Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/249

 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-