The Fraternity and the College (collection)/The Fraternity and the College
When a young fellow asks me to advise him whether or not he should become a fraternity man, or having himself decided that question in a general way wants me to suggest the suitable organization for him, I feel thrust into about the same position as I should be in were I asked to decide whether or not he should marry or were I delegated to choose one from a number of possible candidates for the proposed partnership. Since I have been asked at one time or another to solve both of these matrimonial dilemmas for my student friends, perhaps I should not hesitate to tackle so serious a problem as is that presented by the fraternity.
I believe that the college Greek-letter fraternity is an institution that has come to stay, and that on the whole it is a good one. Some state legislatures are attempting to decide the question as to whether or not Greek-letter fraternities shall be allowed in certain institutions, but this decision is properly a matter entirely for the educational institutions themselves. It is in no small sense an educational matter which belongs distinctly in the hands of the faculties and no more concerns state legislatures than the question as to whether students should be allowed to keep automobiles or bull dogs, or whether they should be allowed to board at lunch counters or to live in private dormitories.
It is a natural tendency for young people, and especially for young men, to join more or less closely into groups for the furtherance and the development of mutual interests, and it is a tendency which we should expect and foster in college as elsewhere. Far back in my youth in the country neighborhood in which I lived it was the habit of a special group of boys with whom I associated to meet at more or less regular intervals under the "Iron Bridge" or up in the hay loft to discuss plans and projects of mutual interest. We, too, had our secrets and our signs almost as serious and as significant as are those of the college fraternity today. I knew by the peculiar note which he uttered as he passed our door when Bill Boys was going home at night, and I learned to convey unwritten volumes across the school room to Taylor Curtis through the mystic symbols of our order. Even today, at middle age, I have my pals, and we meet together at intervals and are bound together by bonds not unlike those which gripped me to those companions of my childhood. In a similar way, though now in a more tangible and a more businesslike way, the members of a college fraternity are bound. If the young man can afford it, for like everything else worth while the fraternity costs something, if such an organization appeals to him, if he can fall in with a group of men who are congenial, and if he is willing to make the sacrifice of time and the readjustment of habits necessary to live with such a group successfully, I usually advise him, if he is asked, to join a fraternity.
I am quite familiar through intimate association with my colleagues and through general reading, with the many and serious objections which have been urged against fraternities. Every year I meet fathers and friends of college students, for the most part men who have never been to college or if they have been who know little or nothing first hand about fraternities, who believe these organizations wholly undemocratic and wholly bad, and who give credence to what they hear about fraternities, as they have faith in the stories published in city papers concerning the riot, rapine and wholesale destruction ordinarily supposed to be waged at the usual student celebration. There has been extant for some years, I know, the general impression that the young men being educated at the institution with which I am connected are accustomed to burn down or demolish a theatre or two following each athletic victory of the various teams, when in point of fact the entire destruction caused by the escapades of five thousand students and their followers in twenty years has not exceeded two hundred and fifty dollars, and there is excellent evidence to show that a considerable portion of this was caused by the rabble which is unconnected with the institution but which follows in the wake of these celebrations. So I believe it could be shown if some one would take the pains to investigate that many of the delinquencies which are laid at the doors of fraternities are placed there unjustly and might better be distributed evenly throughout the student body.
Having said so much, however, I am willing to grant that many of the charges which have been urged against fraternities are not without some foundation. Fraternities and fraternity men can easily be found that illustrate the charges of extravagance and dissipation, and snobbishness, and loafing: But the age at which young men go to college is an age when they most easily fall a prey to the temptations to these habits and illustrations are not confined to fraternity men. I could name on any day of the week during the college year men in organizations and out of them and men even in the church of which I am a member who are snobs wasting both their time and their money; but the Presbyterian Church is still a pretty respectable organization. The charges which, a few years ago, were made by Mr. R. T. Crane of Chicago against college men were in no small degree true. Mr. Crane's error was not so much in preferring these charges as in failing to observe that the extravagance, and moral irregularities of which he accused college young men are in a much larger degree true of young men who do not go to college. It is true no doubt that fraternity men have in many cases been extravagant and dissipated and lazy, but it can be shown that in every institution where these fraternity derelicts are found as in every town or community there are plenty of men outside of the fraternities who with an equal amount of money at their disposal and equal opportunity are equally sinners.
