Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/55



I have always felt that some of the strangest and most curious phenomena connected with fraternity life and fraternity customs have to do with the processes and procedures of rushing. In trying to explain to the fathers of prospective freshmen just what fraternities are and what customs they follow, I think there is nothing more difficult of elucidation than those details which connect themselves with the preliminaries to bidding a man. I hear the sounds, and look on at the struggles, and detect the same old subterfuges every fall, but I have never yet been quite able to look upon the procedure wholly seriously. I hear the same argument recited to me every year by the freshman who has listened to it in the chapter houses, the whole purpose of which is to dazzle the coveted man and to make him decide at once to take the pledge button.

Perhaps some one may essay to read this paper who is so ignorant of fraternity parlance as not to know what "rushing" means. For his benefit I may say that rushing is that conglomerate process by which the members of a fraternity in theory attempt to study a new man's character, to get acquainted with him, and to let him get acquainted