8. College Days

However upsetting it may be to the young man whom all the fraternities overlook, this indignity seems to hurt the girls even more cruelly.

It is when the girls get home that the disaster really shows up. Some of the other girls she had chummed with at home are now wearing sorority pins. This is hard to take.

I was close enough to a few sorority seniors to risk asking why this girl or that had been skipped. Some of the reasons, given to me confidentially, were incredibly trivial. One girl they had rushed briefly and dropped had been invited to Eta Beta Pi house for luncheon and had eaten the lettuce leaf on which her salad was parked. This wasn’t done. Perhaps I should add that this foolish thing occurred circa 1920 B.V. (Before Vitamins.) It’s quite proper to eat one’s lettuce leaf now: lettuce is good for what ails you. In any case, the secret societies aren’t so stuffy now about the smaller details of etiquette, table manners being what they are at present.

In the great (as to population) State Universities today the fraternity and sorority dilemma, which has caused so much heartache, is materially reduced. It is in the smaller co-ed colleges that the casualty list is about the same as ever.

Our larger institutions of higher education have taken on an entirely new appearance and character since the veterans of World War II have arrived. The vets are older, more serious, more experienced. A year of hot war, combat war, compounded of mud and guts, blood, sweat and tears, is more aging than a cycle of the traditional peacetime horseplay and rah-rah which identified American college life.

As for the Greek-letter fraternities, the typical vet, who wants to learn something that will quickly help him to a job that promises to support him and his wife and baby he has already accumulated, takes a dim view of them. In his opinion they are a silly caprice of arrested adolescence, an expensive elaboration of the kid gang’s cave, complete with grip, signs, passwords and a peephole in the door.

Alumni who graduated within the past dozen years aren’t subscribing so extravagantly as aforetime to the undergraduate chapter’s handsome new lodge, which is still on the drawing board. Today the alumnus who is earning enough money to help Junior live in fancier quarters than was his custom at home fears he may have to borrow money to pay his taxes.

While we are on the subject of changes wrought on college customs by the arrival of the veterans, it should be noted that the old peace and calmness of the academic world has largely disappeared, driven into almost total eclipse by job-hungry men who haven’t time to “take it easy.”

In my library I have an old textbook which my papa studied, a sort of philosophical anthology, stating in a condensation the theories of such giants as Kant, Spinoza, Descartes, etc. The first line of the Introduction says, “Knowledge is the product of leisure.” Perhaps my papa believed that when he was in college. I’m sure I didn’t: I just believed in leisure, period.