The Fraternity and the College (collection)/The Fraternity and Scholarship
Excepting in the case of freshmen, I believe that the fraternity has had little if any effect until recently with us upon a young man's scholarship. It has seldom raised it above what it would have been had he not joined a fraternity, and I do not know of many cases in which the fraternity was responsible for a lowered scholarship. In many cases the fraternity was little interested in scholarship; it chose its men for other qualities. The young fellow going into a fraternity carries with him his own ideals and personality and these do not materially change simply because he changes his lodging place. The fraternity man may develop but the fraternity seldom entirely makes over its men. They may be brow-beaten or encouraged in some degree, they may weaken in enthusiasm, but the total effect is gradual and is not great. The greatest influence will come through the traditions of the chapter, and through the example of the upperclassmen.
I am reminded of a young friend whom I had twenty or more years ago who had procrastination down to a science and whose conception of how much indebtedness his monthly salary would liquidate was exaggerated beyond any sort of realization. He was convinced that no matter how many duties he postponed until the future there would be ample time for their accomplishment, and he approached the end of the month with the optimistic assurance that his salary of one hundred dollars would wipe out a debt twice that size. Sometimes when he saw the downfall of these false hopes he used to have a melancholy half hour, but there was for him always a solution in which he had complete faith. It was this. He was engaged to be married to a sweet young girl, and he looked forward to that union as a sort of new financial and temporal birth for him. "I'll be a different man then," he used to say. "She will change me completely." He has been married for many years, but his work still piles up beyond anything that mortal man could accomplish, and he still goes hopelessly into debt. Marriage has not changed him temperamentally any more than it is likely to change you and me, and what change it has made has been by slow degrees.
No more, ordinarily does a fraternity suddenly change the college man who goes into it; and the man who bases his hopes of mental and moral reform upon the fraternity is likely to be disappointed. It is likely only more strongly to confirm him in habits which he had previously formed. True, he is younger than the man who marries, and so, perhaps, more susceptible to environment and suggestion, but even he turns out of the old rut with difficulty. If he has previously developed concentration, if he has liked books, if he has really studied seriously before coming to college, he is not likely to be different in college. There is a distinct difference between the man who has obtained high grades through serious study and the one who has reached the same result through cleverness or quickness of wit without application. The young fellow who depends upon quickness of wit alone to get him through college will ordinarily not get far without disaster, and too frequently when such a man joins a fraternity the failures in scholarship which he may make are laid at the door of the fraternity. The hope of the fraternity lies in the character of the man it chooses, and in the ideals of scholarship which it requires of the men whom it pledges. Unless they have high ideals of scholarship as pledges, they are little likely to acquire them after they enter the fraternity. If the fraternity is to improve its scholastic average it must look to the scholastic character of its freshmen before they are pledged. A freshman's scholastic standing should be as closely scrutinized as his social and moral and athletic standing.
If I have read the early history of fraternities rightly they were organized for bringing kindred spirits together, for strengthening bonds of ship, but most of all for the development of the best things for which college stands and among these primarily for the development of character and—of scholarship. The early fraternity men were first Of all good students with high moral ideals. We speak now of the Greek-letter fraternities and similar organizations as "social" fraternities, and more and more as time went on this social feature seems to have been emphasized until within the last twenty years at least, most other elements in a fraternity man's life and character were forgotten. The man's social standing—meaning by that that his financial rating and his ability to dress well and to utter polite inanities mellifluously—was the main thing taken into consideration when he was being considered for admission to a fraternity. Second to his social standing his ability to enter successfully into the various activities of student life, especially his skill in athletics, was the main factor in deciding his choice. The good athlete could often get by with a pretty thin veneer of social polish. If his scholastic standing or his ability to do high grade college work was ever taken into account it was not done seriously. He was expected to pass enough work to keep him in college, of course, but further than this, his scholarship was not made a matter of much discussion.
