is to change the names. It
looks as if Lyons was a hard worked man.

“Our annual reception was one, indeed, to be
proud of, and pronounced the greatest fete of the
Commencement season. At Commencement Lyons

153 .

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

did honor to our noble fraternity by being awarded
the medal given by the News , the college paper, for
the best short story. Lyons, also, tied for the
“Ready Writer’s” medal.

“We are represented on the college paper, the
News , by George as associate editor and Smith as
circulation manager. On the Monthly by Weaver
and Lyons as editor-in-chief and business manager.
At the last meeting of the athletic association,
Lyons was elected president and Smith, treasurer.
While we have received these honors, we did not
secure them by political schemes, but attained
them through merit.”

The estimate which the fraternity correspondent
places upon his chapter and upon its accomplish¬
ments is very seldom a reasonable one, or one which
is born out by the facts. I have known but one man
who admitted that his own chapter was not the best
in college, and I doubt very much if he would have
done so had he been making a statement in the
chapter letter. I have seldom known a man who
could really look at his chapter in a cold-blooded
and unemotional way and judge it fairly. Some
years ago my office sent out to the various frater¬
nities which have chapters at the University of
Illinois a questionnaire asking, among other things,
that the thirty or so chapters of Greek-letter fra¬
ternities then represented at Illinois be ranked in

154

The Chapter Letter

order of excellence or standing. The papers were
to be returned without signature, so that it was
not possible to tell what fraternity had filled out
any one of the papers. It was interesting to note
that practically every fraternity was given first
place on at least one paper, and it was not hard to
guess that most of the organizations had ranked
themselves first. If the estimates of correspondents
are to count for anything the men who write must
be able to see their own faults and the weaknesses
of the organizations which they represent, and
they must be willing to admit some of these faults.
An upperclassman is more likely to do this than
is a freshman or a sophomore.

A third characteristic of these letters which
seems to me to show a weakness of judgment is
the fact that nothing is seized upon a fit subject
for praise and dissemination with such eagerness
and self-congratulation as is the fact that some one
of the brothers has been elected to something or
has joined some organization outside of the fra¬
ternity. There is verily more joy over the one or
two lucky brothers who get into the most insignifi-
ant organizations than over all the others who
stay in the chapter house and do the real work of
the fraternity. A few excerpts will suffice to illus¬
trate my point.

“The coming year promises to be one of great

1 55

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

prosperity. The chapter is better represented in
all lines of activity than any other organization
here. We have two varsity captains, manager of
the musical clubs, an athletic manager, an inter¬
scholastic manager and an assistant manager,
upper and lower class debaters, editor of the 1917
Sphinx with three men on the board, a class presi¬
dent, and other minor offices.”

“ ‘Bull’ Dunne made Archone, junior law
society, and ‘Swats’ Bartelme was appointed stage
manager of the Comedy Club for next year. At
the all-campus election held in May, ‘Tim’ Paisley
was elected assistant track manager for 1915-16.
With these honors to begin the year, and the
prospect of having every active brother back
again, we are confident that the ensuing year will
prove an exceptionally successful one for us.”

After reading such an item I am moved to ask
in the language of the undergraduate, “What
d’you mean successful?” The statements sound
like the flattery printed in a country newspaper
when the freshman goes home from college.

The next illustration is rather characteristic,
and seems to indicate that the Kahle brothers
might be the busy men at the picnic.

“For the coming year there are bright pros¬
pects. The candidates under consideration are
very promising and much is expected from the

156

The Chapter Letter

older brothers. Rhoades is a member of the Col¬
lege Council and Rankin and H. B. Kahle mem¬
bers of the Interfraternity Conference. R. F.
Kahle is associate editor of the Campus , the college
weekly, and assistant editor of the Kaldron, an
annual publication. He is also treasurer of the
Modern Problems Club and on the debating team.
Boyd is assistant football manager this year and
succeeds to the managership next year.

“Moore, Baker, and H. B. Kahle have been ini¬
tiated into Alpha Chi Sigma, the chemical fra¬
ternity. McKinney has been chosen leader of the
Mandolin Club and H. B. Kahle is manager of the
combined Glee and Mandolin Clubs.

“Moore is business manager of the Literary
Monthly , and also secretary of the Athletic Assoc¬
iation.

“McKinney, Wilber, and H. B. Kahle are out
for the basketball team. R. F. Kahle is in charge
of the cross-country running squads.”

I do not wish to minimize such honors as are
mentioned here. They are interesting, some of
them are worth while, but they are after all only
incidental to the real life and work of the chapter
and should not have the emphatic position in the
letter. It takes little genius in college when one
has influence to get into things, but it often
requires backbone and finesse to keep out.

157

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

Scholastic success unless attended with some
public praise or recognition is made little of in
these letters, and if one did not know to the con¬
trary, one might very well ask himself when he is
reading whether or not the fraternity man ever
attains any scholastic honors. The item quoted
below touches the scholastic situation with a
delicacy which deserves commendation.

“Illinois Beta is now enjoying its summer vaca¬
tion after a most successful year. Most of the
brothers passed their final examinations satis¬
factorily and from the outlook we should take a
high place among the fraternities at Illinois.

“This year we lose three men by graduation.
Three other brothers will not return next year
having left college to go into business.”

One can scarcely help wondering if the three
brothers who have left college to go into business
may not have been induced somewhat to take that
step because they were not included in the fortu¬
nate list of those who passed their final examina¬
tion. There is no mention either of any brother
who might in passing have done himself and the
chapter credit. It is considered a sufficient cause
for congratulation that so large a number suc¬
ceeded in getting by, and no questions are asked
or information given as to the margin above a mere
passing grade which the brothers attained. Since

158

The Chapter Letter

the doing of his college work is the main thing
for which an undergraduate is supposed to go to
college, the fellow who accomplishes this result
with distinguished credit to himself is certainly
entitled to some special mention even in the chapter
letter.

One could wish sometimes that the writers had
adopted a more direct and a simpler style. The
following is the introductory sentence to a letter
full of the most ridiculously exaggerated eulogium.
One feels as he is reading it as if he were wallow¬
ing in a mire of oratorical slush.

“Fifty-six years of Iowa Zeta’s existence have
passed into the realm of history, and as Apollo
casts his radiant gleams upon her fifty-seventh
annus we wish first of all to introduce seven new
brothers.”

Each issue of one fraternity journal which comes
to my table is full of such humor from the first
letter to the last.

The effect of all this inflated style, exaggerated
self-praise, and failure to realize the relative value
of things, is bad. The letters seem artificial, insin¬
cere, conceited. They remind me often of the
conversation of two imaginative small boys the
one trying to outstrip the other in tales of personal
accomplishment and adventure. They too often
lack character, force, and real truthfulness, and

159

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

they seldom give us any adequate idea of the actual
condition of the chapter.

Having heaped so much criticism upon the chap¬
ter letters as I have found them, I ought at least
to make a few suggestions as to their improvement,
and this I shall attempt to do.

I have never seen any advantage to the local
chapter or to the fraternity at large in fabricat¬
ing the facts. Such a procedure seldom deceives
anyone. When a pale, haggard-eyed under¬
graduate comes into my office and tells me that he
is in riotous good health and that he never felt
better in his life, I know that he is practicing the
faith cure or lying, though I do not always go
to the trouble of telling him so. So when a fra¬
ternity boasts of his chapter’s having the best
year in its history , of its having pledged seventeen
of the most superb freshmen that ever came out
of prep school, and of being on the whole the
most inexpressibly successful and influential bunch
ever tolerated by the college authorities, every
one who has had any experience knows about where
they stand. To blow one’s horn mellifluously and
modestly is a task so difficult that the ordinary
correspondent might better not attempt it.
Present the facts fairly and as they are. Tell
the truth. If the fellows have succeeded, say so ;
but we have all learned that life is not entirely

160

The Chapter Letter

sunshine. If you have lost out, admit it ; if things
are wrong and you have made mistakes, face the
facts honestly. It is unquestionably bad taste to
air one’s family troubles in public, but one ought
not to be afraid to tell the truth and admit one’s
weaknesses to one’s family. The man or chapter
that is supremely self-satisfied will never improve.
Optimism may be carried so far as to become a
weakness. When you revise your letters, cut out
ninety-five per cent of the self-satisfaction and all
of the self-praise.

Try so far as is possible to give an adequate
idea of the personality of the individual men com¬
posing the chapter. Single each man out and give
a few details as to what each is like, where he came
from, and what he has done, especially as to the
new men, for you are presenting these brothers to
a wide range of friends who do not know them but
who would be glad to get better acquainted. Tell
who recommended them, to whom they are related,
and what work they are taking up. If King is
the youngest brother of Elden’s wife, and if Cross
comes from Warren’s town, these facts will help
to introduce them, to individualize them. If
Wallace was a high school orator, or Wright a
cross-country star, these are good things to say.
The correspondent has a fine chance to present the
characteristics and personality of every man in

161

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

the chapter, and in so doing he will help to carry
out the original purpose of the chapter letters
which was, as I have said, to bring each chapter
and each man in the chapter into closer personal
touch with all the other chapters.

We are all intensly interested, I am sure, in
the growth and development of the institutions
in which our various chapters are located, and as
for myself I am most interested in the life, the
customs, and the traditions of these institutions —
the local environment and the conditions which
so strongly influence undergraduate life and which
differentiate the character of one institution from
that of another. How little of this tremendous
difference is revealed by the chapter letters is
unbelievable until one has read them in an attempt
to discover it. Have you ever tried to determine,
for example, how different undergraduate life and
traditions at Albion are from those at the Uni¬
versity of Virginia or at Tulane from the Univer¬
sity of Minnesota? Have you ever thought to what
extent undergraduate practice at an institution
of more than ten thousand students like the Uni¬
versity of Michigan or the University of Illinois
differs and must of necessity differ from that of
a smaller college like Beloit or Muhlenburg? The
chapter letters give us very little conception of
these differences because the correspondent, per-

162

The Chapter Letter

haps, having in most cases been in but one class
of institution, has taken for granted that matters
are run in every institution as they are run in his
own, and has not given the time or the thought
necessary to make these differences clear. He does
not realize how interesting and illuminating his
letters would be if he would take such trouble. I
have looked, for example, through many fraternity
quarterlies in an attempt to get an adequate idea
of the specific class scraps held in various institu¬
tions throughout this country, but though I find
constant references to them, so little detail has been
given that I have never been able to understand in
what way one contest differs from another. The
correspondent has simply taken for granted that
we know all about it and lets the matter go at that.
We read about the abolishment of the “tank scrap”
at Purdue, or the “sack rush” at Illinois, but we
get no idea as to what these contests were. The
same thing is true of a thousand other details of
undergraduate life.

I was very much interested, I can not say sur¬
prised, at a recent interfraternity conference when
in conversation with a prominent fraternity man
of New York, to find how little he knew of the Uni¬
versity of Illinois. He was wholly unfamiliar with
its history, its equipment, its endowment, its cur¬
riculum, and its attendance. He did not know

163

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

whether it was located in Chicago or in Kankakee
and the chapter letters he had read were calculated
to give him very little information on these sub¬
jects. Before I commented too severely upon his
ignorance I took time to ask myself how much I
knew about the University of Oklahoma, or Rut¬
gers, or Miami, and before anyone who reads this
article grows conceited I should like to inquire how
much he knows about Cincinnati University, or the
College of Charleston, or the Agricultural College
at Manhattan, Kansas, or Tufts, or Bowdoin, and
how concrete an idea is it possible for him to get
from the chapter letter in his fraternity magazine.
All this suggests to me that the letters ought to
tell every year something about the college — its
aims, its extent, its growth, its accomplishments,
and the atmosphere which surrounds it.

I should feel it unfortunate, too, if the letters
did not contain considerable specific reference to
undergraduate activities. Athletics, dramatics,
social events, college publications form a large
part of the life of most undergraduates and a
larger part of their interest. College papers are
often criticized because they devote so large an
amount of their reading matter to the discussion
of these undergraduate activities and so small a
part to the more important things of college life.
It will always be so so long as those who have

164

The Chapter Letter

charge of college publications are young and inter¬
ested in youthful activities. I have frequently
remarked that if a prominent professor should die
on the day of an important football game, the
college paper the next morning would very likely
give the game the front page while the professor
would be modestly stowed away somewhere on the
inside of the sheet. Since this point of view is
so common I should feel that the chapter letter
would not adequately and truthfully represent
the undergraduate point of view unless it devoted
a considerable amount of the space allotted to it to
college activities and not wholly to those activi¬
ties in which some brother was starring.

There was a time, I suppose, when a fraternity
man felt that his duty was done if he knew his own
fraternity and showed interest in it. I have even
heard fraternity men say that they did not care to
form the acquaintance of men of other organiza¬
tions, and that they had little or no interest in
what other fraternities were doing. Such a feel¬
ing, fortunately, is about gone, and fraternity men
all over the country are being drawn more closely
together, are stimulating each other to mutual
improvement, and are showing a real interest in
each other’s welfare. Anything that has to do
with fraternity life, fraternity relationships, and
fraternity improvement and advancement in your

165

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

college ought to form an interesting part of the
chapter letter. If fraternities come, as I think
they will, into a higher place in our college life,
it will be because they pull together, because they
are willing to learn from each other, and because
they are willing to recognize each other’s merits.
If they go down, they will go down together. What
I have said of self-praise does not apply, I believe,
to praise of one’s neighbors, and the fraternity
correspondent will have got a long way when he
reaches the point of discussing interfraternity con¬
ditions and relations in his college and has judg¬
ment and generosity enough to recognize a rival
fraternity’s strong points.

