Why go to College?

by Clayton Sedgwick Cooper

COLLEGE FRATERNITY LIFE

The Greek-letter society is found at the heart of these undergraduate social activities. Indeed, fraternities have become in many institutions as much the center of the college itself as of college society. So far as social and moral influences go, the character of the fraternity which a young man joins is quite as important as the college or university he selects. The fraternity students represent the “system” in college: they choose athletic managers, they exert the “pull” which controls editorship upon the college papers, they determine largely the presidents of classes, and in some cases the elections to senior societies.

The membership of the thirty-five national Greek-letter fraternities (not to mention a hundred or more local fraternities or the fifty fraternities of the professional schools) now comprises 200,000 undergraduates and graduates. These figures do not include the twenty intercollegiate sororities that claim 250 chapters and 25,000 members. Three hundred and seventy colleges and universities at present contain chapters of national Greek-letter fraternities, and millions are invested in the buildings of these societies. An almanac for 1911 ascribes 1013 fraternity-houses to American colleges. Half a million dollars is invested in chapter-houses at the University of Michigan alone. The property of the eleven fraternities at Amherst had twenty times greater money value than Yale’s available funds in 1830; and the property of the fraternities at Columbia, valued at a million dollars, are as great as the total productive funds of all the colleges at the beginning of the last century.

The college fraternity or the college club becomes responsible for a large and representative part of the undergraduate life in America. It is usually responsible for the histrionics in university life, and there is perhaps no literary tendency more pronounced in our colleges to-day than that toward the making of the drama. Several important plays of recent years may be traced to graduates who were members of such clubs as “The Hasty Pudding” of Harvard and “The Mask and Wig” of Pennsylvania. At a time when confessedly there is a crying demand for good, strong plays at the theater, it is agreeable to hear that the classes of professors of dramatic literature are crowded.

Furthermore, the fraternity is no longer simply a debating society; it is also a student-home. There is an increasing tendency, especially on the part of state institutions, to make it possible for college fraternities to erect their buildings on the campus. Every fraternity-house is the product of much thought, liberal support, and often sacrifice, on the part of influential alumni. College authorities are seriously considering the many problems connected with these organizations, for thousands of undergraduates find their homes in them for four very impressionable years. The general attitude of the faculties is wisely not one of repression or of drastic regulation by rules, but, as President Faunce of Brown has expressed it, of “sympathetic understanding, constant consultation, and the endeavor to enlist fraternities in the best movements in college life.”

There is, moreover, a plain tendency on the part of members of college fraternities to face the dangers as well as to enjoy the advantages connected with such societies. They realize that these organizations can be effectively influenced only by a leavening process within the fraternity itself, for external pressure and rules have never yet succeeded in forming or changing student sentiment. The fraternity can establish manliness and decency, or sportiness and laziness, as its ideals, and these ideals are clearly reflected in the membership. The inclination of these bodies to assume definite responsibility for the moral welfare of their members is indicated by the action of some of the old national fraternities, which have chosen efficient field-secretaries to travel among the chapters in order to study conditions and to assist in the direction, control, and general betterment of fraternity activities. The type of men selected for membership is being more carefully scrutinized. In a considerable and growing number of institutions, students are not chosen for membership until the end of the freshman year; there is thus needful opportunity on both sides for more intelligent choice.

More and more the coöperation of fraternity alumni is being sought by the authorities. These graduates, who are often largely responsible for the fine houses of the fraternities, are justly called upon by the college to assist in maintaining proper regulations within them. Moreover, assurance is given that the fraternity itself wishes to coöperate with the faculty in securing a higher grade of scholarship, which fraternity life too frequently menaces, and in demanding the reform of conditions leading to delinquency of all kinds. There is no police force really effective for a college community but a student police force, and this operates not by external pressure, but by internal persuasion.

A real danger of the modern college fraternity lies in its distraction from the real work of the college—study and the intellectual life—through habits of indifference, laziness, or immorality. The chapter-house tends to suggest that college work is optional, not imperative. “Thou shalt not loaf!” as an eleventh commandment, written across the doorposts of a fraternity club-house in the Middle West, is no inappropriate injunction. The undue and distressing waste of time in inconsequent and foolish play, the inevitable interruptions, the dissipations of social events, the inane profligacy, the autocracy of athletics, the feeble conversations that “skim like a swallow over the surface of reality”—all these are too often the doubtful compensations received by the college man as fraternity privileges.

“The modern world is an exacting one,” says ex-President Woodrow Wilson, “and the things that it exacts are mostly intellectual.” One often wonders, in visiting the fraternities of America, how large a place this intellectual work holds in college life. Was that Eastern college professor justified in saying that some fraternity men are not unlike the old farmer down East who was usually to be found in a comfortable arm-chair in the post-office, and when asked what he did, replied, “I just set and think, and set and think, and sometimes I just set.” The fraternity-house that becomes a place to “set” rather than a place to work is hardly a credit to a college campus. As President Northrop said to some society men at the University of Minnesota, “If your fraternity is not a place for intellectual and moral incitements, it is a failure, and it must go the way of all failures.”