The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (collection)/Fraternity Expansion
The question of expansion is probably one of the most vital and regularly discussed questions before the general fraternity world today. It has been discussed freely at meetings of the Interfraternity Conference, and the consensus of opinion has been in favor of it. The reasons are quite obvious.
The attendance at colleges is increasing by leaps and bounds. At many institutions the attendance during the last few years has doubled. The effect of this increase has been to reduce the percentage of undergraduates who could belong to fraternities, for the increase in the number of fraternities has not, in any way, kept pace with the increase in the number of students.
Most young men like to belong to a college organization. A good many of them feel, perhaps, as the freshman did to whom I was talking not long ago. "I don't give a damn to belong," he said, "but I would like to be asked." And with the increasing number of students in our colleges the percentage of men who can be asked is growing smaller and smaller.
It is interesting to note that the opposition to fraternities which has sprung up all over the country and the talk against fraternities is not led by men who have belonged to fraternities in any case so far as I know; but by men who have been outside of the membership, and this is likely to continue to be so. As we increase the number of chapters of fraternities we reduce the strength of the opposition to them.
The Interfraternity Conference has recognized all these facts. At a recent meeting it appointed a special committee, whose work should be to encourage expansion in fraternities already organized, to investigate institutions where it would be advantageous to have more fraternities, and to encourage the organization of new national fraternities. All this is to be done with the hope that it will result in benefit to fraternities now existing.
Echoes have come to me from the various fraternity conventions held lately, through the reports of delegates from chapters at my own institution, of the discussion which took place at these meetings concerning expansion. There was much said that was unfavorable. Judging from the remarks which took place in my own convention upon this pertinent topic, I infer that what was said was often both interesting and personal. Many undergraduates oppose expansion, and it is the undergraduate who largely decides fraternity policies. But the undergraduate seldom keeps himself informed upon general fraternity conditions. His vision is limited; he sees very little beyond his own chapter. He usually knows little about his own fraternity chapters, and he knows still less about others. The larger fraternity problems he seldom grasps or considers seriously, and his arguments are superficial and not always based on facts.
He calls attention to the rapidity with which the roll of chapters has increased within the last ten years; he enumerates the chapters which have been installed since he awoke to the fact that Greek-letter fraternities existed; and he begs with all the dramatic art and fervor gained in a college class of public speaking (I taught public speaking once) that we give our serious attention to internal development and build up the chapters we now have before we add further to our list. "Strengthen those we have," he says "before adding more." His inference is that as we add to our list of chapters we weaken those we already have and that the increase in numbers is likely to result in less efficient internal organization.
This sounds well and it is in favor with the boys, but it is bunk. Internal organization of fraternities is better now than it ever was before. It is only within recent years that there has been anything worthy of the name of internal organization in fraternity management. Traveling secretaries, district or province managers, the regular visitation and supervision of chapters, was a thing unheard of or thought of until long after I became a member of a fraternity. It was impossible, in fact, for the fraternity did not have money enough to finance such a project. While the number of chapters in each fraternity was kept small there was little or nothing to hold them together. There was no supervision and no unity. Fraternity organization was of the loosest kind. The effort to build up individual chapters and the binding together of each fraternity into a unified whole has come much faster than has expansion, and our newest chapters are the most influenced by it. It is very difficult to get the oldest chapters in any fraternity to realize that their organization is a national one and that they must conform to national regulations, that they must submit reports, that they must yield to control and obey regulations; it has not been the tradition for them to do so. Newly organized chapters do not feel so. It cannot, therefore, be shown that increase in numbers has weakened organization or is likely to weaken it. Quite the opposite effect has resulted. If the fraternity roll has increased in numbers, fraternities generally have developed closer supervision, better organization and control, and a closer unification.
The statement is made that our newest chapters are our weakest chapters. From what I know of Alpha Tau Omega and from what I have observed of other fraternities, this is not true. It is more often the oldest chapter which has developed the least business sense, which fits the least easily into the organization, which most often fails to appreciate the fact that the fraternity is a national organization and not a local club, which knows the least about the fraternity as a whole. My experience has been that our new chapters have got to a wonderful degree the spirit of the fraternity. They understand its organization, they appreciate its ideals. I have only to go back to the last two Congresses to which I was a delegate to find abundant illustration of these facts. What is true of my own fraternity is true of others. The Secretary of Delta Kappa Epsilon admitted to me not long ago that next to his own chapter the strongest chapter in his fraternity was organized only recently. I have had the same admissions from the officers of other conservative fraternities. They agree with me that their new chapters are not their weak ones, either in the institutions in which they exist or in the fraternity at large.
It is argued also, by those who plead for culture, that when we expand into the West, especially into the agricultural colleges in the West, we leave culture and refinement behind us. We take into our brotherhood, they argue, "The uncouth, barbaristic, low-browed denizens of the mountains and manicurists of the corral." I suppose it was once true that we were justified in thinking that those who came from the farm or from the west might be expected to be crude and uncultivated, with little appreciation of the finer things of life. I myself was born in Illinois and I came from the farm. But it is not so today. The farmer travels, he reads, he has all the accessories of civilization, as he once did not have, and he takes advantage of them. The westerner may not go to Europe so often as the man from the Atlantic coast, but he has traveled more, he has been in more states of our union, and he knows more about the people and the customs of his own country than does the New Englander. The crudest, most bucolic hayseed in college today does not come from the farm, but from New York, and Boston, and St. Louis, and Chicago. It is the city and not the country that breeds crudity and bad manners. If you will study your own college community and your own fraternty, you will agree with me.