An adequate judgment of the chapter’s stand¬
ing and worth, a personal estimate of each mem¬
ber’s character, accomplishments, and personality,
some details of college activities and college cus¬
toms, and an interested review of what fraternities
in general are doing at the institution from which
he writes are among the things which a corre¬
spondent can use to make his chapter letters more
interesting and more beneficial than some of them
now are.

I was visiting one of the large institutions of the
Middle West just this week, and by invitation
called at one of its beautiful chapter houses. Who
should meet me at the door but “Swats” Bartelme

166

The Chapter Letter

still giving the glad hand graciously, and still
riotously interested, I have no doubt, in college
dramatics. I had no idea when I began this paper
that I should ever run onto him.

\

167

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

BUILDING A CHAPTER HOUSE

Some learn only through their own experience,
by hard knocks and not by suggestion; others
pick up an idea or a method as soon as it is
presented to them. Now that it seems to be the
style, and I think it a good one, for every frater¬
nity chapter to have its own house whether it has
any money or not, I thought it might be helpful
to tell the story of how we got our house, in the
hope that my tale might serve as an incentive to
others to do as we did.

I don’t remember who it was that first suggested
the idea of building a chapter house. I presume it
was Wes King, for Wes was a lawyer down town
who had worked collections on the side and who had
learned to wring money from the most reluctant
debtors. He was a man who under difficulties got
results. One of the brothers was responsible for
the statement that Wes had stopped in front of a
wooden Indian one day, and by flattery and
cajolery had induced him to pay a bill which had
been long owing by the proprietor within, so I
feel sure it must have been Wes who first made the
suggestion. Whoever it was, he had nerve.

When our chapter was first organized we did
business, as the other chapters did at that time, in

168

Building a Chapter House

a suite of rooms down town over first one restaurant
and then another. These rooms were reached by a
dark and untidy box stair, and though they seemed
to us at first quite elegant and palatial, they were,
in point of fact, bare and barn-like and uninvit¬
ing. They were too remote from the campus to
serve as a convenient meeting place, and they did
not furnish the slightest semblance of a home as a
fraternity house is today supposed to do. The
members of the chapter were scattered about the
town, and there was little chance of their all
getting together in the rooms excepting on Friday
and Saturday nights, and even then there was
little to be done excepting to pound the piano,
which was usually out of tune, or to sit around on
the stiff uncomfortable chairs and smoke, and
smoking made some of the brothers sick. The
rooms were rather scantily furnished, and as I look
back at them now through the vista of twenty-five
years, they were pretty close to impossible as a
loafing place or a living place. It was only
the companionship of congenial friends that made
them seem something like an imitation of home.

We all had keys to these apartments, and we
used to wander up to the rooms every day or two
alone or with some pal and sit round and imagine
we were enjoying ourselves. We held our initia¬
tions there — pretty rough some of them were with

169

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

very little regalia and very much less parapher¬
nalia; we invited our girl friends in sometimes,
under proper chaperonage, but it was after all a
poor substitute for real fraternity life.

We stuck to this sort of thing for three years,
I believe it was, and then, following the example
of some of the older fraternities, we rented a house
near the campus, on Green Street, bought, bor¬
rowed, or stole a little furniture, and became from
that time on a real part of the college community.
I have often wondered just what form of mental
aberration was afflicting the man who designed the
house into which we moved and in which we lived
for the next few* years. It was not particularly
suitable for a dwelling house or a summer hotel or
a hospital ; it had rooms of the most curious shape,
and of the most unheard-of arrangement; it had
an unusable basement which we converted into a
dining-room, this latter room approached by a
dark unventilated passage way ; there was no attic
and few closets; but we disposed ourselves in it
with a good deal of comfort and satisfaction and
began soon to realize for the first time some of the
possibilities of the right sort of fraternity life.
If the house had been better and more convenient,
perhaps we should not so soon have conceived the
idea of having a house of our own. At any rate
one might as well look with optimism upon the

170

Building a Chapter House

experiences of life, and derive some satisfaction
and profit, if possible, from its discomforts.

It may have been when the plastering fell in
the hallway and nearly killed one of the brothers,
or when the furnace went out of business, or the
plumbing threw a fit — I have forgotten. At any
rate some domestic disaster caused us to get
together and wonder why we could not have a
house of our own. The Phi Delts were building,
and though we were not so old as they and did
not have a cent of money to our names, we could
not see why we should not follow as advanced ideas
as they. It was the optimism of youth and of
inexperience.

It was in the spring of 1901 that we grew desper¬
ate and did something. A few of our local enthu¬
siasts got together and worked out a system of
chapter house notes. It was a simple system, and
any optimist quick at figures and skillful at push¬
ing a lead pencil could easily figure in a few
minutes that it would take us only a short time
to have the amount raised, the house built, and a
reserve fund out at interest.

In brief, the plan was to induce each brother,
active and alumni, to sign ten notes of ten dollars
each, one note a year to be due for each of ten
successive years. There was to be no objection
raised if any brother insisted on paying the entire

171

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

series of notes in advance. Wes King was elected
general manager of the note signing business and
was to take special care of the alumni, and I want
to record mj statement right here that in getting
fellows to promise to pay sums of money, he has
no equal this side of Los Angeles. In point of fact
he induced a good many people to promise to pay
who have not paid and who, I am now convinced,
never had any intention of doing so. They
simply signed the notes or wrote the letter to get
rid of him. I have a collection of these notes and
letters in the upper right hand drawer of my desk
now that I often look at and read with the greatest
interest, but with a somewhat weakened and wan¬
ing faith in the promises of man. Some time if I
become desperate I may publish these, if the writers
continue to ignore their promises, but I still retain
a few rags of hope that I may ultimately get real
money from them. Hans Mueller had the job of
running the members of the local chapter into the
corral and getting them to sign, and he, too, proved
a good solicitor.

I drew the job of treasurer and general custo¬
dian of the notes, because I was a guileless college
professor who knew no better. In contemplating
the job of treasurer from a distance I must con¬
fess that it has its attractions. It has all the
symptoms of what the undergraduate calls a

172

Building a Chapter House

“pipe.” I remember asking a six year old neigh¬
bor boy of mine whose father is a bank president
just what the older man did for a living. “He
just gives money away,” was the reply, and this
answer with slight verbal changes expressed my
idea of the business of a treasurer. I thought
that he simply received money that was sent him.
In retrospect, however, such a position takes on
a very different aspect. If anyone who reads
these paragraphs has had in mind accepting the
position of treasurer of a corporation organized
not for profit and composed largely of under¬
graduates who propose to build a fraternity house,
my advice to him would be the same as that offered
by Mr. Douglas Jerrold to young men about to get
married — “don’t.” It is a delusion and a snare.
That simple innocent job of treasurer has caused
me more pain, has caused my fraternity brothers
more annoyance, and has required more letters to
be written which have never been answered than I
ever dreamed of. I have held it twenty years,
because I did not dare to drop it, and there was
no one else foolish enough to take it away from me.

We got twenty-three sets of notes at the first
canvass, and though this seemed pretty good,
many of the old fellows did not sign them and have
not since shown any material interest in the house
building scheme. A number of these brothers

173

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

have been back to enjoy and to admire the house
after it was built, but their appreciation has not
gone further than laudatory words. In recent
years it has been the policy of the chapter to
require each one of the initiates to sign a series
of these notes, though each man is allowed to set
the date when his first note is to be paid. It was
our hope when this scheme of house notes was
devised that some of the brothers would pay them
out quickly and that with the first money we
accumulated we should invest in a suitable site
for the house.

I remember with what delight I received the first
payment. It came from one of the brothers who
was getting well or working or enjoying himself
at some German health resort, and who sent me
a postal money order for fifty marks. I had never
had any occasion previous to this, excepting when
in the grades, I was working out my problems in
compound numbers, to satisfy my curiosity as to
how much real money one can get for a mark, but
I find that the first entry I made in the ledger
which I immediately started is $11.80. I guess I
got the full worth of the order as marks go now.

The house notes as they came due were paid
with reasonable promptness. Some fellows who
had little money and who, therefore, had to manage
their financial matters carefully, sent in the

174

Building a Chapter House

money before they received a notice, but for the
most part it required one or two reminders before
the response came. A few — not many — of these
men have been receiving two or three notices a
year for the past fifteen years without my getting
a single response. I am an optimist so I keep
hoping. By the spring of 1904 we had accumu¬
lated one thousand three hundred and fifty dollars,
but long before this some of the other brothers
had had their eyes on two good looking lots near
the campus which we were sure would be just the
place to build our house. In order that we might
be able to hold property legally we realized the
necessity of forming a corporation, and this we did
in the spring of 1904. This corporation consists
of nineteen members, eleven members of the active
chapter elected by the chapter each spring, and
eight life members elected from the alumni. The
real business of the corporation is done by a
Board of Directors, seven in number, four from
the active chapter and three from the resident
alumni. When all this preliminary organization
had been accomplished Wes King went over and
hypnotized the old German — or was it his wife —
who owned the John Street lots and stole them
from him; that is, he got a contract from him to
sell them to us for three thousand dollars, we to
pay down five hundred dollars and to have the

175

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

privilege of reducing the remainder of the debt by
the payment of such sums as we should be able to
raise at any time we wished. We were able to clear
the mortgage in less than two years largely with
money collected from our house notes.

I said that the money was collected largely
from the house notes. The rest of it came from
the issuing of gold bonds, two thousand dollars of
which were really disposed of. The original
intention was to sell five thousand dollars worth
to launch our enterprise, but the brothers did not
fall for the gold bonds with the enthusiasm that
we had anticipated ; it struck them as a good deal
like putting good money into mining stock. In
point of fact, the gold bond idea had the least in it
of any of the bright thoughts which came to us
in working up the house scheme. We have found
these bonds harder to handle than any other
indebtedness, and I feel that they were perhaps
a mistake. Some of them have been given to the
corporation, by the holders ; now and then one
has been paid when we had made some lucky collec¬
tion and had the money; and the rest still remain
to be cancelled as we prosper sufficiently to take
them up.

With our lots paid for we felt that we were in a
position to begin to build our house. There was
only one trifling handicap that held us back, and

176

Building a Chapter House

that was the lack of money. Some of the inter¬
ested members of the Board of Directors had made
investigations as to the possibility of our getting
money from some of the Chicago houses which
make a business of lending money to those in
need, but the project of building a house for irre¬
sponsible undergraduates in college was a new one,
and no one was willing at first to take the risk.
Building and Loan Associations would not then
consider the proposition for a moment, though
now that the building of such houses has become
common and has been shown to be a safe enter¬
prise in which to invest capital, it is not especially
difficult to persuade either private individuals or
Building and Loan Associations to lend money
for such a purpose.

It was one of our local members, abetted by two
other wide-awake lawyers from our alumni, who
finally presented the scheme to the Chicago Sav¬
ings Bank with such a rosy aspect as to win their
favor. They had it all worked out to a minute
when we could pay it back and all planned to a T
where the money was coming from. I was reading
over the proposed schedule of payments just a few
days ago, and it surely looked beautiful on paper.
We have not done the business at all as he worked
it out, but we have done it in quite as good a way
if in a different one. As I intimated this Chicago

177

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

firm agreed to lend us twelve thousand dollars for
twelve years at five and one-half per cent on a first
mortgage, and this amount made it seem possible
for us to begin the house. We had hoped to get
by with eighteen thousand dollars and since a local
business man agreed to give us three thousand
dollars on a second mortgage, we felt that the
house was as good as built and began to save
money for furniture.

As soon as the money was in sight a committee
was appointed with full power to select an archi¬
tect, approve of plans, and get things moving.
This was in the spring of 1906. We had a number
of sketches presented. It was thought at first
that for the sake of sentiment and perhaps to save
a little money, it would be desirable to have one
of our brothers design the house; but I had
learned long ago that no one is likely to save much
money by letting his relatives work for him, or in
fact, in working for them, and it was not long
before we were all agreed that the wisest plan for
us was to employ the best architect we could get,
even if we had to go to Boston to find him. This
we did, and he made us a plan which was simple
and dignified and which still causes our house,
although it is nearly the oldest one about the
campus, to be admired and praised by visitors to
the University for its beauty and convenient ar-

178

Building a Chapter House

rangement perhaps more than any other house
which has been built. I have since advised all my
friends to engage a good architect even if they
contemplate building only a woodshed or a dog ken¬
nel.

We were not easily satisfied with our plans;
like all builders with limited means, we wanted a
large number of big rooms within a limited floor
space, and we wanted everything on the first floor.
When everything had been adjusted to our satis¬
faction so far as this was possible we submitted
the plans to contractors for bids. If any archi¬
tect has ever submitted plans to a contractor and
had the bids come within the original estimate I
should like to have the name and address of both.
At any rate the bids on our house ran two thousand
dollars beyond anything which we had in our wild¬
est moments considered. We had to cut, and we
did it generously, and then let the contract. In
round numbers the total cost of the house includ¬
ing lighting fixtures, walks, and everything neces¬
sary to its completion was twenty-one thousand
dollars. It will be remembered that the amount
of money we had borrowed was fifteen thousand
dollars and this left six thousand dollars unpro¬
vided for. We had during the interim since our
house notes were first issued saved two thousand
five hundred dollars from this source, and the re-

179

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

maining three thousand five hundred dollars we
borrowed from the contractor and from four of
our alumni. When the house was done in the fall
we had money enough to meet all of our outstand¬
ing obligations. ^

Even now when these scattered obligations have
all been' met I am convinced that we spent too
much on the house. The paying of the extra
three thousand five hundred dollars strained every
nerve of the three or four fellows responsible for
its collection. I don’t know now how we ever se¬
cured it. We got some of it from the house notes,
we saved a little from the rent ; we insulted some
of our well-to-do alumni until they gave it to us
to get rid of us, but ultimately we paid it — in fact
we paid it exactly when we agreed to do so. Our
house was so large that it required a big chapter
roll in order that it might be full and the rent be
easily paid, and I have yet to be convinced that a

chapter roll larger than twenty-five is likely to be

*

the most efficiently managed. I think that most
fraternities lack the courage to build a house well
within their means and best suited to their needs.
They are all afraid that if they do not build a
house larger than their neighbors, people will
think them poor; just as some men are afraid to
buy a Ford for fear that some one will imagine
they cannot get by with a Cadillac.

