Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/31

 a few crude. If these men do not get proper social training in college, they are little likely to acquire it after they get out. A member of a good fraternity has an easier entree into the best social life which the college offers than does any other man. In no college with which I am acquainted do the fraternity men usurp the best social life, but the fraternity man always has someone to introduce him, someone to help him plan, someone to push him if he lags back or lacks nerve. We may be emphasizing social life too much in our colleges at the present time, and especially in our coeducational institutions, but be that as it may, a healthy, moderate social life no one in college can afford to omit, and the fraternity furnishes the undergraduate the easiest aproach to it. I heard a well-known successful engineer say at one time that more engineers had failed in getting a job because of soiled collars and badly selected neckties than from any other reason. I should not be inclined to take his statement too seriously, but I am convinced that social associations of the right sort do teach a man many things worth while about dress and manners and social precedureprocedure [sic], and that these lessons will be profitable to him as long as he lives.

The fraternity, in the Middle West at least, leads its members pretty generally into all forms