The Fraternity and the College (collection)/The Fraternity and Its Underclassmen
At the University of Illinois as at most other similar institutions, I presume, there is a tradition that freshmen, especially freshmen who belong to a fraternity, should be kept in the background, should be required to do most of the unpleasant or "dirty" work about the house, and should be denied many of the privileges which are open to other members. Occasionally a sophomore who has been especially negligent or derelict is put under freshman rules, but this is unusual, and ordinarily all a freshman need do to get out from under the ban is to live nine months after he has entered college. House rules for freshmen are often different from those laid down for other classmen and those rules which have to do with study hours are enforced against them with especial rigidness. The result is that the freshmen go to their rooms shortly after dinner is finished and study or make a bluff of doing so; freshmen stay in perhaps while other classmen may be enjoying themselves; and if there be any irregularities carried on by the older brothers the freshmen are put to bed or given a good book to read in the library which will help to stimulate their imaginations.
This enforced studiousness and regularity of life has two results. Being with their books a considerable number of hours a day and having no strenuous prejudices against carrying their work, it is impossible that they should not learn something; so fraternity freshmen come out at the end of each semester with grades that average somewhat higher than do those of freshmen outside of such organizations. So far the result is excellent.
The second result seems to me not so good. The freshman has not always liked the restrictions which have been placed upon him in the fraternity house. Released from them completely as he usually is at the end of the freshman year he feels often much as a man might who is allowed to break training or who has been let out of prison, and his tendency is frequently to go to the opposite extreme. Two very battered looking freshmen were brought to me a few weeks ago by a city policeman who had found them in a state of intoxication trying to make their way home from one of the disreputable districts down town. They were, on the whole, decent fellows of good reputation. One had in fact earlier in the year broken his pledge to a fraternity because, as he told me, some of the men drank more than he thought right or good for them. Their only reason for being in the condition in which they were found was, as they tried to explain it to me, because they had been kept in so strictly that they felt they must have one experience to celebrate their release from the bondage of freshman life. It is this sort of revolt which I think is the second and the objectionable result of the ordinary way in which freshmen are controlled in fraternity houses. The average young fellow will submit for a time to a strict military régime, but later he is likely to revolt and go to the opposite extreme. The discipline that is best is that which is made to appeal to the reason or that which is self-imposed.
Another phase of this evil result of the rigidly imposed discipline is seen in the attitude which the sophomore just released from freshman discipline holds toward the incoming freshman. Having himself suffered, and done penance, and acted the part of a slave, he does not as one might suppose, feel kindly toward the men who are assuming his former humble place. On the contrary he usually takes the most cruel delight in continuing the practice which he so recently found objectionable. An illustration drawn from a slightly different experience will make my point clearer perhaps. For years, at the University of Illinois, at the opening of college we were annoyed and disturbed by the growing practice of hazing. From a few isolated cases the practice grew to an alarming extent and bade fair permanently to injure the institution. We tried in turn persuasion, suspension, dismissal for a longer period without much avail. We came ultimately to expulsion as the only means of breaking up the practice which under this mode of discipline began gradually to decline until now it can be said to have disappeared from the institution. The continuance of the practice was based entirely upon the fact, I was convinced by investigation, that the man hazed this year felt under obligations to get even with some one else next. When there were few or nobody who had any cause to get even there was no incentive to continue the practice, and it lapsed.
I believe that if the practice of rigid discipline for freshmen has any defense it might very well be carried into if not through the sophomore year. It is not difficult to establish the fact that the sophomore year is the most critical year in the college course. Second year students are more knowing, they are harder to control, and notwithstanding the large number of unsuccessful freshmen who for one cause or another drop out at the end of the first year, the second year men will be shown to have a lower scholastic average than do the freshmen. Yet the fraternity men at the University of Illinois come from the best high schools and preparatory schools in the state and in the country. They have a better training than the average boy in college and have had opportunities for cultivating their intellects which should make them in college superior students.
My experience for many years has led me to the conclusion that in the management and control of the freshmen and sophomore members of the fraternity may be found at least one cause for the lack of initiative and self-reliance of many fraternity men, and so a cause of weak character and of poor scholarship.
