# The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (collection)/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 betterment of the undergraduate and of the college community 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 character and training of those who now enter were as ​different as it is possible for a changing civilization 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 obligations; 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 institutions 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​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 club; now it is a home which shelters often far too many souls for easy management, it is a social force, a political 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 different ideals. The fraternity could be exclusive then without attracting attention to itself; it cannot 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; extravagance and dissipation were not uncommon. With all these conditions criticism was easy and criticism was just.
But this criticism, this opposition to the con​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 allowed that interest to wane and had drifted somewhat out of touch with their own respective chapters. 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 situation, 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 ​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 difficulty if such may come to the Greek-letter fraternity 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 difficulties, 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 fraternities 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, ​however, it seems to me it must change in certain ways, it must adjust itself to certain new conditions, 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 intellectually, 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 considered 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 everywhere 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 fraternity is helping men on toward better scholastic ideals, that a man's scholarship not only does not suffer on account of his joining a fraternity, 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 anywhere in the country in these days at which the sub​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 organization 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 initiation night, but not to be followed and exemplified in his everyday life. There is less and less everywhere 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 ​goes with it following the initiation of today with what was said and done under similar circumstances ten or fifteen years ago. Risque stories, vulgar suggestions, and drinking are almost entirely 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 intoxicants at fraternity banquets is growing larger. The fraternity of the future will eliminate intoxicants 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 ​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 irregularities 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 development 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: ​its principles had touched me only vaguely, superficially. 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 fraternity 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 influences 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 ​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 for what their fathers have been. A fraternity 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 fraternity. They were strong, healthy, wide-awake fellows with good manners and good morals and ​excellent scholastic standing. They were well thought of in the community, and they were interested in all sorts of college activities. There was a mixture of foreign names in the list of membership. 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 gentlemen, and my fraternity is an organization of gentlemen." 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 institution 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 ​well mannered, well dressed, and excellently prepared 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 situation. 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 susceptible 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 fraternity of the future is going to take account of these men; it is going to accept them for what ​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 coöperate with similar organizations in the general 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 membership to more than a small percentage of the undergraduates 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 institution the future safety of the fraternity is in the first place dependent very largely upon so increasing the number of local clubs and fraternities that as large a percentage as possible of those men who would enjoy membership in such an organization may have a chance to do so. I believe, therefore, that in the future for its own protection, if for no other reason, fraternities will take more ​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 fraternity 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 college 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 intercollegiate 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 fraternity 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, ​"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 constructive 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 contributed 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 authorities, it will win the loyalty and friendship of the ​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 undergraduate affairs.