The indiscretions of a man who belongs to an organization attract more attention and arouse more comment than do those of the individual not so connected. When a fraternity man errs, the character of all his brothers suffers just as when one man in a group coming home late at night is drunk the whole crowd is said to be "stewed." A good many years ago an alumnus of a fraternity with which I am acquainted, during a summer vacation, planned and carried out a party in the chapter house at which some of the men were disgracefully drunk, and the matter became known. He was the only member of the fraternity present, the affair was contrary to the rules of the organization, it was without the knowledge of any one in the active chapter, and the man was severely disciplined. Wise objectors to fraternities remember the event still, and I think honestly believe that the same sort of orgies yet go on regularly in this house, though it is in fact one of the best conducted at the institution where it is established, and the charges made against it are entirely false. One spendthrift, one gambler, one unclean or intemperate member in a group is likely to give his reputation to the whole fraternity, and the organization and fraternities in general suffer as a result. At a large fraternity gathering which I attended not long ago one representative of a western chapter became intoxicated and made a public fool of himself. The chapter of which he was a member and all the representatives of it suffered in reputation and in influence through the exhibition of the weak character of this one man. On the other hand, one such man unconnected with an organization passes practically without comment and has little effect upon the general reputation of the student body. My experience has been that the faults and dissipations attributed to fraternities exist in much smaller degree than is generally supposed, and not proportionately in any materially greater degree than would on investigation be discovered in the general student body. As a disciplinary officer in an institution which numbers approximately five thousand young men, most of whom I know personally, I have had ample opportunity during the last dozen years to make daily observations, and I have drawn the conclusions just stated with a good many detailed facts in mind.
So far as I know the irregular conditions which exist in fraternities in one college or another are characteristic of the general student body in which they exist, and may be attributed either to indifference on the part of the members of the faculty, lack of sympathy for student matters, or actual inefficiency as regards student discipline and control. It would not be either good taste or good judgment for me to name specific instances to substantiate these statements, but if I were permitted to do so it would not be difficult to cite many illustrations. Sometime ago I visited one institution, for example, where objectionable fraternity conditions have been widely advertised. The fraternity men are here said to be given generally to drinking and dissipation and perhaps truthfully so; but it is true, also, so far as I could see from a pretty careful observation of conditions covering a period of several days at two or three different times, that members of the general student body are equally given to these irregularities and further than this, that many members of the faculty are not free from criticism. At this institution I was invited freely to the homes of members of the faculty, and I have no recollection of being at any such house where liquor of some sort was not served, and this whether students were present or not. At the faculty club there was general drinking, and at times to such an extent as quite perceptibly to increase the drinker's spirits. I recall having been at a dinner here attended by perhaps seventy-five students and members of the faculty at which drinking was general, and the members of the faculty present showed quite as much color and undue exhilaration as a result as did any student. A considerable amount of drunkenness among the students was evidenced at the end of the week, and when I inquired from a prominent member of the faculty what was done in such cases, I discovered that no one assumed any responsibility for these things, and no official notice was taken of them.
One member of the faculty said that he did not wish to know what students were doing and when business called him to pass through the locality where students were likely to be seen in an intoxicated condition, he managed if possible to take a round-about road. Not only was no intelligent attempt made to regulate these matters in the fraternities, but the general student body followed its own sweet will, and the members of the faculty in their own homes and in their club houses set the students an example of drinking which these same students, being young and without the mature judgment of their elders, followed often neither wisely nor well. For an objectionable custom which, it seemed to me, was quite general, the fraternities got the advertising and the criticism. The only difference which I can see in these cases between the fraternity man who drinks to excess and those outside of such organizations who do the same thing is that the fraternity man goes to destruction with his friends about him, while the other men have perhaps a less sociable but an equally destructive experience. In this institution to which I have referred I believe the faculty was wholly to blame for conditions. It set the students an example publicly and privately, it took no responsibility and exercised no disciplinary control, but weakly allowed to continue a practice which can only be subversive of all that tends to the development of good citizens.
