Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/11



The history, the organization, and the purpose of a college Greek-letter fraternity are about as vague in the mind of the average native of my state as are his ideals of Greek life and customs in the time of Sophocles, and I do not believe that the natives of my state are in great degree more ignorant than are the citizens of adjacent states. Unfortunately the large majority of those who have written about fraternities, more especially those who have written against them, have had very little first hand information. What they say ought not to be given too much weight in discussing fraternities. Their invectives remind me of an experience of my undergraduate days.

The state university which I attended was, in fact, a pretty orderly, quiet, steady institution whose faculty almost to a man held no unorthodox views, but placed the highest ideals before us and themselves worked in the churches as regularly as taxes. There could not have been a safer place theologically to send a boy. Most of us went to church and the Y. M. C. A. meetings regularly and said our prayers without molestation as we had done at home. Among the religious denominations throughout the state, however, an opinion had be-