The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

The fraternity house offers a useful center for returning social courtesies. The students, in their class-day spreads and at other times, may thus indicate their appreciation of social attentions received from townspeople.

All this can be said and said heartily. It may seem that I am making out such a strong case for the fraternities that any criticism offered later will be of no avail. It would be unfair, however, not to state the advantages as strongly as one’s own judgment would approve.

But there are certain offsets in fraternity life which must come up for an equally frank and thorough consideration. There is a constant tendency in any fraternity house to spend more time and more money than many a student can afford. No fellow of spirit can allow others to treat him, take him to the theater, show him all manner of attentions without feeling an obligation resting upon him to return these courtesies. A few men in a fraternity with rich fathers, large allowances, and warm hearts, can, with no sort of wrong intent, set the pace in such a way as to demoralize a whole group of young men. The man of modest means and simple habits, dependent upon a hard-working father for his education and for all the comforts of his home life, is apparently forced into a gait which it is wrong for him to take. He does not intend to be mean or cruel, but he adopts a scale of expenditure which he cannot afford; he runs into debt; he becomes unjust to his parents, who are making sacrifices for his education. It requires more grit than nine out of ten young fellows of the high school or college age possess, to stand up and oppose the course of action which leads to these ill-advised “good times.”

It is to be regretted that simplicity is so overborne in all our social life by the elaborate and the expensive. Business men, husbands, and fathers, are being killed off, before their time, by nervous prostration, heart disease, or exhaustion of other vital organs, in making the necessary money to keep it up. Society women, mothers and daughters, are being sent to sanitariums and rest cures by reason of the strenuous tasks imposed upon them in devising and arranging new and elaborate ways of spending the money. What a caricature much of it is upon real social life, which ought to be a joy, a recreation, a means of relief from serious work, but never a burdensome, exacting labor!

The young girl in high school gives a luncheon for her fraternity elaborate enough for a society woman of fifty. The boys plan for a good time on a scale which might indicate that they were solid business men well on in their prime, with fortunes of their own earning completely at their disposal. The whole tendency of it is bad and only bad. The simple pleasures are the best for everybody and especially so for young people. The tuxedo is not a suitable garment for a five-year-old boy even though his father is able to buy him a hundred of them; and some of our social activity is quite as ridiculous as such a coat would be on the youngster. It rears up a set of young people who, having tasted it all and become blasé before their time, are now nervously intent upon some new sensation by more startling and stimulating forms of social life. And all the while the simple, serious, quiet interests of education have been suffering a loss irreparable.

There is also the tendency in most fraternity houses toward a wasteful use of time. Where there is a lounging room with its open fire, the university colors, pillows, pictures, trophies scattered about, and a group of jolly good fellows always accessible, it is not easy to turn one’s back upon it and sit alone digging on some difficult subject. Eve holding out an apple or even a ripe peach in the garden of Eden suffers by comparison when placed alongside the temptations thus offered to a student whose will may already be a trifle lame.

I recall a certain fraternity house which I watched for a number of years. Splendid fellows they were—my heart warms within me as I think of their faces! It was always Indian summer there—cigarette smoke until one could scarcely see through it. It would not be entirely true to say that one could cut it with a knife; some stronger implement would have been needed, an axe maybe—perhaps “the Stanford axe.” A number of the boys were keen and the jolly talk was sometimes equal to a page from “Life” or “Fliegende Blätter.”

But men cannot make perpetual chimneys of themselves in order to furnish such a volume of smoke or become perpetual jokers without imperiling certain other interests, much more important than smoke or jokes. And that same fraternity, genuinely attractive though it was in its social aspects, became the banner house on the campus for furnishing men who suddenly went home at the end of the term, because “their fathers needed them in business,” or because “their health would not stand the strain of college study”—those graceful explanations which sound well and deceive nobody, either at the college end or the home end of the line. The constant tendency in all fraternity life is to spend upon pleasure more time and more money than the average student can justly afford.

There is furthermore the tendency to a narrow exclusiveness which sometimes degenerates into actual snobbishness. This is especially true of the high-school fraternities. The spirit of narrow clannishness is stronger then than later. Breadth of sympathy, which ought to be the spirit of our public schools, is thus destroyed. The girl is tempted to think that, out of hundreds of girls in high school, only the little group of twenty in her own fraternity are fine, choice girls. When the social interests are thus being “cribbed, cabined, and confined,” it is not a long step to the spirit of that bigot who prayed, “O Lord, bless me and my wife, my son John and his wife, us four and no more.” The “us four and no more” attitude is apparent to thoughtful observers in almost all of the high-school fraternities. The larger loyalty and broader sympathy is overborne by a narrowed social interest.

It is the judgment of an ever-increasing number of men at the head of the secondary schools that the high-school fraternities at least are nuisances. This is their verdict in spite of the fact that many of the best students are members of them, striving to make them helpful, not hurtful. But when the losses and the gains are accurately computed, the losses seem to far outrank the gains. The spirit of social exclusiveness is opposed to the spirit of our public schools and encourages the development of qualities that have no rightful place in American young people.