180

Building a Chapter House

When the time came for moving into the new
house we had very little furniture. The old stuff
we had had in the Green Street house had been
hardly dealt with for nearly ten years. We gave
it all a complete over-hauling, presented some of
it to the Associated Charities, sent some to the
repair shop to be gone over and refinished, and
consigned the rest to the bedrooms. We had been
gradually collecting a furniture fund, but it was
entirely inadequate. Here again we fell back on
the local chapter and the alumni. Some of the
younger fellows were more than ordinarily skilful
in handling tools and these agreed to make in the
engineering shops some of the larger pieces of
furniture for the living-room and library, such as
the tables and the big lounging chairs. We found
that by this method we could materially reduce
the cost and in addition introduce a little element
of sentiment. The fellows who had worked the
hardest to raise the money for the house gave the
most liberally toward buying the furniture or
gave rugs, chairs, or curtains as they chose. The
place looked mighty good to us when late in the
fall of 1907 the curtains hung, the rugs down — I
thought that the living-room rug was especially
handsome because Frank Scott and I had paid for
it — and the furniture placed, we moved in. No
one knows so well how to appreciate an accom-

181

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

plishment of this sort as when he has done his
level best to bring it about.

But our troubles were not all over when we had
moved into the house; in fact as treasurer of the
corporation I was soon convinced that they had
only just begun. The regular payments had to
be made. The money for these was to come from
the rent which we received for the house from the
local chapter, and from the income from the house
notes. The rent we set at one thousand five hun¬
dred dollars a year, and the notes should have
brought us another thousand. We have always
received the rent, but the notes have often brought
us no more than two-thirds of what they were
estimated to do.

The fellows often lose interest when they get
away from college. Their duties multiply, their
obligations increase, and they are likely to forget
the chapter house. The best help to keep every
one in touch with the house and the active chapter
has been a chapter quarterly paper sent to every
one who has ever been connected with the chapter,
and containing personal items about all the
brothers, and news of the college and the campus.
It took us several years to find this out, and I
think in consequence we have lost several thou¬
sands of dollars that we should have collected had
we started the quarterly earlier. The main idea

182

Building a Chapter House

is not to let one forget or lose his hold upon the
old life.

At the end of two years we saw that we should
have to raise the rent to two thousand dollars a
year if we were to meet our payments, for repairs
became necessary almost at once, taxes and insur¬
ance were high and growing higher, and we had
no sooner built than the city authorities passed
ordinances to pave on four sides of our block.
The improvement increased the value of our
property, it is true, but it also increased the drain
upon our exchequer. All this increase of expendi¬
ture made it the more necessary that the chapter
roll be kept large. It was again in my mind an
argument in support of the statement that we had
built rather too generously.

It was in 1910, I believe, that we decided to
increase the rent paid by the chapter. Our in¬
debtedness had by this time been reduced to fifteen
thousand dollars, all the loose bills and personal
debts having been taken care of. At the same time,
it seemed best to those who had looked most care¬
fully into our financial affairs that if possible we
should pay off our two mortgages and take out
one loan of fifteen thousand dollars from a Build¬
ing and Loan Association. After some negotia¬
tions we were able to do this, and our monthly
payments in this association were for the next five

18 8

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

years one hundred sixty-two dollars and fifty cents
a month. This amount we were able to meet from
the rent, and the income from the house notes took
care of the taxes, improvements, and repairs. It
is true that we sometimes ran pretty close to
shore but whenever my bank account ran down
near the five hundred dollar mark, I began to re¬
trench or to put the pressure upon the delinquent
brothers. I was forced to resort to all sorts of
tactics to get the notes paid, but we were always
able to pay the bills when they were presented.
I do not believe the fellows out in the world and
far away from college have realized in any sense
what a responsibility it meant to carry the house.
They have argued that it would be all right if
they paid when it was convenient; they have been
angry often when they have been “dunned”; they
have thought me at times sarcastic and insistent,
but they did not consider that there was the regular
monthly assessment to be met, and the regular
bills to be paid, and behind it all only the rent and
the promises which they had made. The fact that
I always kept in the bank this surplus of five
hundred dollars has more than once saved the
corporation from disaster.

Later we decided that it would be best again to
refund the loan which had now, through our regu¬
lar payments, been reduced to something less than

18L

Building a Chapter Home

nine thousand dollars. Without much trouble we
were able to make this refund, and so to reduce
our monthly payments to less than one hundred
dollars a month. This reduction in our monthly
payments made it possible to reduce the rent
exacted from the local chapter to one hundred and
fifty dollars a month for ten months, and later to
one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, and
so to relieve the chapter of a burden which for so
many years it had been carrying without com¬
plaint. It has never seemed to me that we should
quickly relieve the property of debt. The more
people who have a part in helping to bear the
burden, the more will these men after they become
alumni appreciate the value of the house. Per¬
haps later it may seem desirable again to refund
the loan in order that the rent may be reduced to
one hundred dollars a month, an amount which
the chapter could always easily pay.

There is no likelihood that we shall for many
years at least abandon the house notes. There
are constant improvements and repairs which need
to be made on the house ; as it grows, older these
will proportionately increase. We realize that
the best possible economy is to keep the house in
first-class repair, and all this takes money and a
good deal of it. Besides this, the house notes give
every man an interest in the house and a sense of

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

f

ownership. His regular payments for ten years
recall to his mind his undergraduate days and
bring him back to see the fellows and to live over
again the details of his youth. I am sure the
house notes are a good thing.

We now owe about eight thousand dollars on
property which valued very conservatively is
worth fifty thousand dollars ; we have the pay¬
ments arranged in such a way that we can meet
them without putting an unreasonable burden upon
any one. Our house is a real home, it is in good
repair, and is one of which we may well be proud
for many years to come. I shall be gone very
likely before there is a new house built for the
chapter, for though I am not yet a patriarch, I
am still the oldest of the small group of men who
worked to bring about the completion of this
house. Those who come after me and who may
have a part in building a new and a better house
for the chapter, have my kindest wishes. In more
ways than they think, their labor will be a labor
of love; but I hope that they will feel as I have
felt that the struggle is worth while, that the
effort put forth is more than compensated for in
the satisfaction of seeing the result. It has cost
me some worry and not a few postage stamps, as
it has cost a number of the other brothers. I
have written thousands of letters and have had,

186

Building a Chapter House

I have no doubt, scores of replies, but I never
walk down the street in which the house is situated
without feeling a glow of satisfaction that we
did it.

There are others, who read this, who if they
had the courage and nerve and persistence, might
do even better than we have done.

187

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

THE MAN WHO DOES NOT JOIN

“I was never asked to join a fraternity when I
was in college,” a young fellow said to me not
long ago, “though many of my intimate friends
were, and I have always had a feeling of regret
and loneliness when I have gone back to visit my
Alma Mater. I have wondered if there might not
have been something the matter with me, something
about me not quite normal. I find it now often
difficult to explain to people just why I was not a
member, for it is as embarrassing for me to say
that I never was asked as it must be for a maiden
lady when explaining why she has never married.”

The fact that a young man while in college does
not join a fraternity or is not asked to join is
not of necessity an argument against the man or
against the fraternity. The number of fraterni¬
ties in any institution with which I am familiar
is too small to admit of everyone’s being invited,
and the reasons which induce men to stay out or
which prevent them from being asked are as varied
as the men themselves. Why have you not joined
the Elks, or the Odd Fellows, or the Ancient Order
of Hibernians, or the Christian Science Church?
Why are you in the profession which you are now
following? It is not at all likely that you can

188

The Man Who Does Not Join

answer, for it is next to impossible for any one to
determine just what series of causes lead to any
specific action which he may have taken.

There are a great many people, some of whom
belong to fraternities and others of whom do not,
who have the feeling that there are only two types
of people in the world — those who are elected and
those who are damned, those who get in and those
who stay out, those who join and those who do
not. My experience has led me to the conclusion
that there is mighty little difference, and that the
man who does not join usually came out of the
same dust heap as the man who does.

An acquaintance of mine, herself a member of
a college sorority which she considers the best on
the market, related to me not long ago the details
of a tearful interview through which she had just
passed with one of her sisters in the bond. The
incident which had been the instigating cause of
the lachrymal outburst was the announcement of
the engagement of a third sister. Now an engage¬
ment is ordinarily no cause for weeping; quite the
contrary in fact. In this case, however, the hor¬
rible and disgraceful fact had been divulged that
the young man in question was not a member of
any fraternity. This misguided young woman had
somehow absorbed the erroneous impression that

189

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

unless one belongs to a college fraternity he is
hopelessly lost in a social way.

As I said at the outset, very few colleges have
organizations enough to take in all the new men
who arrive at each fall opening. In point of fact
there are not enough Greek-letter fraternities in
existence to supply such a demand. In theory,
perhaps, it might be a good thing if there were;
but in practice I am afraid that difficulties would
frequently arise. I have known undergraduates
in college who would disorganize heaven if they
ever got in — or hades, and who, like some of our
recent political candidates, would never be happy
or contented in any organization unless they were
themselves the whole of it. I have never investi¬
gated the results in those colleges where an attempt
has been made to break up all the student body
into groups, but I have little faith in it as a suc¬
cessful unifying and harmonizing process. Some
men do not want to belong to anything ; they wish
most of all to be let alone, to form no associations
with either students or faculty. They come to
college to get an education, they say, and that
means to study books and to acquire facts.

Such men have little that is gregarious in their
make up. They like to work by themselves, they
are restless and unhappy if they have a com¬
panion, and they would not join anything, not

190

The Man Who Does Not Join

even the army or the church, unless they were
forced to do so. One of these I recall at this
moment quite vividly. He was a quiet, studious
fellow, an only child who at home had had his own
room and followed his own methods of work. He
had never been interfered with; neither his books
nor his bureau drawers had ever before been over¬
turned. When he wanted to study or to meditate
he sought the quietest isolation. When he came
to college he was at once caught in the maelstrom
of rushing, and before he came to himself he found
that some one had decorated his lapel with a parti¬
colored pledge button. But this fact brought no
joy to him: he was restless, discontented, melan¬
choly, revolutionary, and the outcome of it all was
that he gave back the button, found a room by
himself, and settled down to a quiet, hermit life
such as pleased him. There are many like him,
and if they want to be happy, rather than to form
friendships, they do not join.

There are those, too, who do not like to be mixed
up in things. If something exciting is being per¬
petrated they would rather go in the other direc¬
tion. They never run to a fire; they pursue a
doctor’s degree or a hobby; they enjoy the out¬
skirts rather than John Street. Such a man the
fraternity would undoubtedly help to educate far
more than many another agency, but he usually

191

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

manages to keep his feet out of the snare. If he
is invited out he has an engagement; he has little
desire to be done good. At the present time with
us the tendency is to crowd about the campus ; the
more congested things are the better the ordinary
student likes it. If he lives east of the campus
during his freshman year where life is quiet and
regular, by the time he has become an upper¬
classman he has moved to the west side where all
the men’s organizations are located and where there
is something doing. Yet with all this tendency
there are still some fellows who prefer the isola¬
tion which may be found beyond the towns, and
of their own initiative seek out those places which
are far removed from the crowd.

The selfish, headstrong man often does not join
when he is asked, and I did not mean to suggest
that either of the two sorts I have previously
mentioned are to be counted in this class. One has
to yield his own desires if he gets on comfortably
in any partnership or organization, even in mar¬
riage or the grain business. Brotherhood even of
the most unsentimental character is a matter of
daily if not of hourly concessions and considera¬
tion of the profit or the comfort of others. If one
is incapable of such sacrifice and of the real happi¬
ness and satisfaction which results from it, he
ordinarily is wise enough to go his own way, and

192

The Man Who Does Not Join

he keeps out of a fraternity. I remember a young
fellow of this sort who came to college some two or
three years ago. He wanted the honor and the
prestige of belonging, he had an attractive ex¬
terior, and he was pledged in a short time. The
life got on his nerves at once, however. He could
not stand the restraint of the house, he could not
bring himself to submit to rules, he could not yield,
or follow directions. He wanted his own room, he
objected to the food, he wanted his own comfort
and his own way. He tried living out of the house
for a while, but nothing was right; so he went
back to his own isolated selfish life. The next fall
he was bid by another fraternity, but it was not
in him to get on unselfishly with anyone. So he
soon gave up the pledge button and left college.

