Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/166

 making up the averages assigned a grade of sixty to all courses which the student dropped without permission at the time of the final examination. Sometimes when a fraternity has been particularly desirous of keeping up its scholastic standing, its officers have forced members who were likely to bring down the average and who had no hope of pulling up to withdraw before the end of the semester. It is not now with us an uncommon practice for fraternities to withdraw the pledge button from students whose scholastic standing is low and who show neither ability nor desire to raise it. The methods employed and the motives which the various fraternities have employed for raising their scholastic standing may not always be as commendable nor as high as we could desire, but we should not, perhaps, be over critical. The methods employed to get people into the early Christian Church and for keeping them there, if we may believe history, were not all that might be wished for.

Whatever the reason or the method employed to gain the result, fraternities are undoubtably coming to have a greater interest in scholarship than they once had, and for this I rejoice. Since fraternities take only what they consider the pick of the secondary schools, there is every reason to expect them not only to maintain a scholastic average equal to the general college average, but