1912–13 Volume 37 No 1–5 - Phi Delta Theta Scroll Archive

212 THE SCROLLIt seems to me that we can have united effort to improve the conditionsof scholarship in our several colleges. One of the chargesbrought against the fraternity system is that it tends to lower thestandard of scholarship. Statement after statement is being pub^lished by college authorities showing that the average grade of fraternitymembers is below the average grade of non-fraternity men,and sometimes below the average grade of the student body. Thisseems to me all wrong. We must make our members appreciate thefact, that, after all, our colleges exist for the purpose of education,and that the prime interest of the student should be so to avail himselfof the opportunities of instruction and of culture offered himin college, that he may the better be prepared for the duties and responsibilitiesof life. We claim to be, we are, selected men. Weought to take precedence in matter of scholarship and it will be ajust charge against us until we rectify the conditions which haveprevailed among some of our chapters in recent years.We ought to find common ground in an insistent demand for collegeloyalty. The charge is sometimes made that fraternity men putthe fraternity first and the college second and that there is a distinctlack of interest in college activities, particularly those of thecultural sort, manifested as soon as a freshman enters the doors of afraternity. In my work as general secretary of Beta Theta Pi, Ihave taken particular pains to urge this matter of college loyalty.The college must come first and the fraternity second. It takesonly a very little reflection for one to see that the interest of a fraternitychapter is absolutely bound up with the prosperity of theinstitution where that chapter is located. Can we not, as fraternitymen, unite all along the line to emphasize and magnify collegeloyalty?We can unite in a movement for college democracy. Anotherclaim of our opponents is that the fraternity tends to make mensnobbish, that the chapter house becomes the center of a sort ofaristocracy in which those who think themselves better than their fellowslearn to look with condescending mien upon their less fortunatefellows, the barbarians. I sometimes think this charge is wellfounded. Boys come from the farms who have never had in theircountry homes the luxuries which the chapter house furnishes. Theyrevel in their shower baths and other conveniences of the chapterhouse and then go back home at vacation time to chafe over thelimitations of their own homes and to grow restless in the societyof their own parents. This tendency is absolutely wrong. The boysof Phi Delta Theta and Beta Theta Pi have largely been taken fromthe homes of common people. In our origin and history we havedrawn upon the worthy of all classes and hardly without exceptionour chapters have been free from those whose main claim to considerationis pride of birth or family. If we have been inclined to