A great many men entering college would like
to join a fraternity but feel that they cannot
afford the expense which such a procedure would
entail. Their going to college demands sacrifice
on their part and on the part of the home folks,
and they very wisely are not willing that this sac¬
rifice should be made heavier simply for their own
pleasure. It is true that every chapter at the
University of Illinois, as at many other institu¬
tions, I have no doubt, contains members who have
little means or who are partially or wholly self-
supporting, but it cannot be denied that the ex-

193

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

n

pense of living in a fraternity is greater than is
required for one to live outside, and many of the
best men in college who have plenty of opportunity
to join stay out because they feel that they must
live as economically as possible. These men often
miss the close friendship and comradeship which
they would find in the fraternity; often, however,
they gather around themselves outside groups of
friends who are bound as closely together as are
the members of any fraternity organized. I have
often heard it deplored that the fraternity is so
organized as to shut out any worthy man, but as
society is now organized similar instances may be
found in any community to illustrate the fact that
many of the good things which we would enjoy we
are deprived of because we cannot afford to pay
for them. The man who is forced to work his way
through college, as many of us know from experi¬
ence, cannot always ride in the Pullman or attend
the formal party. He may gain something in in¬
dependence and self-reliance, but he will of neces¬
sity have to sacrifice many much desired pleasures.

Not a few fellows who would like very much to
be fraternity men never have an opportunity. It
is against fraternity conventionalities for anyone
to express interest in joining or desire to join.
It would be considered quite as unpardonable a
breach of etiquette for a freshman unasked to

194

The Man Who Does Not Join

express a willingness or a desire to join a frater¬
nity as it would for a young girl to propose mar¬
riage to a male friend, perhaps in these days more
so. The outsider from an unknown town has too
little show. I know a young fellow coming to col¬
lege next fall who will be scrambled for by a half-
dozen fraternities while his intimate friend who is
coming with him will be scarcely likely to get a
look in unless through the necessity of asking him
in order to get his friend. When, as in large in¬
stitutions, there are so many eligible fellows who
are personally known by the members of chapters
or who are introduced to them, there will always
be a great many excellent boys who are overlooked
because there is more good material than can be
utilized.

Undoubtedly the fact that a man comes to col¬
lege unknown is not the only barrier to his being
asked to join a fraternity. Personal traits of
character and personal appearance influence the
matter materially — the latter considerably more
than it should I often think. The man who talks
too much or who refuses to talk at all ; the fellow
who has too much self-assurance or the one who
has too little — all |iave difficulty in getting by.
Crude manners a* crude dress are always bars
to admission. OlSen it is the man’s fault, and at
other times the fraternity is finical and critical

195

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

and hard to please. Often, too, since an election
must be by unanimous vote it is the prejudice or
the stubbornness of one man in the fraternity that
prevents a man from being asked. It may seem to
some that it is unfair for one man’s vote to keep
out an otherwise acceptable freshman, but that is
generally the custom of the fraternity. I know
men who have worked every possible device, who
have pulled every available string, who have even
had their relatives come to town in order that their
influence might be added to that of the individual
himself who wished very much to join. It has
even gone so far at times as for interested outside
friends to try to influence the college authorities
in behalf of their friends who could not get in.
The man who resorts to these devices, however,
very seldom profits from them. Every year I see
the disappointed faces of young fellows who have
come to college with the highest hopes of making
a fraternity only to find that they had built their
hopes upon a wreak foundation.

Sometimes a freshman is asked by the wrong
crowrd of fellows, and he has the good sense to
recognize this fact and the courage to decline the
invitation. Only this week a boy came to me to
say that he had had an invitation to join a certain
group of men and was not quite certain of their
character. He asked me to tell him frankly just

196

The Man Who Does Not Join

what they were like and what they stood for.
After I had done so as fairly as I could, he said,
“Thank you for telling me so straightforwardly.
I don’t believe from what you say that they are the
sort of men that I should like to have for my inti¬
mate friends in college, and I shall decline their
invitation.” It took pretty staunch principles for
him to reach this conclusion, for he is a boy who
would very much enjoy the sort of life he would
find in a good fraternity, and he knew very well
what it means at the end of the freshman year to
decline an invitation to join. Such instances are
not at all rare of men who rather than join the
wrong fraternity elect to join none at all but try
to make for themselves a happy independent life.

Not infrequently the opportunity to join a fra¬
ternity comes to a man too late. He would have
liked the opportunity earlier in his college course ;
but if it comes to him in his junior year, he often
prefers to stay with the coterie of friends whom
he has gathered about him than to adjust himself
thus late to a new set. Only this year two juniors
at the University of Illinois were invited to join
two different fraternities. They were decidedly
among the most influential independents in college.
They were strong politically, they were respected
socially, and they had a wide circle of warm
friends. They did not feel that it would be quite

197

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

loyal to these friends for them to break away so
late in their college life. “If I had been asked in
my freshman year,” one of the boys said to me,
“I should no doubt have been glad to accept. I
have fought my way up alone, however, and have
made for myself a satisfactory position in under¬
graduate affairs, and I feel without conceit that
I should be doing the fraternity a greater honor
in joining it now than it has done me by inviting
me.” I felt the same way as he did about the
matter, and I have frequently felt so with refer¬
ence to men who have been asked to join fraterni¬
ties when they had gone beyond the sophomore
year. A young friend of mine a few years ago was
in about the same position, he said, as Thackeray
was with the taffy. When as a child he very much
wanted it, he did not have the shilling that it cost ;
later he had the shilling but he did not care for the
taffy. When this boy friend of mine entered col¬
lege, he very much wanted to join a fraternity but
he did not have a chance ; later in his college course
he had the chance, but he had formed his friends
and he did not have any desire to join.

It is interesting to see what becomes of these
men who do not join. Those who do not wish to
do so, of course, live their own lives, form their
own small circle of intimate friends and have no
quarrel with any one. They get out of college

198

The Man Who Does Not Join

what they came for, and they seldom have any
feeling of jealousy or envy for the man who gets
something else. These men have the kindest feel¬
ings for the men in fraternities and see no reason
why if these men have the time and the money and
the desire for such things they should not go into
them. The man who really has no interest in join¬
ing and who enjoys another sort of life is not
mixed up in any fight against organizations. He
likes his own life and is willing for the fraternity
man to like his.

Some of the men who are disappointed in not
being asked are too weak and too lacking in inde¬
pendence to adjust themselves to their surround¬
ings and to form a group of friends of their own.
A young boy came in to see me not long ago with
some evident trouble weighing on his mind. I tried
to get it out of him with little success for a time,
but finally I asked, “What is worrying you, Fred?”
“What I want to know,” he burst out, “is how I
can get a bid to join a fraternity.” He was really
pathetic, he would have taken anything offered
him. All that he wanted was a pin. I tried to tell
him frankly that his chances were not very great ;
he was not quite the sort of man to attract inter¬
est by fraternity men, he had no friends to push
him. I tried to show him that happiness and suc¬
cess were very little, if at all, dependent upon his

199

The i Fraternity and the Undergraduate

joining! a fratemity^that was only an incident
in his life in college which could be omitted without
seriously disturbing anything; but he could not
see it that way. He had come to college appar¬
ently for the sole purpose of joining a fraternity;
his friends at home expected it ; his happiness de¬
manded it. If he could not attain his purpose at
once he would go home, and he did. His college
life was closed in a month all because he was too
weak to live his own life. He was the sort of man
who had too little force to help an organization
had he become a member of one, and there are not
a few like him.

Most of the men who do not join adjust them¬
selves at once to the situation. They find other
activities and associations which present to them
opportunities for friendship and social exercise.
They go into athletics, they work in the churches,
they find interest in the professional societies
which are established in every college. They go
into dramatics and debating and military and poli¬
tics and competitions of all sorts, and so get satis¬
faction and compensation for the life they for one
reason or another have missed. It is interesting
in going through the senior section of our col¬
lege annual to notice how few members of the
class are unattached to some organization or
activity. Even this list of activities and organiza-

200

The Man Who Does Not Join

tions which every senior gives is inadequate, for
it does not take into account the little house groups
which are formed everywhere about the campus,
and which in a large degree take the place of the
real fraternity life which the Greek-letter man
lives.

Most of the independent political leaders whom
I now know in college are either men who have
been asked to join a fraternity and chose for one
reason or another not to do so, or they are men
who would have liked to be asked, but for some
reason missed the chance. They have had force
and initiative enough to make their own plans, to
gather about them their own supporters, and to
conduct their own political and social campaigns.
The enterprises they undertake are not nearly so
easy of accomplishment as are those of the frater¬
nity man, because the fraternity man has definite
backing, a well-organized support. He is ma¬
terially helped in the accomplishment of any un¬
dertaking which he begins, while the independent
is not. The latter, therefore, if he wins in any
.undertaking must be the stronger, the more self-
reliant, the shrewder of the two, and he fre¬
quently shows that he is. Two of the strongest
men in the junior class at the University of Illinois
this spring are independents, and I believe they
are decidedly among the best men in college. They

201

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

have made friends everywhere; they have been
leaders in whatever they have undertaken, and no
man in the junior class has undertaken more.
They are good illustrations of the leader in col¬
lege who is left out and yet who is in no way dis¬
couraged by that fact; neither one I am sure
would be willing for a minute to admit that he had
been left out.

It is usually the men who are not asked to join
fraternities or who are not pleased with the invi¬
tation they receive who are responsible for the
organization of the local clubs or of groups of
men which eventually become Greek-letter frater¬
nities. I have known a dozen such groups of men
at my own institution which were organized as
church clubs, or as purely local clubs, in most
cases with the averred intention and determination
never to become more, and yet I have never known
one which did not eventually petition a national
organization for a charter. This is quite the nor¬
mal procedure really, for a national organization
can make a more careful selection of its men and
has a stronger form of government than has a
local club, and the fellows soon come to appreciate
this fact.

Occasionally there is jealousy and ill feeling
among those who would have liked to join and who
do not have the chance. Not finding it possible

202

The Man Who Does Not Join

to get in themselves, they immediately conceive
reasons why no one else should be allowed to do so.
Their imaginations conjure up all sorts of evils
and irregularities and undemocratic situations
within the fraternity; and they are at once and
for all time against the system. When I was a boy
on the farm I was fortunate in owning a riding
horse and saddle. The boy who lived across the
road had neither, but he spent a considerable part
of his time in showing up to the other boys the
evils and dangers of horseback riding. His father
would willingly get him a horse, he said, if he
wanted one, but he did not want one ; he thought
it was a very bad thing and a very dangerous
thing for a young boy to have a horse of his own.
And so he salved his feelings and comforted him¬
self by railing against me. He deceived no one
but himself. It is somewhat the same sort of atti¬
tude that the man who does not join a fraternity
occasionally takes by way of explaining why he
never got in. It is a common method in society
of explaining things, but it is usually an unfair
and ineffective one.

If the men who are waging an active war against
fraternities had usually been active members of
these organizations and acquainted with the pur¬
poses and the real life of fraternity men, they
could make a considerably stronger case. As it

203

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

is, I do not know an agitator against fraternities
who has spent the four years of his undergraduate
life in such an organization, and further than this,
I do not know one who had a chance to do so.
Most of them know little or nothing first hand.
Either they or their children were disappointed in
gaining admission, and for this reason they vir¬
tuously take up the fight as George Ford in my
boyhood was opposed on principle to riding horses.
The only trouble is that they sometimes succeed
in deceiving people into believing that they are
promulgating truth.

The reason that there are not more strong
leaders among the independents is explained by
the fact that as soon as a man begins to show
qualities of leadership in the sophomore class or
in the junior class, he is immediately picked up by
a fraternity. The strongest independent leader
in our present sophomore class is not likely long
to lack opportunity to join a fraternity. A half-
dozen organizations have been inquiring about him
within the last month, and before college closes he
will be wearing some fraternity button unless he
elects to live an independent life throughout his
college course.

The main difference between those who join and
those who do not is a temperamental one. I have
no sympathy with those who preach that it is

204

The Man Who Does Not Join

wholly a matter of money or pull. These things
sometimes help, but there are in every organiza¬
tion with which I am familiar, men who have
neither. It is largely a desire for comradeship,
for association with his fellows, and adaptation to
such a relationship that causes one man to join and
another one to be left out. It is very often a
genius for leadership ; and if a man has this, if he
fails with one sort of organization, he gets into
another or makes one of his own.

The independent who pushes his way to the
front and who attains leadership by his own efforts
is more often than otherwise the strongest man in
college, because he has fought and conquered
against the greatest odds. There is more honor
and training in winning alone but far less chance.
The man who doesn’t join usually does not care
to do so, or is unsuited to fit into an organization
life. It is the occasional exception, only, who
overrides the handicap and proves himself the
strongest man in college.

205

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

THE TRANSFER

One of the most difficult problems for frater¬
nities to solve, in large institutions at least, is how
best to offset or utilize, as the case may be, the
influence of the numerous transfers from other
chapters which make up so large a percentage of
undergraduate life. Whether they are formally
affiliated and become active members of the chap¬
ter or not does not solve the problem entirely, for
their mere presence in the college, so far as the
college public is concerned, constitutes an affiliation
and makes the local chapter responsible for their
conduct and for their influence. I have sat at
fraternity conferences and heard uttered the
commonplaces and platitudes about “once a Phi
Kap always a Phi Kap,” just as I have been taught
since my childhood the Presbyterian doctrine of
the election of the saints — once in grace, always
in grace — but there is in this case as in many oth¬
ers a vast difference between theory and practice.
The doctrine that when a man is taken into a fra¬
ternity he is entitled to its privileges wherever he
goes and with whatever chapter he may come into
contact, sounds all right, and is quite easily de¬
fensible until one comes up against concrete ex¬
amples, and then the theory goes to pieces.