Within the last few years the conditions have been changing. The opposition which has arisen in various quarters against fraternities has caused a gradual change of view point respecting these matters of scholarship. There has been a revival all over the country, of the former interest in the scholastic standing of fraternity men. There has been a general discussion of the subject at fraternity congresses and conventions, and fraternity journals, almost without exception, have been active in stimulating interest in scholarship and in formulating plans for its encouragement. Only a few of the most conservative and self-satisfied organizations have kept out of the movement, and they will come in soon or be dis credited. It has now come to be a pretty well recognized principle that the college fraternity has little cause for being unless it is willing to do its share in promoting the interests for which colleges exist. If it has no desire to make scholars, it has little hope of winning the approval of the general public which it desires. We should get on faster, however, if more thought were given to a man's scholastic ability before he enters the fraternity, and less energy wasted in making it good after he gets in. The fraterity can discover if it wants to do so whether or not the men it wishes to pledge were good students in the high school or otherwise.
Different fraternities and different institutions have employed different means for improving the scholarship of members. Interfraternity associations have taken the matter up, scholarship committees have been appointed by individual chapters to apply the goad to the brother who is lagging intellectually, general secretaries have been sent out by grand officers, letters have been written, prizes have been offered, and in every way conceivable an attempt has been made to stimulate an interest in scholarship. The fraternity that is not now interested in the improvement of its scholarship is dead to progress.
For years at the institution at which I have done my work we have been trying to impress upon the fraternities the necessity of bringing up their college work, and of pledging only such men as are likely to make a decent scholastic record. We have been successful to a gratifying extent, and now, from a difference at the outset of several per cent there is practically no difference between the grades of men who belong to fraternities and the grades of those who do not. We require in October and December of the first semester, and in March of the second semester, a scholarship report on all freshmen and special students and on all other students whose work is less than five points above passing. These reports are made first to the office of the Dean of the College in which the student is registered, and the records of all undergraduate men are within a day or two forwarded to my office. As soon as the reports are in, some officer of the fraternity has a conference with me or my assistant with reference to members of the chapter whose scholarship is unsatisfactory, and we make such suggestions as we can for the improvement of the work of these students. Often I see the students. Students whose work is down in more than one subject are called to the office of the Dean of the College in which they are registered. Other students are simply notified by mail of their low standing.
Since these scholarship reports have been inaugurated, two things have contributed very materially in helping to raise the scholarship of fraternities. The first was the publishing in the college papers of the relative scholastic standings of the various organizations about the campus. At first those organizations whose standing was particularly low rather resented the publicity which was given to them by this method, and protested that it was unfair thus to advertise them. I have frequently had these men come to me at the opening of college and ask that the publication of the grades which have been averaged during the summer be deferred until after the rushing season was over, alleging that a low scholastic standing would serve as a severe handicap in their pledging the best men. It has been our experience, however, that having made a bad intellectual mess of it, the best thing in the long run for these organizations to do is to face the facts and make the best of them. If they suffer this time, they are likely to be more careful next. It was, moreover, quite easy to point out that no one should complain if the facts are honestly given.
The president of one organization which for years had been fighting for bottom place and which is now struggling with equal vigor to stand at the top, said to me that following the first publication of these relative standings, the members of his fraternity were actually ridiculed into an effort to raise their scholarship. An alumnus never came to town without calling their attention to the disgrace of being at the bottom; a member could scarcely board the street car without being pointed out as belonging to the fraternity with the notorious scholastic standing; even the girls "kidded" them, and the humorous column of the college daily made them the subject of metrical innuendo. It was more than they could stand, and so they began to pull themselves together. To a greater or less extent this same result has been true of the other organizations whose standing was poor.
The second thing which helped the fraternities to raise their scholastic standing with us was a regulation proposed by the local Interfraternity association and approved by the University, forbidding the initiation of any student into a fraternity or club until he had carried successfully at least eleven hours of college work. Men might be pledged whenever the fraternity wished, but they might not be initiated until they had complied with the rule. The effect of this regulation was first to stimulate the pride of the pledge who, even if he were innately lazy would sometimes rather study than suffer the humiliation of having his pledge button taken away from him or the time of his initiation deferred because he had not carried his work. The fraternity, too, was roused in most cases to more than ordinary interest, and when it seemed likely that a pledge was in danger, stimulated him by one means or another until he could be made to bring his work up. As a result, the general scholastic average was considerably raised.