With us, as with many other institutions, I imagine, the control of each fraternity lies almost exclusively with the upperclassmen and not infrequently with the members of the senior class, or it may even be with one or two members of the senior class. Underclassmen are allowed little voice in the conduct of the chapter. Freshmen especially are not expected to take any initiative in fraternity affairs, and, although they are held pretty rigidly to their work, they are not expected or allowed to express an opinion upon the control or management of their own chapters. Sophomores work under few restrictions, but are allowed little voice in affairs and little initiative. Usually the man longest in the chapter, and this may quite likely be the weakest man, is elected as its ruling head. Members are usually given very little responsibility until they become seniors, and are quite often not expected to take any. If the man at the head of the chapter happens to be a strong man who can marshall the support of the other upperclassmen and win the respect of the underclassmen, this method of senior control works reasonably well, but if the opposite is true the result is disastrous. I need not go far for illustration. In one fraternity last year, a fraternity which was well toward the bottom of the list in character and scholarship, there was at the head of the chapter a senior, good intentioned, but weak, inefficient, and without influence among the men. He had been elected simply because he was the oldest man in the chapter and not because he had fitness for the position. The fraternity went rapidly down; there was neither order nor control. When I discussed the situation with one of the junior members—a strong efficient fellow—he said, "We see the situation, and regret it very much; but what can we do? We are only juniors, and we have no right to interfere with the management of the seniors."
In two other cases I made the grave error recently of speaking to junior or sophomore members of fraternities concerning conditions in their chapters which I thought needed correction. I was later spoken to by the president of each organization who said to me that if I wished to make any criticism upon the chapter I should make it to him as president. And yet in each case the president was indifferent and interested mainly in being at the head of his organization, and not in assuming the responsibilities and the duties of the office. I had selected the man whom I considered the strong, energetic leader of the group without taking the trouble to find out who was president.
I believe that in general the treatment of underclassmen and especially of freshmen is not such as to develop in them initiative, self-reliance, and the desire to bear responsibility. They are made to keep up their work; they are not taught to do so. They work under a military rule which is seldom helpful. They are given so little part in thinking and acting for themselves, they are treated so much as inferiors and as children, that many of them never get over it, and never come to the point of assuming responsibility for themselves or for the chapter as a whole. Freshmen are seldom expected to have opinions or to take any but the most menial part in bearing the responsibilities of chapter management. The most serious time is when the freshmen year being over, they are released from restraint and have not yet learned anything of independence.
Only last fall an upperclassman of one of the fraternities with which I am well acquainted came to me for advice as to the treatment of a freshman who seemed obstreperous. "What is the matter?" I asked. "Well, he's fresh. He talks to much," was the reply. "What about?" I asked. "Why," the upperclassman said, "he is constantly offering suggestions and making criticisms of our methods; and the most annoying part of it is, he is usually right. But of course you can see that we can never allow a freshman to tell us what we ought to do, even if he is right." And yet, some way, I couldn't see it, and I cannot yet; for that freshman has proved himself most efficiently active in college affairs, and he has received the highest scholastic average so far this year of any student in the fraternity. I have the feeling that the chapter might very profitably allow him to express some opinions as to its conduct, and give him a little opportunity to develop independence.
The method of keeping freshmen under control by "tubbing" or "paddling," the ordering of freshmen about as if they were inferiors or without judgment, I believe in almost every case is bad and detrimental to the development of independence and self-reliance in the freshmen. I have never seen any permanent good come from regulations which prohibit underclassmen from smoking, or drinking, or going out, or from doing any objectionable thing which upperclassmen do with impunity.
"We send our freshmen to their rooms at half-past seven every night," an indifferent upperclassman virtuously declared to me not long ago. "And what do you do?" I asked. I knew quite well that he spent much of his time smoking in front of the cheerful grate fire when he should himself have been studying, while upstairs the freshmen in their study rooms were enjoying themselves as best they could. It all reminded me of a senior who was very fond of "Pall Malls," but who thought it undesirable for his freshman brother to indulge in cigarettes. Every evening '09 sent young '12 up to his—room to study while he remained in the living room to enjoy his cigarette. Upstairs little brother was not engaged solving algebraic formulae as was supposed, but was quietly puffing away at his own cigarette. There was no training for either of them in the procedure excepting the training in deceit. Fraternities too often consider themselves quite beyond criticism if in their various irregularities they can say that they at least keep their freshmen out of them. It affects me about the same as it would to have a man arrested for drunkenness claim immunity on the ground that his children at least were sober.
I talked only yesterday to a capable fraternity sophomore who has drifted both intellectually and morally since he entered college. I was urging him to pull himself together, to try to be something more than commonplace. "Do you think you have ever been of any real good to your fraternity?" I asked him. "I don't suppose so," he replied. "I'm only a sophomore, and I have not yet had a chance to do anything in the control and management of my fraternity." I think it will not be hard to see that the system is wrong which allows a student to be two years a member of an organization without making him feel that he has any voice of responsibility in controlling or in making it what it should be.
