Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/15

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

appeals to him, if he can fall in with a group of men who are congenial, and if he is willing to make the sacrifice of time and the readjustment of habits necessary to live with such a group successfully, I usually advise him, if he is asked, to join a fraternity.

I am quite familiar through intimate association with my colleagues and through general reading, with the many and serious objections which have been urged against fraternities. Every year I meet fathers and friends of college students, for the most part men who have never been to college or if they have been who know little or nothing first hand about fraternities, who believe these organizations wholly undemocratic and wholly bad, and who give credence to what they hear about fraternities, as they have faith in the stories published in city papers concerning the riot, rapine and wholesale destruction ordinarily supposed to be waged at the usual student celebration. There has been extant for some years, I know, the general impression that the young men being educated at the institution with which I am connected are accustomed to burn down or demolish a theatre or two following each athletic victory of the various teams, when in point of fact the entire destruction caused by the escapades of five thousand students and their followers in twenty years has not exceeded two hundred and fifty dollars,