I have visited within the past three years a considerable number of western colleges and I have seen the agricultural students of Washington and Oregon and Iowa and other state on either side of the Rocky Mountains. The student in the Liberal Arts colleges has nothing on these men either in good manners or refinement, or knowledge of the world, and these men have in addition a force and a power of initiative which win our respect. They have learned to work and to respect labor. They know why they have come to college and they make the most of their opportunities. Their clothes are well tailored, an important fact in the mind of the fraternity man, their speech is careful, their ideals are as high as any man's in the oldest chapter in the oldest fraternity in the country. Only yesterday I read to one of our students uncertain as to the wisdom of expansion into such institutions as I have referred to, a letter from one of these supposedly ill-trained and ill-mannered westerners. It was well phrased, well written, refined, in thoroughly good form and good taste and showed a cultivation and a courtesy not ordinarily met with.
"I don't know how many men in my chapter could write each a letter or would do so," the man said when I was through, "but I know one who couldn't." And the man who wrote the letter was born on a ranch in a far western state and is a student in his own state university.
The westerner and the agricultural student, these anti-expansionists say, are crude and uncultivated. Perhaps; but I have always thought the opposite. His life in the open brings the farmer into the closest relationship with the grandest and the most beautiful things in the world—flowers and birds and growing things; sunshine and fierce storms, the earth under his feet and the great sky over head. What tends more than these things to refinement and cultivation?
David, I hope his name is not an unfamiliar one, farmer, sheep, herder, hunter of wild beasts, musician and poet, watched the stars at night and the clouds by day and wrote of them as no man before or since has done, but I presume that if David and his friends had applied for a charter of some national fraternity they would have been turned down as not worthy to be known as brothers by the more scholarly and refined city dwellers because of their lack of cultivation. And yet it was David who became King.
There is one way of keeping down the number of chapters, which I believe every fraternity might with profit occasionally employ, and that is the elimination of worthless chapters. Every fraternity has a number of chapters which have little spirit, little vitality, little appreciation of fraternity progress. They are as loosely organized as a high school club and have no understanding of what it means to belong to a great national organization. Their connection with the grand officers and with the central office is remote. Their main interest lies in their own local problems and pleasures. They are often behind in their taxes, careless in the observance of regulations, and ignorant of general fraternity matters. They should be labored with, they should be given opportunity to pull themselves together, they should be shown wherein they are failing, but if they do not change, their charters should be withdrawn.
At the last Congresses of my own fraternity the representatives of our newer chapters have been the most active and aggressive. They have shown themselves capable of taking and holding their places in discussion and in social affairs. They have been the outstanding men of the Congess. The Wyoming Chapter put on the cleanest, cleverest and most acceptable show we have had at a recent Congress and proved to the gratification of every clean-minded, sensible delegate that it is possible, even at a fraternity convention, to have a smoker which holds the attention, which is amusing, and which is neither dirty nor vulgar.
The arguments against expansion are not tenable. Fraternities are taking care of the individual chapters better now than they have ever done before. Internal development is strengthening and will continue to do so. Fraternities are spending more money for the supervision of the various chapters than they have ever done in the history of these organizations. The new chapters that are going in everywhere are made up of men of character, of purpose and of possibilities. It is not true that there is not cultivation in the agricultural college. Every curriculum in the agricultural colleges of the country gives wide opportunity for elections in science, in language, in literature and in the humanities in general. National fraternity officers recognize more than ever before the necessity of increasing the number of chapters of every fraternity. Our future is dependent upon it.
I believe strongly in expansion,—conservative, intelligent expansion. I believe in fresh new blood. If any fraternity feels the necessity of controlling or reducing the number of its chapters it should begin with the dead ones. It should either resuscitate them or bury them. As they now are, they are an incubus and a handicap to the best interests of fraternity life.
There was a day when only the elect went to college. In those days the fraternities could afford to be exclusive. Conditions have changed completely now, and the group of men who make up the attendance at the average college is the most cosmopolitan in the world. It represents every class of society and almost every nationality extant. If the Greek-letter fraternities are to hold their place they must meet the changing conditions in college. They must carry the gospel of brotherhood and good fellowship to the whole college world. They have no more right to be exclusive then has the Christian church. The undergraduate members must recognize this fact, as the alumni members and grand officers of most fraternities have done for some time. It is a choice between expansion or a more determined and general opposition than we have previously met.
Expansion is often hindered, where the consent of the chapter nearest the petitioning group is required, by jealousy, by rivalry, or by petty prejudices. I could give numerous instances which come to my mind where a chapter in a large institution will not give the slightest consideration to a petitioning group in a neighboring smaller college purely from prejudice or from a misconception of the ideals and accomplishments of the smaller college. And the same thing is true of the smaller college with reference to the larger institution. Petitioning groups have been held up for years at the University of Illinois, because chapters already established in smaller institutions near by imagined that the character of the students at the larger institution was inferior to the character of those in the smaller one. "I didn't know how to milk a cow and so I couldn't get into the state University," one of these intelligent young city dwellers explained to his friends. He knew a lot about a state university.
I believe in expansion because I believe in the fraternity. I have lived with it every day for thirty years or more and few men know more fraternities and fraternity men than I have been privileged to know. I know it has faults as has every organization composed of human beings, and I have not hesitated when occasion gave me opportunity to point these out, but I believe that on the whole the fraternity is a good thing for the men who belong to it and for the colleges where chapters are located. It holds up to young men high ideals. It gives them opportunity for leadership, for taking responsibility, for the development of their characters in the right direction which they are not likely to get otherwise. I know what its enemies have to say about it, but I know, too, that in a very large degree these things are false.