Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/210



One of the most difficult problems for fraternities to solve, in large institutions at least, is how best to offset or utilize, as the case may be, the influence of the numerous transfers from other chapters which make up so large a percentage of undergraduate life. Whether they are formally affiliated and become active members of the chapter or not does not solve the problem entirely, for their mere presence in the college, so far as the college public is concerned, constitutes an affiliation and makes the local chapter responsible for their conduct and for their influence. I have sat at fraternity conferences and heard uttered the commonplaces and platitudes about "once a Phi Kap always a Phi Kap," just as I have been taught since my childhood the Presbyterian doctrine of the election of the saints—once in grace, always in grace—but there is in this case as in many others a vast difference between theory and practice. The doctrine that when a man is taken into a fraternity he is entitled to its privileges wherever he goes and with whatever chapter he may come into contact, sounds all right, and is quite easily defensible until one comes up against concrete examples, and then the theory goes to pieces.