My visit to other prominent institutions where fraternity difficulties have arisen and where there has been general criticism of the habits and life of the men in these organizations has led me to the conclusion that in most if not in all cases the conditions in the fraternities is only a slightly exaggerated instance of what may be found generally—among the student body. For these conditions, whatever they may be, I do not believe the fraternities or any other undergraduate organizations can be or should be wholly blamed. My experience for twenty-five years with thousands of undergraduate men leads me to the conclusion that the undergraduate student is on the whole a fair-minded, reasonable being, who is not beyond control, who wants generally to do right, and who whether in fraternities or out of them, is pretty likely to respect a reasonable college law. If colleges have had difficulties, I believe the trouble lies mainly with the faculty, who have not kept awake to student conditions or exercised control or who have been too weak or too indifferent or ignorant to discipline flagrant offenders. The same reason exists too frequently now as existed in the institution in which I was an undergraduate; those members of the faculty who knew of the devilment which was going on did not care, and those members who cared did not know, and so the difficulties increased and insubordination ran riot.
I have not intended this paper primarily as a defense of fraternities, though I think such a defense could without difficulty be made. I have meant it to show that Greek-letter fraternities are not in themselves more artificial than are the ordinary conditions of living in college; they are the outcome of a tendency of young people and old in all conditions and walks of life to form into groups for mutual pleasure and advancement in one line of endeavor or another. If fraternities have not been a source of strength and help in college, it is not the fault of the fraternities but the fault of the college authorities who have not set the proper example or shown the proper interest, or exercised the proper supervision or control over their undergraduates—who have in short let the student body run away with them, and who are to blame for it.
In the remainder of this paper I want to show how, in an institution of more than five thousand students during a period of nearly fifteen years, fraternities and similar organizations have been a real help to me. As an undergraduate student in the University of Illinois I had no connection with Greek-letter fraternities and no first hand knowledge of them. They were not permitted at that time in the institution, and I was led to believe that they were altogether objectionable. They were later allowed to reorganize in the University, and as an executive officer charged with the supervision of student conduct, student problems, and student activities, I became very intimately associated with these and other similar student organizations. The fact that shortly after leaving college I became a member of a Greek-letter fraternity, I believe has not in any undue degree prejudiced me in their favor.
One of the most practical things which the fraternities have done for the University of Illinois within the last fifteen years is materially to help in taking care of the problems of housing students at a reasonable rate. The fact that eleven of our fraternities have built and own their houses and that most of the others have interested property owners and real estate men to build for them proper homes has helped in a small place where there are no dormitories and where good lodging houses are only too rare, to provide comfortable homes for fully a thousand men. The conditions under which these students in fraternity houses live are on the whole satisfactory. The study rooms are quite as convenient as they could get outside of these houses, the bathing and toilet facilities are more than ordinarily adequate, and such students besides have the run of an entire house. The board furnished is not more expensive than that to be obtained at most regular boarding houses about the campus, and in almost every case it is of better quality, is better cooked and far more carefully served. The opportunities for work and study in these houses are as good for those who really want to work as they are anywhere. All the organizations have definite house rules as to hours of study, and all of these rules prohibit drinking and gambling in the houses. It is a satisfaction to be able to say, also, that in a very large majority of cases these rules are seriously enforced.
With an indifferent landlady and lax house rules or no rules at all the student who lives outside of a fraternity house may have much less careful supervision than does the fraternity man, and his irregularities of life are much less likely to be detected and corrected than are those of the fraternity man. It is a great gratification to me, therefore, to know where all these men live, how they are taken care of, and the conditions under which they do their work. With us at least it is not true that fraternity men live in surroundings more luxurious than those to which they are accustomed at home and those to which they are likely to be accustomed when they leave college. Some of the houses, it is true, are beautiful and a few of them have cost a considerable sum of money, but the rooms in which students live are in no case luxurious, and in most cases are quite as humble in their furnishings as the student has been used to or will find when he leaves college. Usually the first floor rooms of a fraternity house are well furnished, but even these have little of actual luxury. In order that these statements may not be wholly theory, I make a practice of keeping regularly in touch with some of the older men in each one of the organizations, and at some time during the year I manage to visit and take a meal with them. I have been from cellar to garret of most of the fraternity houses of which I have spoken. The total living expenses for each student in these houses, including board, lodging, and the general running expenses of the house, average about thirty-three dollars a month. Some organizations who live in small houses keep their expenses below this amount and some run above it, but the variation is not great in either direction, and is little or no more than a student would have to pay for similar accommodations outside of a fraternity house.
