Those Fraternities

Alumni who are members of Greek Letter fraternities will be greatly interested in the radical recommendations offered recently at Dartmouth by a committee of Palaeopitus, which amount to urging that the system familiar to students at Hanover for several generations and still virtually in force in all the colleges but the very largest, be drastically remodelled. The most striking suggestions are that all fraternities at Hanover sever their national connections and abandon their present fraternity houses.

The reasons advanced for this course are that the present set-up does not meet the conditions. Since Dartmouth expanded so notably in size, the fraternity equipment which sufficed admirably for a college of 400 or 500 men has been out-grown. Certain traditional features of fraternity life, both social, intellectual and purely ritualistic, have tended toward disuse. The students no longer use the fraternities for the purposes originally intended. If the report of this committee is correctly understood, it recommends the fuller recognition of the fact that the fraternities are today only clubs, or meeting-places for the likeminded ; that they are no longer capable of serving as places to live in, for any considerable number of members; that their functions are so purely local that their national affiliations are of no importance ; that their present memberships are too large; and that it would be better to make such groups smaller and more numerous.

It would be idle to dismiss this set of recommendations, as many of us would gladly do, with a wave of the indignant hand. Conditions really have changed, and fraternity life is not what it was even 25 years ago, let alone 40 or 50. But it is manifestly impossible to expect the graduate membership of any well known national fraternity to read, without a gasp and a subsequent convulsion of indignant protest, the suggestion that such should secede at wholesale from the ancient and honorable congeries of Greek Letter societies famous for a century or so in the colleges of the entire country. This is not to say that the report submitted is wholly wrong, or the alumni who may be opposed to following it wholly right; but it is to remind undergraduates that in this matter the active delegations are not alone and ought not to decide anything so momentous all by their lonesome. It may be possible for the members of the chapter of Eta Bita Pie now in active residence at Hanover to declare their organization to be free and independent of the national body known by those cabalistic letters—and again it may not be. At all events it could not be done without a protest. If memory serves, the separation decreed in the case of the greater universities was forced on the local chapters by the national body, and was vigorously resisted by the active chapters at the time in more than one instance.

Dartmouth at present may be too large in point of student population to use the old-time fraternities as they were originally meant to be used. It is only too probable; indeed older fraternity men have been heard to complain that the ancient glory had departed. Gone were the Wednesday night debates, the so-called "literary" exercises, the singing of more or less outworn songs. In their place had come card parties, house parties, occasional rumors of an excessively festal cheer. Beyond doubt, the club idea has been growing,, as the literary tradition has been dying. But is it yet imperative to scrap the whole thing, sell the numerous houses to the College, and get down to a system of small social campus groups without national organizations? We may come to think so—but many of us will hate to.

It strikes us that nothing much more vitally interesting to the alumni of Dartmouth has been projected for some time. It seems a proper topic for interested graduates to consider and to make the subject of letters to the ALUMNI MAGAZINE expressive of their best thought. These young men are apparently anxious to secure an absolute divorce, and they allege grounds which strike them as sufficient. They may be right—but we suspect that the first and immediate reaction will be strongly against them, whatever may come to pass as the subject grows older and is more thoroughly threshed out.