The system goes even farther than this. If perchance a sophomore or a junior is initiated into a fraternity, even though he be a man of judgment and experience, he is often made to submit to freshmen rules, and to come and go as he is directed by those who in many cases are far less fit to direct and give orders than is he himself. I have in mind now the case of a young fellow, sensitive, refined, and socially experienced, whose feelings were tortured, and whose college work was ruined by the corrections and criticisms of his manners and social conduct by a senior whose social experience has been very limited, and whose standards of social etiquette were at best crude. It might not be so bad, perhaps, if these infantile methods were practiced in private, but, on the contrary, upperclassmen too often seem to feel that the greatest benefit will come to the freshman from correcting him, as an irritable parent might correct a naughty child, without reserve, before his friends and the whole chapter. This sort of public "bawling out" may silence the freshman, but it seldom appeals to his sense of justice, and it seldom permanently reforms him. It often rather confirms him in his errors and drives him secretly to practice the habit for which he has been openly corrected and humiliated. I have never really seen a freshman thus reformed by force who did not come back as a sophomore more boisterous and incorrigible than ever and ready to get even with the first freshman who should dare to call his soul his own. A private, quiet, brotherly talk as one man to another would usually result in a very different attitude. If the system is any good for the freshman it ought at least to be tried upon the sophomores who usually need it more.
My whole observation of the system which I have here been attempting to illustrate, is that its effect upon underclassmen is bad, and since underclassmen often finally develop into upperclassmen, the effect upon the whole fraternity is bad. If responsibility is not given to the man when he first enters the chapter, if his thinking is done for him, if he is treated as an inferior and a child, if he is not taught at first to think for himself and to develop his own principles, it will often later be difficult to put responsibility upon him and have him assume it. It will in many cases be impossible to do so. In the business of undergraduate college life more than in any other business that I am familiar with, the habits of life, the conduct, the initiative which a student develops during the first year or two and usually during the first semester, are those which cling to him during the whole of his college course. He can be led but he can seldom be forced. He can not be free from responsibility for half or three-fourths of his college life, and then drop into it naturally and effectively. Because he is kept from it so long is, I believe, one of the main causes of our having so many weak, inefficient fraternity seniors who are willing to hold office or to be at the head of affairs, but who are not capable of real, strong, efficient leadership.
In the direction of underclassmen there is little in laying down precept that is not backed by example. I have heard a good many "straight" talks from upperclassmen to freshmen which "went in at one ear and out the other" because the freshman knew very well that it was pure talk he was listening to, and that his senior brother was not himself intending in anyway to follow the precepts he was laying down. "I want you to understand, Dean," a senior said to me recently when I was talking to him about a disgraceful escapade in which he had been engaged, "that we did not allow the freshmen to have any part in it." But the freshmen were quite well aware that something disreputable was going on, they were keen to be in it, and their imaginations running riot had made the performance far worse than it really was. If the affair had to be it would have been better in its effects upon the character of the freshmen if they had been there.
I do not wish to be understood as advocating the theory that underclassmen should be on an equality with the upperclassmen in a fraternity. Other things being equal, the upperclassmen should rule; their two or three added years, and their greater experience give them the right to do so. My contention is that far too great a distinction is made between the freshman and the senior. If the freshman is to be developed as he should be, he should be treated as an intelligent adult and not as a child; he should become at once a real part of the fraternity and should be heard after the other members, perhaps, and his advice followed if it is good. He should be persuaded as a reasonable being, not coerced like a refractory truant child. If he is sent up stairs to study some one should go with him to show him how it may best be done. If there are habits of life which it is not well for him to form, then it is easily shown that it is not helpful for upperclassmen to indulge in them. The fraternity is to be a brotherhood, not an autocracy. There is at most too little difference between the ages and experiences of freshmen and seniors to make the distinctions that are usually made and no one sees the injustice of these distinctions more than does the freshman, and no one breaks away from their military school domination sooner than he. The coerced freshman can almost invariably be recognized in the incorrigible sophomore.
A large per cent of the benefit which comes from a college training, I believe, is found in the opportunity which the student gets for independent action, for developing self-reliance, for taking personal responsibility, and for working out his own problem. I have in another place observed that the student who lives at home while going to college loses very much of this training in self-reliance, and is usually on this account a weaker student. The reason is, of course, that his parents oversee his actions; think for him, and rob him of initiative. As I observe fraternity life I am afraid it is often furnishing this weakening sort of home life for its underclassmen, and the result is showing in undeveloped character and poor scholastic standing. Because he is not allowed to be a leader in any form of fraternity management, he grows to expect to be directed—to be told when to study and when to go to bed; when to get up and when to go to class; what to do and what to refrain from doing. The result is that he remains an irresponsible, indifferent child, who feels that until he becomes a senior there is very little for him to do either in college or in his fraternity; and when he becomes a senior he is quite likely to be confirmed in his lazy, shiftless ways.
I believe the remedy lies in throwing upon the underclassmen more responsibility, in holding them to a less military routine, and in leading rather than driving them to do the things that should be done. Fraternity men could do more with their freshmen if they worked with them rather than upon them; if they set for them moral and scholastic examples which are healthy and safe for them to follow and treated them as far as it is possible as if they were men.