206

The Transfer

I have seen a chapter disrupted by transfers ;
I have seen its whole policy and character disor¬
ganized. I have seen it deteriorate into little more
than a mere boarding house. I can at present
think of but few cases in which the affiliate really
proved a benefit to the chapter, got into its spirit,
and became a strong unifier and leader. We have
this year at the University of Illinois such an in¬
stance, but they are so rare as to attract unusual
attention. This fact does not seem to me strange.
The transfer, coming from a different chapter has
learned its methods, its customs, its traditions, its
spirit, and he can not lay these aside at once. In
point of fact he seldom desires to do so ; he wishes
rather to transplant them into other soil. He
comes from another college, also, and he finds it
as difficult to relinquish its customs as he does
those of his chapter.

There is a pretty general opinion prevailing
among undergraduates that all the members of
one fraternity, their own, perhaps, are in large
degree alike — alike in ideals, in temperament, in
personal appearance even. Only a few days ago
I was speaking to a young sophomore in my office,
and I happened in the course of the conversation
to refer to his chapter. “How did you know what
fraternity I belonged to?” he asked with much
interest. “Oh, I usually know,” I said, “I can’t

207

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

always tell how.” “Do you know,” he continued,
“I believe I could tell a member of my fraternity
anywhere I should meet him in this country. It
seems to me that we look alike, that we are differ:
ent from other fraternity men.” I did not think
it worth while to disagree with him, but, although
I think I have met as many and as great a variety
of fraternity men as anyone of my age, I am sure
I should not be able to tell a Deke from a Lambda
Chi Alpha, and after I have been to a fraternity
congress I know that there is as much difference
between an Alpha Tau from Michigan and one
from Georgia as there is between friends any
where. It is this great variety in ideals and tastes
and training that makes the problem of the trans¬
fer so difficult a one to solve satisfactorily, and the
wuder the range of territory from which the trans¬
fers come, and the greater the difference in the
character and traditions of the institutions con¬
cerned, the more difficult it is to harmonize and
unify the fraternity interests.

The character of the men who are likely to
transfer from one college to another is often not
such as to cause them to be helpful additions to
a chapter roll. A good many of the fraternity
men who come to us from other institutions come
because they have been urged to do so or invited
to do so by the faculties of the institutions where

208

The Transfer

they have previously been registered. Their work
or their conduct it is frequently thought would be
improved by a change. Even when the man comes
of his own desire and planning, he is not infre¬
quently uncertain of himself, vacillating, not satis¬
fied with his course or his surroundings, anxious
to do something new or something different from
what was offered in the college in which he had
previously been registered. Such a malcontent is
not likely to fit in harmoniously with the men of
the new chapter, and not likely to be a help if he
is affiliated. Of course there are men who change
colleges as they change their minds, thoughtfully
and carefully, because they feel that the change
will help them better to accomplish the very defi¬
nite purpose which they wish to accomplish.
These men are likely to fit in when they come to a
new chapter and likely to show interest and initia¬
tive ; their number, however, is small as compared
with the total number of those who transfer.

“But the whole purpose of the fraternity is
changed and frustrated,” a junior said to me
today, “if a man loses his influence and his stand¬
ing in a fraternity by going from one chapter to
another. In my fraternity the doors are always
open, and any brother who wishes may enter and
receive a warm welcome.” This doctrine is all very
well both as to sound and sense, if the fraternity

209

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

has few chapters and if these are located in small
colleges. When the family increases and expan¬
sion is the watchword, and when the chapter is
located in a big university, then most organiza¬
tions find themsfclves forced to adhere to a different
doctrine. The affiliation of a man from one chan-

x

ter with the fellows of another is to me a good deal
like a second marriage. I have seen many success¬
ful ones, a few really happy ones, but the tender
sentimental feeling of youth is usually lacking. It
is too often a practical, unemotional, business
arrangement. A man usually has but one real col¬
lege experience. After that, no matter where he
goes or how many other chapters he n ay have
affiliation with, when he drops into reminiscence
it is always, “Our chapter at Albion,” or “We had
a pretty good system at De Pauw.” He can never
forget his first love.

The fraternity with few chapters is not likely
to find great difficulty with its transfers, because
there are few undergraduates to transfer. The
total number of active men at any one time is
small, and the likelihood of any considerable num¬
ber of them leaving their own chapter and going
to another one is extremely slight. . It is perhaps
for this reason that such fraternities have in most
cases adopted the practice of affiliating all broth¬
ers who come to them and do not seem to be able

210

The Transfer

to understand why another fraternity should do
differently. I had a warm discussion only a few
days ago with a man who felt that when a brother
came from another chapter there was only one
thing to do, and that was to rush out to meet him,
fix him a place at the table, send his suitcase up¬
stairs, and to take him in with open arms. This
method is quite safe with his fraternity, for since
its installation several 3Tears ago it has had but one
affiliate, and though he did the chapter no good, he
was not able unaided to do it much damage. He
came and went without many people’s guessing that
he was a member.

Such a practice, however, in a large institution
might wreck a fraternity like Beta Theta Pi, or
Kappa Sigma, or Phi Delta Theta, each of which
has a large number of chapters, and so is likely to
have a good many transfers. In an institution
like Cornell, or Michigan, or Illinois, there are
scores of students every year transferring from
the smaller colleges or even coming from the larger
institutions. Many of these are fraternity men.
One of our fraternities last year had thirteen
transfers from nearly as many different institu¬
tions. I have heard of one fraternity in a large
university which had a year or two ago twice this
many. The effect of so many men coming with
different ideals and experiences and different

211

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

methods of fraternity management is seldom a
good one. Factions are created almost at once,
and unity of action is next to an impossibility. It
is as nearly impossible for an affiliate to refrain
from telling the fellows how much better things
were done in his home chapter as it is for a man
who has been married twice to keep from referring
to the admirable qualities of his first wife, and the
effect of such reference on the harmony of the
home is not particularly different in either case.

As I have seen for the past fifteen years the
effect of affiliation upon our local chapters I am
convinced that on the whole it is not a good thing.
There are a few instances in my mind which would
prove the contrary, but these are overwhelmingly
in the minority. I could cite many instances where
it would have been far better for the chapter if the
transfer could have been kept away from the house
excepting upon special occasions when he was in¬
vited. I am sure that in most cases it is far better
that the transfer be not invited to eat regularly at
the house, though with us it is usually easy for the
fraternities to take care of all their transfers in
this regard if they wish to do so. There are few
places about the fraternity house where the home
life is more strongly emphasized than at table dur¬
ing meals, and no better chance to promote
harmony or introduce discord than during the half

212

The Transfer

hour when the men gather about the fireplace fol¬
lowing dinner.

My objections to affiliating a transfer and
thereby making him an active voting member of
the chapter are that so far as his knowledge of
the workings of the chapter into which he is going
is concerned, he is a freshman who should do
freshman duty and keep a freshman’s place. This,
however, is exactly what he has no intention of
doing. If he comes from an eastern institution
to one in the Middle West, for example, even
though he may have been dismissed from college for
inefficiency or irregularity, he begins at once to
show how the chapter should be run, to point out
how superior conditions are at Cornell or Dart¬
mouth or Brown and to object to authority and
regulation. I can not now recall one such man who
was willing to be subordinate, to take dictation, or
to admit that the chapter with which he had become
affiliated was superior or even equal to the one
which he had left. Even if he has had but one
half year’s experience in the chapter into which
he was initiated, he usually considers that experi¬
ence quite sufficient to enable him to assume direc¬
tion of any new group to which he may join him¬
self. I recall a case which occurred only a few
weeks ago where a critical situation arose in one
of our local chapters which concerned the pro-

213

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

posed dismissal of one of the active members for
moral irregularities. The problem required for
its solution experience, judgment, and tact; all
the alumni and every active member of the chapter
were concerned. The most active man in the con¬
duct of the prosecution was an affiliate who knew
little of the chapter, who had been in it only a few
weeks, and who was least capable of managing a
difficult situation with diplomacy. I could not
make him see that the modest thing for him to do
was to sit back quietly, to express his opinion when
he was asked, and to vote when the time came. He
was determined to drive or he would not ride in
the machine at all. He was like a new professor
who came to us last year from the Empire state,
who desired at once to reorganize the University,
who objected to all of our regulations, and who
condemned everything from our marking system
to our thunder storms, because they are managed
differently from what is done in New York. He
wanted to run things, and he wanted to do it in
exactly the way it is done in the community and
in the institution of which he was first a member.
The affiliate too often feels the same way.

One cannot quickly transplant the customs or
the traditions of one institution or organization
into another, and when as is the case of chapters
having a number of transfers, the attempt is being

214

The Transfer

made at one time to bring the tradition of a half
dozen different institutions into one chapter, the
thing is impossible. There is nothing truer than
that an undergraduate learns the customs of a
college quickly and that he accepts these as the
customs of all colleges. The freshman is trans¬
formed between September and the Christmas
vacation; he goes home a new man — not always
intellectually new, so much more the pity, but he
has learned the routine of college life — its cus¬
toms, its traditions, its clothes, its limitations. If
at the beginning of the next semester or the next
year he enters another institution, his nerves
receive a shock when he realizes that the fellows
in this second institution may never have suspected
the things that he has been led to believe are uni¬
versal college customs. He is like a man who has
all his life been brought up to feed himself with a
fork and who, going to another part of the world,
finds that quite refined people do the same thing
with their fingers or with chop sticks. We might
not object to have such a man as a visitor, but we
should hesitate to put him into a position of
authority where he would have charge of affairs.

Sometimes the affiliate does not care to assume
control, he is satisfied to sit back and criticize —
to tell how things are managed in his chapter, to
suggest how a real fraternity is run, to be super-

215

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

cilious and superior. Such a man does little harm
excepting, perhaps, to become chummy with the
malcontents, to help to develop factions. It is
this sort that I should not have about the house
excepting upon invitation, and I should make the
invitations at long intervals.

The most difficult problem, with the college
office at least, is with those transfers whose ideals
of life are not all that they should be. Outside of
the fraternity house they are bad enough, but
when they become active members they are im¬
possible. They feel less responsibility to the chap¬
ter with which they have affiliated than they did
to their own, and the chapter has over them less
power of control. They seem like ill-bred uncon¬
trolled step children who do not wish to obey and
who stir up the other children to all forms of
disobedience and derelictions. I have never felt
able to consider them as entirely divorced from
the fraternity, nor yet have I felt like holding
the fraternity responsible for their actions while
all the time I knew that they were no help to the
strong men and were a constant menace and evil
influence as regards the weak ones. Whether they
are affiliated or not, they visit the chapter, they
become intimate with the weaker members, and
they often waste a good deal of their own time

216

The Transfer

and the time of anyone who will consort with
them.

As I said at the outset, the problem of the
transfer is not solved even if the man is not
affiliated. If he is a good man, the chapter gets
the benefit even if he has not been taken in; if he
is a bad one, the fraternity must bear the disgrace
without being in more than an advisory position
with reference to his conduct. I have in mind now
one of our fraternities whose transfers, even
though they have not been affiliated, have been of
service to the chapter both for the advice and
help they have given regarding the conduct of
affairs at the house, as well as in themselves rais¬
ing the scholastic average ; I recall an instance
in another chapter where the transfer damaged
the chapter irreparably by his bad conduct, and
even after he was dismissed from college came back
at intervals to commit improprieties which reflected
immeasurably upon the good name of the chapter.
The active men held, of course, that he had not
been affiliated, that they were not responsible for
his actions, and that they had no control of his
habits ; but these statements did not get them any¬
where. The general public knew that he was a
fraternity man, and the local chapter received
the credit for whatever he did.

In view of all these facts I believe that it

217

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

is ordinarily unwise for a fraternity to have a
general regulation requiring a chapter to affiliate
a transfer from another institution. I believe
that the action taken should be determined by
each chapter for itself. It is desirable that every
chapter should have knowledge of the men who
transfer from other institutions, and that they
should be shown some courtesy and some atten¬
tion. Whether they should be taken into the chap¬
ter, whether they should even eat at the chapter
house table or visit the house often, should depend
entirely upon the character of the men and the
desire of the chapter. Usually I have found that
the chapter has acted wisest that did not affiliate
the men, and that had as little official connection
with them as possible. When a chapter finds one
man that will help and be of real service it will
find a half dozen that will prove worthless or a
real incubus. While I have been writing these
paragraphs I have had a talk with a man whose
fraternity requires that all transfers be affiliated,
and I asked him to tell me frankly what the result
in his fraternity had been.

“On the whole we have lost more by it than
we have gained,” was his reply, and that is the
way I have come to feel about it. If a chapter
establishes a custom of taking its transfers in, it
will be impossible not to do so even when it is

218

The Transfer

quite apparent that such an action will not be
for the best; if it decides each case upon its own
merits, and takes few or none, it will be in a much
safer position. The fraternity which does not
affiliate any of its transfers will be most likely
to get on agreeably. It will avoid internal dis¬
sensions and factions, it will be more easily able
to carry out a uniform policy of chapter manage¬
ment, it will miss the help of an occasional good
man, but it will save itself from the annoyance of
many a poor one.

If someone suggests that this method is not
quite fair to the transfer, I will say in reply that
the transfer has little ground for complaint. He
has had his day; he chose his college and his col¬
lege home, and if circumstances make it inadvisable
or impossible for him to continue where he began,
well, he simply is paying the penalty as we all
must do in every walk or department of life for
the errors we make or the misfortunes we encoun-
ter.

