Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/219

 made at one time to bring the tradition of a half dozen different institutions into one chapter, the thing is impossible. There is nothing truer than that an undergraduate learns the customs of a college quickly and that he accepts these as the customs of all colleges. The freshman is transformed between September and the Christmas vacation; he goes home a new man—not always intellectually new, so much more the pity, but he has learned the routine of college life—its customs, its traditions, its clothes, its limitations. If at the beginning of the next semester or the next year he enters another institution, his nerves receive a shock when he realizes that the fellows in this second institution may never have suspected the things that he has been led to believe are universal college customs. He is like a man who has all his life been brought up to feed himself with a fork and who, going to another part of the world, finds that quite refined people do the same thing with their fingers or with chop sticks. We might not object to have such a man as a visitor, but we should hesitate to put him into a position of authority where he would have charge of affairs.

Sometimes the affiliate does not care to assume control, he is satisfied to sit back and criticize—to tell how things are managed in his chapter, to suggest how a real fraternity is run, to be super-