SOCIAL EXCLUSIVENESS
IN the colleges and universities should develop in this direction, what would become of the fraternities? The double system of cottages and clubs would remove the practical reasons for their existence. There is no work that they claim to do for the few that could not be done for the whole either in a cottage organization of students or by a club. They would be driven back upon the real ground of their growing prosperity in our land of the Newly Made—social exclusiveness. On that basis doubtless they will continue to exist. There will always be some people who will wish to wear a badge possessed by the few, who will wish to retire into an inner circle of common knowledge and common acquaintance where they are safe in feeling superior to those whom they keep outside as far as the choice lies with themselves. But these cliques, whatever each thinks of itself, will be forced to yield to the larger organizations of students both the control of affairs and the right to set the fashion in character and in social customs. They may become specialists in “cliquocracy”—the frat of the Vans and the frat of the Vons and the frat of the Log-Cabin Ancestors, the frat of the Ultra-Platonists, the frat of the Super-Bogies, and the frat of the Number-Two Shoes. That is, if the element of good which the fraternities give to their members is supplied to all college students in other ways, the fraternities themselves are bound to dwindle and shrivel until they become mere social excrescences, curiosities of aristocratic affinities.
THE FRATERNITY BADGE
Probably it is too late to make a stand. The fraternities are strong among the privileged classes, and tenacious of their privilege. They see, as who does not, that in an age and a country where opportunities are increasingly restricted to the few, this caste system of education is the best possible preparation to enable the few to use the opportunities that are theirs, in that it gives them all the social powers and affiliations by which chiefly the few rule the many; and the development of the individual is not the concern of a system that works to make corporate bodies closed against individual striving.
When one remembers the movement against the high-school fraternities, one is tempted for a moment to hope for a revision of popular opinion. How should what is generally condemned for the years between twelve and twenty be approved for the years between sixteen and twenty-four? Is there so wide a difference between the fraternity idea as it finds expression in the high-school girl of eighteen and the college girl of eighteen? The very women who most earnestly advocate the system in the colleges are bent upon driving it out of the high schools. Yet the fact that neither the joint effort of parents and teachers and state legislation has succeeded in this, argues ill for any successful movement against it in the colleges.
A NEW ALTRUISM NEEDED
WHAT can we do? We need a new religion to teach the subordination of personal good to communal welfare. We believe in it theoretically, we are anxious that our neighbors should practise it; but when it cuts home, we falter and fail. We see the evils of the fraternity system, and the fraternity people are among our most desirable acquaintances. We like them for friends and especially for our children’s friends. We argue against the system and preach its abolition; but when Alice goes to college and is rushed by Beta and Gamma and Kappa in eager rivalry, we step down from the pulpit and rejoice with her and suffer with her anxious little heart until she is safely housed within the chapter that has the best standing.
And yet we do not call ourselves snobs. There must be a top layer. Why should not we be in it? Democracy? Yes; but that we and our children are to be on the same level with venders and hagglers and foreigners and other impossible people—absurd! Let us hasten to put on the Alpha Omega pin, which assures public recognition of our social superiority.
In other words, we still care more for individual distinction than for the welfare of society. I have heard more than a few thoughtful fraternity women sum up their position thus: “I hate the system; I deplore it! But as it’s here, I’ve got to be in it because I can’t bear to be left outside!” Can we fight this spirit? Can we win? If we do, the victory will mean that we have grown wise and sane and strong enough for such a democracy as the world has never yet known.