219

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

THE MEN WHO DO NOT GRADUATE

Every year at the opening of college the papers
are full of the accounts of the large number of
freshmen who are flocking to the various colleges
and universities. I do not know what percentage
of these entrants persists through the four years
of their undergraduate course and come up for
their degrees, but I suppose that it varies in
different parts of the country and in different
types of institutions. An investigation made
recently by the assistant dean of the College of
Engineering at the University of Illinois showed
that at this institution approximately forty per
cent of those entering the freshman class of that
college continued through the course and received
their degree at the end of the four years. A few,
perhaps, returned later to finish their work or
occupied five years in the completion of their
courses, but even counting these in, the percentage
of matriculants who ultimately graduate would
not exceed forty-five per cent. I presume that if
statistics were compiled in the other colleges of
the University, the result would not be particularly
different from that which was shown in the College
of Engineering. A good many reasons might be
alleged for this large percentage of mortality,

220

The Men Who Do Not Graduate

but very likely one of the strongest is that going
to college was never so universally popular as it
now is, and a large number of young people, there¬
fore, enter college in the fall who find out before
spring that they are not particularly fitted for
the work or interested in it. These often do not
return.

One of the most serious problems the fraternity
has to solve is concerned with the men who do not
graduate. There is a very large class of fellows
who enter college, goin a fraternity, and then at
the end of the first semester, or the first year, or
the first two years, give up their college work
and go at something else. This class of men causes
the fraternity a considerable amount of trouble
from the fact that while they are in college they
are often unstable, dissatisfied, and irresponsible,
and after they leave college they are unlikely to
meet their obligations to the fraternity or to show
much interest in it. Fraternities are coming to
see that when they are rushing men one of the first
things to discover about them is whether or not
they have serious intentions of remaining in col¬
lege for the entire course. The student who does
not, is more likely than not to be a poor asset
for the organization.

A fraternity is strong or weak under the present
system in accordance with which fraternities are

221

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

managed, as its senior class is strong or weak.
I have in mind a number of instances of frater¬
nities at the University which have started in
with what was thought to be an excellent fresh¬
man class, and have come to the end of the four
years with one or two or occasionally with not
a single one of the men who were originally
pledged. Such a fraternity is unquestionably
weak. With no seniors it has little organization,
and it reveals the fact that for some time it has
had little, or there would have been someone to
save a few of the upperclassmen from the wreck.
The organization which by one means or another
can carry a large percentage of the men through
to the senior year and graduate them, has a
strength that is worth much to the organization
and to the institution of which it is a part.

It has been a matter of interest to me to make
some investigations at the University of Illinois
relative to these men who join fraternities and
who do not finish their college course. Recently
I sent to the local secretary of each of twenty-
three national fraternities a questionnaire asking
the number of initiates over a period of four years
in each fraternity, and also the number of these
initiates who finally graduated. Through our
class annuals and the registrar’s office I was able to
check results which came in reply to these inquiries,

222

The Men Who Do Not Graduate

so that I feel sure that my figures as to percentages
of men who do or who do not graduate are reasona¬
bly accurate.

I included in this inquiry also a question rela¬
tive to the reasons which had induced the various
men to leave college before graduation time. For
sixty-three per cent of these men no reason was
alleged, and I am not inclined to put much faith
in the accuracy of the replies to the thirty-seven
per cent for which reasons were given, although
I include these. The men who answered the ques¬
tionnaires were of necessity acquainted with only
a very small number of the men concerned, since
they were not in college when most of these other
men were, and could know but little other than
that which comes through hearsay or tradition as
to the influences which induced their brothers to
withdraw. Neither the records of the fraternity
nor of the University ordinarily indicate why a
man has withdrawn or failed to return to finish his
course, so that at best it must be a matter of con¬
jecture or of memory in drawing any conclusion
as to the causes operating. Since I have known
practically all these men personally to whom
reference was made in the questionnaire, I am
inclined to think that only general conclusions can
be drawn, and that it is impossible accurately to
set down percentages.

223

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

In reply to the question as to why these men
had left college before graduation, for four
hundred and fourteen, or 63.2 per cent, no reason
was given. The reasons alleged for the two
hundred and forty-one, or 36.8 per cent, remain¬

ing were as follows :

Reasons Percentage

To enter business . 49.9

Lack of money . 17.4

Failure in studies . 13.3

Indifference to work . 9.1

Dropped from course . 4.9

To get married . 4.0

Trouble at home . 1.3

As I have said before, I am not inclined to put
much confidence in these last replies, excepting
that the reasons alleged are usually the reasons
one or another of which induce men to leave col¬
lege before graduation. “To enter business” is
a reason which may mean almost anything, and
might with propriety be asserted of any man who
following his failure to come back to college had
secured a job.

A study of the table of percentages of those
who graduated and of those who did not brings
out a few interesting facts. The percentage of
graduates is about five per cent higher than was
shown by the College of Engineering, even grant¬
ing that five per cent of the students of this col¬
lege who did not graduate ultimately cleared up

224

The Men Who Do Not Graduate

their work and received their degrees. The percen¬
tages of graduates varied from 75.3 to 15.2 which
is pretty wide, but is partially explained at least
on account of the varying conditions in the dif¬
ferent organizations.

The internal organization of those fraternities
which had the higher percentage of graduates has
also been stronger and the unity of feeling more
marked than in those fraternities which occupy
the lower half. My conclusions are that the fra¬
ternity that can keep up its scholarship, that can
choose men with a serious definite purpose, and
that by a well knit organization can hold its men
together will always have a high percentage of
graduates.

It will be seen that the average percentage in
these twenty-three fraternities of initiates who
graduate is approximately fifty. If before I had
begun my investigation I had been asked whether
the percentage of fraternity initiates who graduate
is larger or smaller than that of men in general,
I should have been inclined to believe that it is
smaller. Even though the figures show that with
us the percentage is larger, I am quite sure that
it is not so large as it should be nor so large as it
will be when the fraternities realize the importance
of pledging men whose purpose it is to graduate.

I am not sure that the reasons which keep fra-

225

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

ternity men from graduating are different except¬
ing in degree, perhaps, from those which are
instrumental in keeping other men from continu¬
ing in college. The percentage of fraternity men
placed on probation for poor scholarship or
dropped from the University is practically the
same as the percentage of other men. I am sorry
to admit that a somewhat larger percentage are
dropped for other irregularities, but this fact may
be accounted for, I believe, because, it is almost
always easier to find out what a man in an organiza¬
tion is doing or has done than it is to find out
similar facts concerning the isolated individual.

The social life of the men in the fraternity is
on the whole considerably more intense than is
that of the men outside, especially in a coeduca¬
tional institution like a state university. The
young man who associates regularly with girls is
likely to fall in love, or at least he is likely to
think that he has done so, and a young collegian
in this state of mind seldom does much with his
studies. The experience steadies and stimulates
a few men to better work, but the large majority
whom I have known can not attend to their books
and to their love affairs at the same time. The fact
that these young people do not marry — and there
is little likelihood that the college man in love in
the early years of his college course will marry

226

The Men Who Do Not Graduate

the girl who has made the impression on him —
does not settle the question. The man in love is
restless, dissatisfied, unlikely to stick to his work.
He usually fails in some subject, becomes dis¬
couraged or dissatisfied, and does not return the
next year.

Few men with us fail to graduate because of
dissipations or bad habits unless the habit of loaf¬
ing may be included in this list. I cannot now
recall a dozen men whom I have known in fifteen
years who were kept from graduation by bad
habits. Young fellows may be indiscreet, they
may do irregular things, but they do these
irregular things so irregularly as to have very
little damaging effect upon their college work. The
week-end party may have its bad effects upon the
character, and it no doubt does lay the foundation
of objectionable habits later in life, but it has
seemed to me seldom to have an immediately
damaging effect upon the man’s studies. It is
undeniable, however, that the fraternity house is
usually a comfortable place to loaf, and it is
generally possible for one adept at this recreation
to pick up someone at almost any hour of the day
or night who will help him at the game. There are
too many loafers at our fraternity houses and
too little discouraging of loafing. The loafer is
not always dropped from college by the authori¬
se

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

ties, in point of fact he is dropped only in a small
percentage of cases. He is in many cases like a
young friend of mine who had changed his occupa¬
tion rather often during the first five years he was
out of college. “What was the matter, Paul?” I
asked. “Were you dismissed?” “Never but once,”
was his reply, “but every other time I saw it was
going to happen, and I beat them to it, and
resigned.” A very large percentage of the loafers
in college usually see what is coming to them in
the future, and rather than reform they decide
to quit college before they must.

I think it is fair to say that although there are
in every fraternity with which I am acquainted
young fellows who come from families of little
means and who must themselves be self-supporting,
yet on the whole the man in a fraternity has more
money behind him than has the average man in col¬
lege. I think it can be shown, also, that a larger
percentage of fraternity men than other men
expect to go back home when they leave college
and go into business with their fathers or with
some other member of their family. Though
many fraternity men must strike out for them¬
selves when they leave college and build up their
own business or profession, there is, however, a
good percentage who know that a first-rate job is
waiting for them when they leave college. Though

228

The Men Who Do Not Graduate

the fathers of these men usually want their sons
to finish a college course and get a degree, yet
since not many of them have themselves had a col¬
lege education they do not always feel strongly
the importance of their son’s finishing his work.

“My son does not have to have a college degree,”
the father of a twenty-year-old sophomore who
wanted to quit college and get married, said to
me this spring. “He’s had two years of college.
That’s more than I ever had; and there’s a good
well-stocked farm waiting for him whenever he
comes home.” Why should a son like that stay out
of agricultural affluence and matrimony in order
to finish a college course? It were foolish, indeed.
This financial state and general state of mind I
am sure is not uncommon among parents, and I
am convinced is responsible for the unfinished
courses of a good many fraternity men.

A good many men, however, do leave college
because of financial matters. It costs more to go
to college than most people think it does. There
has been an impression extant for a long time that
one can live more cheaply in college than at any
other place in the world. It is an error. It costs
more to live in a college town than in a big city;
and it costs a fraternity man more than it does
a good many other men, because he lives better
than they do. Some fraternity men have more

229

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

money than others, and it is rather hard some¬
times for the man with little money to live con¬
tentedly with the man who has more. Rather
than economize, rather than struggle along and
finish what he has undertaken, even though it
demands sacrifice, a good many men quit and go
to work.

Indifference drives other away. I am surprised
over and over again at the lack of purpose or real
interest in many men who enter college. They
come because it is the thing to do, because their
friends are coming, because nothing better presents
itself after they have graduated from the high
school. They have no special interest in books,
they do not enjoy study, and they have formed no
specially definite plans for their own future.
Sometimes these men wake up and find an object
in living and a purpose, but if their indifference
continues, they usually give up the intellectual
business — I can not call it a struggle — and go
into something else.

The salvation of the fraternity is in the men
who graduate, who have the definiteness of purpose
and the willingness to work which will ensure their
finishing their college course. Less society, less
loafing, a more moderate expenditure of money,
and a simpler method of living when this has been
extravagant will keep more men in college. A good

230

The Men Who Do Not Graduate

many of the mistakes which fraternities make could
be solved at rushing time if the fraternity would
take the trouble and the time to find out a little more
definitely what the purposes of the new men are.
The time of the fraternity is usually wasted if the
men do not stay beyond the first or second year.
Accidents happen, of course, the unexpected comes
to pass, and things occur which make it necessary
at one time or another for every man to change
his plans, but it is possible, I believe, if the facts
are found out at rushing time, and if the organiza¬
tion of the fraternity is properly looked after and
the scholarship kept up, to graduate seventy-five
per cent of the initiates rather than fifty per cent
as at present.

231

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

FRATERNITY EXPANSION

The question of expansion is probably one of the
most vital and regularly discussed questions before
the general fraternity world today. It has been
discussed freely at meetings of the Interfraternity
Conference, and the consensus of opinion has been
in favor of it. The reasons are quite obvious.

The attendance at colleges is increasing by leaps
and bounds. At many institutions the attendance
during the last few years has doubled. The effect
of this increase has been to reduce the percentage
of undergraduates who could belong to fraternities,
for the increase in the number of fraternities has
not, in any way, kept pace with the increase in the
number of students.

Most young men like to belong to a college
organization. A good many of them feel, perhaps,
as the freshman did to whom I was talking not
long ago. “I don’t give a damn to belong,” he
said, “but I would like to be asked.” And with
the increasing number of students in our colleges
the percentage of men who can be asked is growing
smaller and smaller.

It is interesting to note that the opposition to
fraternities which has sprung up all over the coun¬
try and the talk against fraternities is not led by
men who have belonged to fraternities in any case

232

Fraternity Expansion

so far as I know ; but by men who have been outside
of the membership, and this is likely to continue
to be so. As we increase the number of chapters of
fraternities we reduce the strength of the opposi¬
tion to them.

The Interfraternity Conference has recognized
all these facts. At a recent meeting it appointed a
special committee, whose work should be to en¬
courage expansion in fraternities already or¬
ganized, to investigate institutions where it would
be advantageous to have more fraternities, and to
encourage the organization of new national frater¬
nities. All this is to be done with the hope that it
will result in benefit to fraternities now existing.

Echoes have come to me from the various fra¬
ternity conventions held lately, through the re¬
ports of delegates from chapters at my own institu¬
tion, of the discussion which took place at these
meetings concerning expansion. There was much
said that was unfavorable. Judging from the re¬
marks which took place in my own convention
upon this pertinent topic, I infer that what was
said was often both interesting and personal.
Many undergraduates oppose expansion, and it is
the undergraduate who largely decides fraternity
policies. But the undergraduate seldom keeps
himself informed upon general fraternity con¬
ditions. His vision is limited; he sees very little

283

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

beyond his own chapter. He usually knows little
about his own fraternity chapters, and he knows
still less about others. The larger fraternity prob¬
lems he seldom grasps or considers seriously, and
his arguments are superficial and not always based
on facts.