The control of students living in fraternities is likely to be more satisfactory than of those living in dormitories controlled either by private individuals or by the University, for the students living in a fraternity house are controlled by officers whom they have elected and are under rules which they have themselves devised and approved. Fraternity freshmen sometimes, it is true, try to evade rules and succeed in deceiving the fraternity officers, but the spirit in which regulations are regarded and discipline is received is altogether more kindly than is true of such things in a private or an institutional dormitory. I have found, also, that these officers ordinarily take their responsibilities more seriously than do the officers in a private dormitory, and get satisfactory results more easily. I generally find that a fraternity officer can enforce the regulations in the chapter without much difficulty, and this is not always equally true in the dormitory. The man in the dormitory can move if he is dissatisfied; the fraternity man cannot, and so learns to take his medicine without serious protest.
In the correction of the habits or the conduct of individual students or in the stimulation of lazy or indifferent students to better scholastic work, I have regularly found the fraternities—helpful. I have made it a point to know the men in each chapter, and to coöperate with the officers of the fraternity in every way possible in developing these men in the best way. Our records for some time past have shown that the freshmen living in fraternity houses have a higher standing than have those freshmen who live outside of these houses. If a fraternity man is behind in his college work or is developing into a loafer, in addition to the influence which I as a college officer can have upon him I have learned that if I have a talk with the president of his fraternity and place the situation before him, I can have added to my own influence the influence of the whole fraternity, which in many instances is much more potent than my own. If fraternity men are developing bad moral habits I am always able to find some influential upperclassman in the organization who will take the matter in hand and help to correct it. Over and over again fraternity officers come to me in confidence and ask me to help them to correct the habits or the conduct of erring brothers. Often they tell the man concerned that they are intending to elicit my aid and the whole thing is quite open and frank.
Only last spring two fraternity officers came to me and said, "Two of our sophomores are developing bad associations down town; they are learning to drink, and they have more than once come home drunk. We have done what we could, but the conditions are not improved. We want you to help us." I called the men, we talked it over, they promised to break away from their harmful associations, and they have kept their promise. This fraternity was not an unusual one nor was it a particularly "Sunday School" organization; in fact it was quite the contrary, but it had standards of conduct and of scholarship which these men were violating, and they were thus helping to lower the standing of the fraternity. The case of another student is interesting. He is a boy of excellent mind but of weak principles. He had been guilty during his first two years in college of a number of derelictions of which I had talked seriously to him. His influence, I felt, was growing bad. He was a ready promiser who admitted usually more than I accused him of and offered immediate and complete reformation. His reform, however, was usually short lived. I was convinced that he ought to be sent away from college, but before having him dismissed I called the president of his fraternity and put the facts before him. He asked to be given a final chance at the man and I consented, with the understanding with the man and his fraternity officer that if his conduct in the future should prove objectionable, I should be informed and the man should sever his connection with the institution. Only a short time ago the president of the fraternity came to me again and said that he could do nothing with the other man, and expressed a willingness in the interest of the progress and the moral standing of the fraternity, to have him go. The student was given a chance to withdraw and did so. I could multiply these illustrations indefinitely as to the help which fraternities almost daily give to me in their desire to strengthen their individual members and so to raise the standing of their chapter and of the University.
Perhaps no one undergraduate custom has done the University more harm during the last ten or fifteen years than the practice of hazing. It developed rapidly, the student escapades were grossly exaggerated by the newspapers, and it bade fair to injure the institution seriously. During the last three years there has been practically no hazing, and during the present year I do not know of a single case. This changed condition cannot be attributed directly to fraternities, for the college authorities used every effort to stamp out the practice and disciplined severely those men who were detected in it, but it can be said truthfully that only rarely were fraternities seriously mixed up in the custom, and that there grew up in these organizations a general sentiment against it. Even at the outset when fraternities were not actively opposed to hazing they were only to a very limited degree engaged in it, and later they became in a more active manner to frown upon it. Because of their failure as organizations to participate actively in the practice and because of the active work which many of the leading fraternity men did in opposition to hazing, the fraternities have helped us materially in stamping out the practice.
