Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/35

 better than are other groups of men whose difficulties are not so great as those of the fraternity. The fraternity has house rules and fixed study hours, and so far I can see there is a reasonable and serious attempt to enforce these rules. The scholarship average of our fraternities last semester was as high as the average of men living outside of these organizations and, as I have said, considerably higher than that of other men living in large groups. The scholarship of fraternity freshmen was also higher than that of other freshmen. The fraternity man who wants to study learns to do so even if the conditions surrounding him are not ideal. He comes to the point of not being disturbed by a little noise or confusion. Before he gets through college the fraternity man is usually so immune to the effects of having people about him that he could write his theme or solve his problem in mechanics as easily in the trenches of Verdun as in his own room.

From my point of view this is a good thing. It is one of the regrets of my college life that I lived alone and that I learned to study and to work alone. Now I find it next to impossible to do any serious work with people about me. I have powers of concentration, but I can control these powers only when I have complete isolation. This fact is a great handicap. If in college I had lived