Much rivalry was soon aroused, and organizations; began to resort to various devices legitimate and otherwise in order that their scholastic standing might not be lowered. If a man could not be made to raise his scholarship in a certain subject by legitimate means an attempt was made to persuade the Dean to allow him to withdraw from it. If this could not be brought about, then the student sometimes dropped the course without permission or absented himself from the final examination and so had no grade at all to form a part of the general average. In order to meet these two subterfuges we have for some time in making up the averages assigned a grade of sixty to all courses which the student dropped without permission at the time of the final examination. Sometimes when a fraternity has been particularly desirous of keeping up its scholastic standing, its officers have forced members who were likely to bring down the average and who had no hope of pulling up to withdraw before the end of the semester. It is not now with us an uncommon practice for fraternities to withdraw the pledge button from students whose scholastic standing is low and who show neither ability nor desire to raise it. The methods employed and the motives which the various fraternities have employed for raising their scholastic standing may not always be as commendable nor as high as we could desire, but we should not, perhaps, be over critical. The methods employed to get people into the early Christian Church and for keeping them there, if we may believe history, were not all that might be wished for.
Whatever the reason or the method employed to gain the result, fraternities are undoubtably coming to have a greater interest in scholarship than they once had, and for this I rejoice. Since fraternities take only what they consider the pick of the secondary schools, there is every reason to expect them not only to maintain a scholastic average equal to the general college average, but to be considerably above it. Unfortunately this choice of the best men means too often the men with the best social standing and not the men with the best scholastic standing. The fraternity in the past has had too yo many fellows whose only object in coming to college was to get out of work, or to make an athletic team, or to play golf, or to be lead about by a bull dog. I asked a young fraternity man not long ago why he had come away from home to college, and he admitted very frankly that he thought he would not have to work so hard in college as he would have to do if he remained in his father's factory, so he chose college. In his case, however, the surcease from labor was only a brief one.
The fraternity has initiated too many men, also, who are hilariously content when they merely pass a course or do indifferently well in it. They are satisfied with being intellectually commonplace. "I do not see why father kicks," the son of a former Phi Beta Kappa man said to me not long ago. "I failed only one course last semester, and considering all the work I did outside, I think I got by pretty well." He was really elated with three grades which were merely passing, and his highest grade was only five points above the passing point. Students repeatedly say to me, "I want to pass all the work I take up, of course, but I have no desire to get high grades; I have no use for a grind"; and they say it with certain pride and self congratulation, as if there were virtue in being commonplace. A lawyer, or a doctor, or a merchant who had no more ambition than this to excel in his special line of work would be looked upon as a joke or regarded as unbalanced. Every one ought to have an ambition to be at the top or at least some place near the top in any line of business which he takes up. The student, however, too often feels indifference toward excellence in scholarship or actual humiliation at the thought of doing well. It is the wrong view point, and it is one which fraternities are coming rapidly to see they can not accept.
The reason offered most often by fraternity men for their low scholarship: is that students in a fraternity have more outside interests, more things which must be done, and so less time for their studies than have other students. They, point to the fact that it is the fraternity men who are in athletics, and dramatics, and student journalism, and in student activities generally, and on this score justify their low standing. An examination of the records of the men at the University of Illinois, however, will show as I have said elsewhere, that the students who are engaged in university activities, whether they be fraternity men or not maintain a scholastic standing considerably higher than the average. The young man who was this year at the University awarded the gold medal for having the highest general standing in college activities and in scholarship was a fraternity man as were all of his competitors for this honor. It is those who have little energy in any worthy direction who are indifferent to excellence in scholarship and who think lightly of attainments along scholastic lines.
Fraternity men say sometimes in justification of carelessness or indifference regarding their work, or in explanation of unsatisfactory results at the end of a semester that they are in college for what they can get out of it; they want an all around training, and they do not care particularly for grades. They fail to recognize that the amount they get out of a course is measured—not accurately perhaps and not always quite fairly—but still reasonably measured by the marks they receive at the end of the course. A merchant might quite as reasonably say that he is in business for what he can get out of it, but that he of course does not care for the amount of money he is making. The success of his mercantile undertaking is measured no more accurately by the profits which he makes than is the success of the student by the grades that he makes.
Good scholarship is then the main justification which can be offered to the state or to the individual or to the organization which expends money to furnish educational opportunities for young people. Unless fraternities can develop an interest in good students and a high grade of scholarship, unless in choosing men they begin to pay more attention than they have previously done to the man's possibilities as an average student at least, if not as a high grade student, the fraternity ultimately will fail.