He calls attention to the rapidity with which
the roll of chapters has increased within the last
ten years; he enumerates the chapters which have
been installed since he awoke to the fact that
Greek-letter fraternities existed ; and he begs with
all the dramatic art and fervor gained in a college
class of public speaking (I taught public speaking
once) that we give our serious attention to inter¬
nal development and build up the chapters we now
have before we add further to our list. “Strength¬
en those we have,” he says “before adding more.”
His inference is that as we add to our list of chap¬
ters we weaken those we already have and that the
increase in numbers is likely to result in less effi¬
cient internal organization.

This sounds well and it is in favor with the
boys, but it is bunk. Internal organization of
fraternities is better now than it ever was before.
It is only within recent years that there has been
anything worthy of the name of internal organiza¬
tion in fraternity management. Traveling secre¬
taries, district or province managers, the regular

234

Fraternity Expansion

visitation and supervision of chapters, was a thing
unheard of or thought of until long after I became
a member of a fraternity. It was impossible, in
fact, for the fraternity did not have money enough
to finance such a project. While the number of
chapters in each fraternity was kept small there
was little or nothing to hold them together.
There was no supervision and no unity. Frater¬
nity organization was of the loosest kind. The
effort to build up individual chapters and the
binding together of each fraternity into a unified
whole has come much faster than has expansion,
and our newest chapters are the most influenced
by it. It is very difficult to get the oldest chapters
in any fraternity to realize that their organization
is a national one and that they must conform to
national regulations, that they must submit re¬
ports, that they must yield to control and obey
regulations ; it has not been the tradition for them
to do so. Newly organized chapters do not feel
so. It cannot, therefore, be shown that increase
in numbers has weakened organization or is likely
to weaken it. Quite the opposite effect has resulted.
If the fraternity roll has increased in numbers,
fraternities generally have developed closer super¬
vision, better organization and control, and a
closer unification.

The statement is made that our newest chapters

235

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

are our weakest chapters. From what I know of
Alpha Tau Omega and from what I have observed
of other fraternities, this is not true. It is more
often the oldest chapter which has developed the
least business sense, which fits the least easily into
the organization, which most often fails to ap¬
preciate the fact that the fraternity is a national
organization and not a local club, which knows the
least about the fraternity as a whole. My experi¬
ence has been that our new chapters have got to a
wonderful degree the spirit of the fraternity.
They understand its organization, they appreciate
its ideals. I have only to go back to the last two
Congresses to which I was a delegate to find abun¬
dant illustration of these facts. What is true of my
own fraternity is true of others. The Secretary of
Delta Kappa Epsilon admitted to me not long ago
that next to his own chapter the strongest chap¬
ter in his fraternity was organized only recently.
I have had the same admissions from the officers
of other conservative fraternities. They agree
with me that their new chapters are not their weak
ones, either in the institutions in which they exist
or in the fraternity at large.

It is argued also, by those who plead for culture,
that when we expand into the West, especially
into the agricultural colleges in the West, we
leave culture and refinement behind us. We take

236

Fraternity Expansion

into our brotherhood, they argue, “The uncouth,
barbaristic, low-browed denizens of the moun¬
tains and manicurists of the corral.” I suppose
it was once true that we were justified in thinking
that those who came from the farm or from the
west might be expected to be crude and unculti¬
vated, with little appreciation of the finer things
of life. I myself was born in Illinois and I came
from the farm. But it is not so today. The farmer
travels, he reads, he has all the accessories of
civilization, as he once did not have, and he takes
advantage of them. The westerner may not go to
Europe so often as the man from the Atlantic
coast, but he has traveled more, he has been in more
states of our union, and he knows more about the
people and the customs of his own country than
does the New Englander. The crudest, most bu¬
colic hayseed in college today does not come from
the farm, but from New York, and Boston, and St.
Louis, and Chicago. It is the city and not the
country that breeds crudity and bad manners. If
you will study your own college community and
your own fraternty, you will agree with me.

I have visited within the past three years a con¬
siderable number of western colleges and I have
seen the agricultural students of Washington and
Oregon and Iowa and other state on either side of
the Rocky Mountains. The student in the Liberal

237

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

Arts colleges has nothing on these men either in
good manners or refinement, or knowledge of the
world, and these men have in addition a force and a
power of initiative which win our respect. They
have learned to work and to respect labor. They
know why they have come to college and they make
the most of their opportunities. Their clothes are
well tailored, an important fact in the mind of the
fraternity man, their speech is careful, their ideals
are as high as any man’s in the oldest chapter in
the oldest fraternity in the country. Only yester¬
day I read to one of our students uncertain as to
the wisdom of expansion into such institutions as I
have referred to, a letter from one of these sup¬
posedly ill-trained and ill-mannered westerners. It
was well phrased, well written, refined, in thor¬
oughly good form and good taste and showed a cul¬
tivation and a courtesy not ordinarily met with.

“I don’t know how many men in my chapter
could write each a letter or would do so,” the man
said when I was through, “but I know one who
couldn’t.” And the man who wrote the letter was
born on a ranch in a far western state and is a
student in his own state university.

The westerner and the agricultural student, these
anti-expansionists say, are crude and uncultivated.
Perhaps ; but I have always thought the opposite.
His life in the open brings the farmer into the

238

Fraternity Expansion

closest relationship with the grandest and the most
beautiful things in the world — flowers and birds
and growing things ; sunshine and fierce storms,
the earth under his feet and the great sky over
head. What tends more than these things to refine¬
ment and cultivation?

David, I hope his name is not an unfamiliar one,
farmer, sheep, herder, hunter of wild beasts, musi¬
cian and poet, watched the stars at night and the
clouds by day and wrote of them as no man before
or since has done, but I presume that if David and
his friends had applied for a charter of some
national fraternity they would have been turned
down as not worthy to be known as brothers by the
more scholarly and refined city dwellers because
of their lack of cultivation. And yet it was David
who became King.

There is one way of keeping down the number
of chapters, which I believe every fraternity
might with profit occasionally employ, and that is
the elimination of worthless chapters. Every fra¬
ternity has a number of chapters which have little
spirit, little vitality, little appreciation of frater¬
nity progress. They are as loosely organized as a
high school club and have no understanding of
what it means to belong to a great national or¬
ganization. Their connection with the grand of¬
ficers and with the central office is remote. Their

239

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

■ y . fWa*

main interest lies in their own local problems and
pleasures. They are often behind in their taxes,
careless in the observance of regulations, and
ignorant of general fraternity matters. They
should be labored with, they should be given oppor¬
tunity to pull themselves together, they should be
shown wherein they are failing, but if they do not
change, their charters should be withdrawn.

At the last Congresses of my own fraternity
the representatives of our newer chapters have
been the most active and aggressive. They have
shown themselves capable of taking and holding
their places in discussion and in social affairs.
They have been the outstanding men of the Con-
gess. The Wyoming Chapter put on the clean¬
est, cleverest and most acceptable show we have
had at a recent Congress and proved to the grati¬
fication of every clean-minded, sensible delegate
that it is possible, even at a fraternity convention,
to have a smoker which holds the attention, which
is amusing, and which is neither dirty nor vulgar.

The arguments against expansion are not ten¬
able. Fraternities are taking care of the individual
chapters better now than they have ever done be¬
fore. Internal development is strengthening and
will continue to do so. Fraternities are spending
more money for the supervision of the various
chapters than they have ever done in the history

240

Fraternity Expansion

of these organizations. The new chapters that are
going in everywhere are made up of men of char¬
acter, of purpose and of possibilities. It is not
true that there is not cultivation in the agricultural
college. Every curriculum in the agricultural col¬
leges of the country gives wide opportunity for
elections in science, in language, in literature and
in the humanities in general. National fraternity
officers recognize more than ever before the neces¬
sity of increasing the number of chapters of every
fraternity. Our future is dependent upon it.

I believe strongly in expansion, — conservative,
intelligent expansion. I believe in fresh new blood.
If any fraternity feels the necessity of controlling
or reducing the number of its chapters it should
begin with the dead ones. It should either resusci¬
tate them or bury them. As they now are, they are
an incubus and a handicap to the best interests of
fraternity life.

There was a day when only the elect went to
college. In those days the fraternities could afford
to be exclusive. Conditions have changed com¬
pletely now, and the group of men who make up
the attendance at the average college is the most
cosmopolitan in the world. It represents every
class of society and almost every nationality ex¬
tant. If the Greek-letter fraternities are to hold
their place they must meet the changing conditions

241

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

in college. They must carry the gospel of brother¬
hood and good fellowship to the whole college
world. They have no more right to be exclusive
then has the Christian church. The undergradu¬
ate members must recognize this fact, as the alumni
members and grand officers of most fraternities
have done for some time. It is a choice between
expansion or a more determined and general op¬
position than we have previously met.

Expansion is often hindered, where the consent
of the chapter nearest the petitioning group is
required, by jealousy, by rivalry, or by petty pre¬
judices. I could give numerous instances which
come to my mind where a chapter in a large institu¬
tion will not give the slightest consideration to a
petitioning group in a neighboring smaller college
purely from prejudice or from a misconception of
the ideals and accomplishments of the smaller col¬
lege. And the same thing is true of the smaller
college with reference to the larger institution.
Petitioning groups have been held up for years at
the University of Illinois, because chapters already
established in smaller institutions near by imagined
that the character of the students at the larger
institution was inferior to the character of those
in the smaller one. “I didn’t know how to milk a
cow and so I couldn’t get into the state University,”
one of these intelligent young city dwellers ex-

242

Fraternity Expansion

plained to his friends. He knew a lot about a state
university.

I believe in expansion because I believe in the
fraternity. I have lived with it every day for
thirty years or more and few men know more fra¬
ternities and fraternity men than I have been
privileged to know. I know it has faults as has
every organization composed of human beings, and
I have not hesitated when occasion gave me oppor¬
tunity to point these out, but I believe that on the
whole the fraternity is a good thing for the men
who belong to it and for the colleges where chap¬
ters are located. It holds up to young men high
ideals. It gives them opportunity for leadership,
for taking responsibility, for the development of
their characters in the right direction which they
are not likely to get otherwise. I know what its
enemies have to say about it, but I know, too, that
in a very large degree these things are false.

243

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

THE FUTURE OF THE FRATERNITY

There has been a good deal of discussion during
the last few years, in college and out of it, by
those who are members of fraternities and by
those who are not with reference to the stability of
the college fraternity and its probable future.
A prominent physician said to me not long ago,
“I believe it will not be many years until all of
these college fraternities, either by the enactment
of state laws or by the regulations of college
authorities will be debarred from our educational
institutions and will have to go out of business.”

If the fraternity is not meeting a real need of
the college, if it is not contributing to the better¬
ment of the undergraduate and of the college com¬
munity generally, I believe my friend is correct in
his predictions, for the fraternity would then have
no legitimate reason for continuing, but I believe
that it is meeting such a need and that it does so
contribute, and that in the future it will do more
than it has done in the past.

The conditions under which students in college
lived when the fraternity was organized and the
character and training of the young men who
entered college then as compared with the charac¬
ter and training of those who now enter were as

244

The Future of the Fraternity

different as it is possible for a changing civiliza¬
tion to make them. The fraternity has perhaps
been slow to recognize these facts and to adjust
itself to them, but it is waking up to its obliga¬
tions ; it is recognizing its duties, and it is meeting
the situation and I believe will continue to meet it.

The last few years have brought considerable
opposition to the fraternity in a number of states,
and this opposition we have probably not seen the
last of. It has arisen for the most part in institu¬
tions like the state universities where the number
of students is large, where the student body is
cosmopolitan, and where the number of fraternities
is not sufficiently developed adequately to take care
of and to furnish a home and associates for those
undergraduates who might under more favorable
conditions reasonably expect to be invited to join
such an organization ; or it has come in institutions
where the authorities were ultra-conservative or
narrow-minded. Because of these facts jealousies
have arisen, opposition has developed, and those
who under normal conditions, would have had
nothing against the fraternity, piqued by the
fact that they have been left out of it, have ignored
the strong points of such an organization and have
engaged in an attack upon its weaknesses.

It is an incontestable fact that the Greek-letter
fraternity has had and still has flaws in its manage-

245

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

ment and weaknesses in its organization as every
other organization has with which I am acquainted.

^Originally the fraternity was a small club which
met at intervals, which was composed of congenial
spirits with similiar ideals, and which made as little
stir in the college community as is now made by
an honorary society or the dramatic clulj; now it
is a home which shelters often far too many souls
for easy management, it is a social force, a politi¬
cal unit, a group which stands out and which many
fellows have a desire to become a part of. When
it was organized the class of students going to
college was very different from the class that now
goes to college with different parentage and dif¬
ferent ideals. The fraternity could be exclusive
then without attracting attention to itself ; it can¬
not do so now, and it is coming to recognize this
fact. As conditions changed a certain lowering
of standards crept in. Scholarship became a less
necessary qualification for membership, moral
standards were less rigid, social finesse was more
generally demanded, the financial standing of a
man’s father came to count for more than the
fellow’s own personal character and worth; ex¬
travagance and dissipation were not uncommon.
With all these conditions criticism was easy and
criticism was just.

