Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/58

 machinery at the fraternity house during the fall rushing season must come back in good physical condition, or he will be as completely exhausted at the end of the first week as a green freshman after his first scrimmage in football.

"Why do you regularly carry on these wild musical incantations during the rushing season?" I asked a fraternity officer recently.

"It's the custom; every one up and down the street is doing it," was the reply; "and you have no idea, unless you've been through the strain, how it fills in gaps in conversation, and helps to relieve self-consciousness."

I am quite well aware that it not only helps to fill in the gaps in conversations, but that it usually makes conversation impossible. How it aided the fraternity to get at the real character and worth of the fellows they were studying, however, I could not see then, nor can I now. I believe that one of the ways in which fraternities could help themselves on to more intelligent rushing would be to have less music, and more quiet well organized conversation. I believe this because of the real purpose for which the processes of rushing are carried on. The new man is usually very little known. He has been recommended by some one who knew his father, or who had met his sister at a summer resort, or who has some social ax to grind.