The two towns between which our University is located have had during the past few years some very severe and interesting fights on the local option question. When the towns voted for temperance regulations a few years ago it was virtually the work of the students which brought this condition about, and the men at the head of the organization which accomplished the business were largely fraternity men. Because they were already in organization it was easier for them to organize. It must not be supposed, either, that those who worked the hardest for local option laws were themselves men who never drank. Many men said to me that although they were in no sense total abstainers, they felt that it was for the best interests of the towns that they should go dry, and so they were glad to use their influence to bring this condition about.
In the development of principles of honesty and in the discouraging of cribbing, fraternities have, generally used their influence in the right direction. Here again the influence of leadership counts. I was discussing only recently with one of our freshman fraternity men the question of dishonesty in examinations. "We have had pretty definite directions at our house," he said, "as to what we should do. Our president called us together before examinations began and gave us a straight talk about being square and honest and above board during the examinations." Is it by such methods as this that the fraternities may help and have helped to encourage honesty in classroom work.
The fraternity sets before its members, also, certain standards of manners, the effects of which can be seen everywhere. The fraternity man who is crude, or coarse, or impolite, or ill-trained has some one to correct him, has some one usually to set a good example before him. The man outside must work these things out for himself, as he very frequently does, or remain as he is. Whether one eats with his knife, or sits when a lady comes into the room, or keeps his hat on when he talks to her on the street, or fails to call on the hostess who has entertained him at dinner, or sidesteps the reception line at a dance, may be in themselves trifling, but they may show the difference between good and bad manners. The fraternity man usually finds some one willing to point out to him these errors if he makes them, while the other man may stumble on indefinitely in a condition of ignorance. The real fraternity is a home, and those living in it usually get a good deal of the social training that one may rightfully expect to receive in a home. Careful dress and nice manners are learned largely by example and associations, and this example and these proper associations one is very likely to find in the fraternity house. I do not underestimate the value of sterling worth, but it counts for much more when linked with courtesy and a neat appearance.
The fraternity as an organization helps materially in the training of college leaders. The man who can successfully stand at the head of a group of twenty-five or thirty men, who can manage a household as it were with all the multifarious things that such management implies, is usually well fitted for leadership in other ways. Fraternity men manage their own house servants, oversee the care of their houses, care for the finances of these houses, and take many serious responsibilities which men outside of these organizations may evade. The men at the head of things in our University are for these reasons usually fraternity men, not because they are naturally more capable or more reliable than are other men, and not because fraternities by their political influence put their men at the head of affairs, but because they have had more experience and because they have at the outset an organization to help them in whatever they are undertaking.
Every college or university must depend upon its alumni for the accomplishment of certain work for its advancement. There are of course some alumni whose influence is not all that could be desired, but the live, right-minded alumnus, especially the alumnus of a state university, can do much to keep the institution in a right light before the citizens of the state upon which it must depend for its support. He is in a sense its advertising agent. If he gets out of touch or out of sympathy with his alma mater, she thereby suffers a great loss. The fraternity more than any other agency that I am acquainted with helps to tie a man to his old associations and to anchor him to the college. The fraternity after the undergraduate has finished his course and leaves college furnishes him a place to come back to; when he drops into the fraternity house after an absence of a few years there is still some one there who knows him, there are many more who have heard of him, and all are glad to see him. He still has a home at the old place into which he can fit as easily, usually, as when he was an undergraduate. Of the thousands of men who last fall returned at the time of our annual Home-coming a very large per cent were fraternity men, and this was true because these men had had some very definite interests when they were in college, they had some one on the ground to call them back, and they had a place to go when they got back. Their return even for the pleasure only of renewing old associations still binds them more closely to the University and makes their coöperation more certain when it is needed.
My experience as an executive officer, then, is that Greek-letter fraternities and similar organizations in college have been to me of the greatest service in advancing the best interests of the University as I believe they may be to other college officers in a similar situation, if they will but study how best to utilize them. Instead of working to get rid of these organizations as some college officers seem to desire to do, I am glad to—encourage their development because in them I see an easier control and direction of student enterprises, student activities, and student thought, and an easier development of the right sort of student morals and ideals.