8. College Days

When, at the end of my freshman year, I was at home telling Papa about the Fraternity and also that these Greeks didn’t take Greek, he inquired, naively, “What do these Greek letters mean?” For there hadn’t been any fraternities at Wittenberg in his time.

“Sorry, Papa,” I replied. ‘These fraternities are secret societies: these Greek words, for which the letters are the initials, are never spoken above a whisper and never even whispered outside the fraternity hall.”

Papa laughed until his asthma strangled him. I wanted to know what was so funny. When he was able to talk he told me.

“You have a secret society, my boy; no doubt about that. When a student, who knows no Greek, whispers a Greek motto into the ear of a student, who knows no Greek, it is a secret that will never get out; never!”

When I arrived at Wittenberg none of the fraternities boasted a dwelling house. Their headquarters were rented halls in the downtown business district. Our hall was a large, cheerless room on the walk-up second floor over a drugstore. Its furnishings consisted of three or four dozen ordinary wooden chairs, a table, and a pot-bellied stove fueled by natural gas. The plumbing leaked, not enough to risk an explosion, but plenty. We made a big thing of the fact that no one except members of the fraternity were permitted to enter. If the non-fraternity element in college had known that the secret we guarded so carefully in our downtown hide-out was a bad stink of leaking gas they might not have felt so wormy about their social inferiority.

I had my fraternity to thank for the frequent invitations to Sunday dinners in their homes. Perhaps that was enough to expect of one’s fraternity in those long-gone days. And my membership in a respected national college fraternity has given me quick access to many an enduring friendship I might not have had through the years which were to follow.

But I have often wondered whether fraternities and sororities provide enough blessings to the minority who belong to them to pay for the serious damage they cause. After I had been out of college for ten years and active in my profession, I was invited to become the Religious Work Director at the University of Illinois, a position created and mostly subsidized by the International Student Y.M.C.A. After four years at that post I became the minister of the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, patronized largely by Faculty members and students at the University of Michigan. I spent five years there. So, for nine years I occupied what might be called a ringside seat with every opportunity to observe many facets of the student’s private life.

In both of these positions I frequently served as a confidential advisor to students in trouble. My office at the University of Illinois was in the Students’ Y.M.C.A. Building which had dormitory space for sixty men. It is needless to say that they were non-fraternity men, else they would have been living in chapter houses. The non-fraternity men referred to themselves as “independents.” To fraternity men they were “barbarians”: “barbs,” for short.

Now this does not mean that all the fraternity men held the “barbs” in contempt; not at all. Occasionally an “independent” would break a record in athletics or pull down a handful of other honors. He might then be tardily bidden by a couple of fraternities. With a cackle of malicious joy he could tell them where to go, and the whole campus, Greeks and barbarians, bond and free, would applaud.