But this criticism, this opposition to the con-

246

The Future of the Fraternity

tinuance of the fraternity has been the best thing
which could have happened to it, for it roused the
active members of the organization, and, better
still, it stirred the strong alumni who, though they
were interested in the organization, had yet al¬
lowed that interest to wane and had drifted some¬
what out of touch with their own respective chap¬
ters. Whatever the Interfraternity Conference
may or may not have accomplished, it has at least
stimulated the interest of some of the strongest
and most forceful fraternity men of the country
and has set them to an attempt to solve the
problems of their respective fraternities and to
help meet the opposition against fraternities in
general. The fight against fraternities has caused
fraternity men old and young to study the situa¬
tion, to realize the evil practicies which had crept
in and to go at the elimination of these as quickly
and as forcefully as possible.

Still another thing which this opposition has
done has been to cause fraternity men to realize
that, no matter what organization they may belong
to, whether it was founded in 1824 or 1902, their
interests are similar and each needs the help of
the other. Less than ten years ago I heard a
prominent fraternity man say that he had no
special interest in what other fraternities were
doing or what their difficulties might be; he was

247

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

quite satisfied with his own and quite contended
to give his attention to its problems. No sensible
fraternity man feels so today. He realizes that if
fraternities rise or fall they will do so together;
the interests of one are identical with the interests
of another; no organization is so old or so well
established, or has such assured standing as to be
self-satisfied or immune from danger or from dif¬
ficulty if such may come to the Greek-letter fra¬
ternity in general. We are all in the same boat,
each needs the other’s help ; we shall all sink or land
safely together. Opposition has had its difficul¬
ties, but it has shown us our weaknesses, it has
pointed the way to improvement, it has brought
us friends, advocates, and champions, and it has
already brought about changes and reforms that
would have been undreamed of ten or fifteen years
ago. The late war tested the strength of frater¬
nities more than any event within fifty years. It
stimulated the indifferent, it threw responsibility
upon those who have previously evaded it, and in
the end it proved a help to these organizations.

What of the future? I have the greatest
faith in the future of the college fraternity. It is
founded upon right and noble principles, it has
an opportunity to do a great work in the colleges
of the country, and I believe it is doing such a
work. If it is to realize its greatest possibilities,

248

The Future of the Fraternity

however, it seems to me it must change in certain
ways, it must adjust itself to certain new condi¬
tions, it must strengthen certain principles. Its
future depends upon these things.

The fraternity is going, more and more, to give
attention to scholarship. Colleges were founded
and exist for the purpose of training men intel¬
lectually, and the fraternity must show that it is
one of the agencies which is helping toward that
end. For a long time it was thought to be no
disgrace if fraternity men were found far below the
average scholastically, it was even by some con¬
sidered almost a matter of self-congratulation if
there were no grinds or high grade students in
the chapter; but that day is past. It is every¬
where a matter of unpleasant comment, as it should
be, if the Greek-letter organizations do not keep
the scholarship of their members on a par with the
scholarship of other men. But this is not enough.
If it cannot be shown in the future that the fra¬
ternity is helping men on toward better scho¬
lastic ideals, that a man’s scholarship not only
does not suffer on account of his joining a frater¬
nity, but that on the contrary it is improved, the
fraternity will not have taken the step forward
that I feel sure that it is going to take. There is
not a general gathering of fraternity men any¬
where in the country in these days at which the sub-

249

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

ject of scholarship is not discussed, there is not a
fraternity official who visits an active chapter who
does not dwell upon the subject of scholarship
with feeling, and there is scarcely an active chapter
which does not have its committee or its organiza¬
tion whose duty it is to encourage and to develop
better scholarship. Such an active campaign can
in the future result only in one thing, and that is
in bringing the scholarship of fraternity men to
a higher and more satisfactory standard — a
standard that is above that of the average man.

The fraternity of the future is going to give
more definite and practical attention to its moral
ideals than it has done in the past. The ideals of
the Greek-letter fraternity have always been high,
but they have not always been taken seriously by
the undergraduate. He has too frequently looked
upon them as theoretical rather than practical.
They were, he thought, perhaps, good for initia¬
tion night, but not to be followed and exemplified
in his everyday life. There is less and less every¬
where the feeling that initiation into a fraternity
is with propriety followed by dissipation or an
orgy. The initiation service is rather made so
serious and so real that the initiate is given an
impulse to self-control and an inspiration to a
higher life. In evidence of this fact one need only
compare the character of the dinner and all that

250

The Future of the Fraternity

goes with it following the initiation of today
with what was said and done under similar cir¬
cumstances ten or fifteen years ago. Risque stories,
vulgar suggestions, and drinking are almost en¬
tirely a thing of the past at such gatherings, and
though there is much still that is humorous and
enlivening, as there should be, yet the general
effect is serious and inspiring to higher ideals.
Practically all fraternities have passed regulations
forbidding the bringing of intoxicating liquors
into chapter houses, and every year the number of
fraternity conventions that legislate against in¬
toxicants at fraternity banquets is growing larger.
The fraternity of the future will eliminate intoxi¬
cants of all sorts from its chapter houses and
from its gatherings, and the men who insist upon
drinking at such places will have little vogue and
little influence. As surely as time is advancing
the college fraternity is becoming a temperance
organization. Its future depends upon it.

The college fraternity of the future will have no
uncertain attitude toward the immoralities which
tempt and injure young men. It is interesting to
see how frankly and how generally the effects of
gambling, loafing, and sexual irregularities are
now discussed in fraternity literature and how
little these sins are condoned. The alumnus who
during his undergraduate days has been used to

251

■s

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

considerable liberality with reference to these
things is now not infrequently surprised when he
returns to his chapter to find that the order of
things is changing.

“When we pledged our freshmen this fall,” a
fraternity president said to me not long ago, “we
gave them the idea that we are trying to be a
moral bunch, and we intend to make good on it.
If any of our alumni come back and start irregu¬
larities we’re going to ask them to move out,” and
that is what is going to be generally done in the
future. I have in mind another fraternity ^which
last fall at the time for the annual return of the
old men handed each man a printed slip as he
entered the chapter house warning him that no
drinking or gambling would be tolerated in the
house. Some of the men were irritated for a while,
but their good sense prevailed, and they said that
the result aimed at by the active chapter was the
only one that could be justified if the fraternity
was to live up to its principles and if it was to do its
part, as I believe the fraternity of the future is
going to do, in the strengthening and the develop¬
ment of character.

“I got a vision of the future,” a senior just
returned from a national fraternity convention
said to me. “I had previously looked upon my
fraternity as local, circumscribed in its influence:

252

The Future of the Fraternity

its principles had touched me only vaguely, super¬
ficially. As I listened to the addresses made, and
as I saw the interest and the sacrifice shown by
mature business and professional men in the
progress and development of the fraternity, I felt
that these principles were worth while, that they
were vital, and that with such forces behind them
the fraternity in the future is bound to outstrip
anything that has been accomplished in the past” ;
and so I feel.

Fraternity men are coming to have a more
democratic viewpoint. The whole trend of frater¬
nity legislation is to emphasize the importance of
careful business methods, of the conservative use
of money, of sane and sound business principles in
the conduct of fraternity affairs. The fraternity
man is being taught to look after financial matters,
to pay his bills, to keep out of debt, and to avoid
extravagance. Systems of accounting, and the
regular auditing of chapter accounts are all influ¬
ences to help the fraternity man to appreciate
the value of money and to keep his expenditures
well within his income.

“I thought the fraternity was a brotherhood,”
a father wrote not long ago when his son was being
pressed for the payment of a long overdue house
account. “It is a surprise to me that you would

2 53

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

embarrass a brother by forcing him to pay a debt
before it is convenient.”

“You are right in thinking that the fraternity
is a brotherhood,” the officer addressed wrote in
reply, “but we are of the opinion that the kindest
and most brotherly act which we can perform is
to impress upon our members their obligations to
pay their debts, to live within their income, and
for each to do his part in carrying the financial
obligations of the fraternity.”

As time goes on the fraternity is going to
impress these lessons of business integrity more
and more strongly upon its members, and we shall
hear less and less of financial extravagance, of bills
unpaid, of debts incurred which cannot be met, for
the fraternity man will learn that the fraternity
is a business organization as well as a brotherhood,
and that brotherly love is best expressed by one’s
first meeting his financial obligations.

//The fraternity, as I said, is coming into a
broader democracy, (it is bound in the future to
take men for what they themselves are, quite as
much as fctr what their fathers have been) A fra¬
ternity officer came to the University of Illinois not
long ago to look over a group of young fellows
who were petitioning for a chapter of his frater¬
nity. (They were strong, healthy, wideawake fel¬
lows with good manners and good morals and

254

The Future of the Fraternity

excellent scholastic standing. They were well
thought of in the community, and they were inter¬
ested in all sorts of college activities. } There was
a mixture of foreign names in the list of member¬
ship. The ancestors of some of them had come
from Sweden and Holland, and Germany and
Southeastern Europe. Some of the men were
working in the various positions that are open to
students who find it necessary to help in their
own support.

“In what sorts of business are the fathers of
these men?” the officer asked me when he came from
visiting the club. I told him, and they were all
respectable businesses as we democratic Americans
count respectability.

“My fraternity will never grant a charter to
men of that type,” he said. “They are not gentle¬
men, and my fraternity is an organization of
gentlemen.” y If this man’s statement expresses
the feeling of many fraternity men today, then the
fraternity of the future will have to modify its
ideas with regard to what the characteristics of
a real gentleman are.

There are two young freshmen in my own insti¬
tution with whom I have become pretty familiar
this year who, as fraternity men now look at life
and define “good material,” have little chance to
get into any such organization. They are both

2 55

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

well mannered, well dressed, and excellently pre¬
pared for college. They have good minds and are
doing excellent work. They have self-possession
and reserve, and would not show embarrassment
or self-consciousness in any ordinary social situa¬
tion. They are interested in athletics, and each
will make an athletic team before he is in college
long. But they come from the common people,
too common, the fraternity man might say, for one
is the son of a mechanic and the other is the son
of a janitor and neither is ashamed of his
parentage.

“But you couldn’t take a man like that into
your home,” a man said to me not long ago.

“Why not?” I asked him. “You do introduce
into your home regularly men with cruder manners
and with far lower intellectual and moral ideals.
Why?”

Such men as I have referred to are as sus¬
ceptible to the influences of a fraternity as is any
man. They would make as good friends, they
would develop into as good fellows, and they
would exercise a stronger influence in building
up and strengthening the fraternity than many
men who are now eagerly sought for. The fra¬
ternity of the future is going to take account of
these men; it is going to accept them for what

256

The Future of the Fraternity

they are, for what they are doing, and for what
they are able to do.

In the future the fraternity will need to do
something more than merely to look after itself.
It will not be enough that it bring up its own
scholarship and look after the social welfare and
the characters of its own members, or even that
it cooperate with similar organizations in the gen¬
eral uplift of fraternity men. It must go farther
than this. In the larger institutions of learning
like the state universities even if chapters of all the
Greek-letter fraternities now in existence were to
he found, the number would still be far and awav
inadequate to furnish opportunity for member¬
ship to more than a small percentage of the under¬
graduates registered. In my own institution
there are already established forty-eight Greek-
letter fraternities, which even with unwisely
swollen chapter rolls could not take in more than
one-fourth of the men enrolled. In such an institu¬
tion the future safety of the fraternity is in the
first place dependent very largely upon so increas¬
ing the number of local clubs and fraternities that
as large a percentage as possible of those men
who would enjoy membership in such an organiza¬
tion may have a chance to do so. I believe, there¬
fore, that in the future for its own protection, if
for no other reason, fraternities will take more

257

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

kindly to expansion than many of them have
previously done, but even expansion will not solve
the difficulty.

The fraternity in the future must become to
far greater extent than it has in the past a real
and a vital influence for good to the entire college.
It must be possible where fraternities exist, even
for the man who does not belong, to realize that
through the presence of fraternities and frater¬
nity men he derives some tangible and recognizable
good. It is a new America in which we are living.
It is an America made up of the contributions
from all the various states of Europe. The list
of names of students which one may see in the col¬
lege catalogue of today is suggestive of almost
every country and nationality on the globe. Only
a few days ago I acted as judge of an intercol¬
legiate debate between the students of two of the
great Middle West institutions. The names of
the contestants represented five nationalities —
Swedish, French, German, Dutch, and English,
and the foreigners were the distinctly superior
men both as to their thinking and as to their
delivery. It is this sort of citizen that the frater¬
nity will have to reckon with, and if it will not
take him into its ranks, it will have to do some
thing to make college life more enjoyable and more
profitable for him. The general public will ask,

258

The Future of the Fraternity

“What has the fraternity done for the college
and for college students in general?” and the
organization will have to answer. It cannot afford
to be selfish, it cannot afford to be self-centered,
it must prove its worth by doing something for
the “other man,” it must be possible to show not
only that the fraternity is a good thing for the
men who are in it, but that it is a vital and a con¬
structive force for the betterment of those who
are out of it.

Even in the making of his friends the fraternity
man of the future will not confine himself as
narrowly as he has previously done to the men of
his own chapter. He will go outside of these.
Any man who belongs to a fraternity ought to
count it a privilege to have men outside of the
fraternity house as his friends. He ought to show
to them what friendship to a fraternity man
means; he ought to invite them to his home and
let them see what real home life in college is like ;
as the fraternity has in so large a measure con¬
tributed to his happiness and development he
should utilize it so far as possible to contribute to
theirs.

I believe that the fraternity in the future will
recognize its duties and its obligations. If it does
it will merit the general support of college authori¬
ties, it will win the loyalty and friendship of the

259

4

The Fraternity and the Undergraduate

men outside of the fraternities, it will do a thing
which will bring credit to the organization and
which will disarm criticism. I believe that it will
see its opportunity, that it will adjust itself to
changing conditions in college, and that it will
become an increasingly powerful force in under¬
graduate affairs.

260

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