Yale Fraternities: A Spawning Ground

"It is here in the nursery of rushing that the social Yale man learns the tactics of success." --James H. Ottaway Jr. Yale Daily News, Oct. 9.

Taking things seriously is as much a part of Yale as the naked rituals of fraternity initiation. Exaggerated concern and threadbare ceremony have established reputation, the bar and the secret grip as the booty of fraternal subsistence.

In the old days, before the College System was introduced in the thirties, the fraternities were active in undergraduate life. They were extra-curricular centers for debating, sports, drama and service work, and the brothers lived together in them. But today these functions have been lost to the colleges and extracurricular groups, and the fraternities linger on as a questionable indulgence, confining themselves to meals, dances and liquor.

Some Want Independence

Some have sold their property and disbanded, and of the nine fraternities which survice, two, St. Elmo and the Fence Club, have abandoned their national associations. Somewhat embarrassed by the pedestrian character of these national connections, several fraternities have made abortive attempts to become independent, and two others are about to try to denationalize. The financial and doctrinal pressure of the national chapters rankles on "fraternity row," and St. Elmo's, for example, declared itself independent after the mother chapter deplored its snobbishness and disrespect of frat pins.

Despite their weakening brotherhood and refined ambitions, most fraternities are retaining their general systems of rushing, pledging and initiations. The fraternal recruitment occurs twice a year, with a "rushing period" each fall and spring. The festival begins when the Inter-Fraternity Council (IFC) calls an organization meeting of all those interested in rushing. The rushees are told the rules of the game and are obliged to complete forms, stating whether they are a "legacy" to any fraternity.

Trying to Be Shoe

After a brief tantalization period, rushing begins, in dead earnest. The first two evenings are "open nights," when rushees are to go to all houses. Due to the splendid turnout (this fall there were 450 sophomores alone), the applicants are first sorted alphabetically, with half going to the "on row" houses one night--and the "off row" houses the next. As the fraternities already have about a hundred brothers, the numbers involved become rather formidable, but everyone has his name on his lapel, drinks beer, and gets to know everyone else. Grinning desperately, everyone tries to be shoe. The third evening the candidate is free to go to absolutely any house he chooses, but the fourth night he must be invited.

This is the first moment of truth, when the smiles, chatter, drinking and dressing of the previous bouts begins to pay off, when the dazzling exterior really comes into its own. Cuts are made, but everyone is given his second chance, for one evening all those who have been dropped may start afresh at a new fraternity.

Finally, there is a "hash meeting," after which the survivors are sent written invitations for the last evening of rushing. This is the rushees' last chance to put himself across, to reach the brothers. He then leaves the house and goes to bed, while the brothers hold elections. Early in the morning, the successful candidiate is visited by an IFC man, who tells him who has "bid" for him. Rushing is now over, but there is more to come.

It is perhaps unfair to judge the rushing system entirely in the harsh light of the superficiality, injustice and distress which are its characteristics. Not only does it train the Rush Committees for later life, but a good rushee will emerge broad gauge. Approximately 30 percent of each class is given the advantage of this special training. Although 30 percent is a democratic enough figure, the College Dean's office reports that four fifths of this group attended private schools.

A Month of Pledging

The elections over, the rushees become "pledges," and rushing makes way for "pledging." This lasts for about a month, and each future brother is provided with a "pledge father." The pledge father is subordinate to the "pledge master," who runs the pledging. The pledges are obliged to do such things as scrub floors and wear Linus blankets and suck their thumbs. But frequently they become unhappy in their work, and last year one pledge master was chained to a parking meter in front of the state capital, while another taskmaster was packed on a plane for California.

Dean of Undergraduate Affairs, Richard C. Carroll, however, considers such fun juvenile, and the IFC, always one jump ahead of the administration, is discouraging it. So strong is their self-restraint, that some fraternities are considering shortening pledging and promoting social service work.

Rituals Vary

But as long as initiations remain, all the fun of joining a Yale fraternity has not vanished. The initiation ceremonies are generally divided into two evenings, the "informals," and the "formals." Whereas these rituals vary from frat to frat, or rather from fraternity to fraternity (the word "frat" is considered at New Haven to have an unfortunate midwestern flavor), a pledge who enjoyed the following informal would not feel especially distinguished.

After waiting in line outside, one is blindfolded with a private toilet article. The pledge is then led in, is permitted to strip to his shorts, and is led to the "game room," where he kneels on ground saltines for an hour and a half. To prevent a sense of boredom from interfering with his agnoy during this period, a scratched record player is played, which repeats itself several times a minute. After this, the expectant brother passes down the stairs between a gauntlet of paddlers. He is then interrogated and brain-washed, after which he stands in a stairwell with his mouth open and receives thereabouts raw eggs which the brothers drop from several flights above.

What follows varies greatly as to duration and ingenuity, but one fraternity often finds it necessary to have a second night of informals. Most, however, simply have formals the following evening, during which the pledge is initiated into the mystical rights of the order. He is then a genuine Yale Man.

Nonetheless, the fraternities do not receive undivided support at Yale. The college newspaper, in such articles as Fraternities--A Fading Anachronism, and From Fraternities: Followers, Not Leaders, has frequently condemned them, urging that their buildings be turned over to the colleges. It charges that fraternities are expensive, immature, intellectually wasteful and that they illegally sell liquor to minors.

The new Yale magazine Criterion, a rather class-conscious journal, in a recent article says that the fraternities are concerned with "organized friendliness and constant drinking," and cries out that "the ideals of the wealthy--social hierarchy and distinctions, exclusiveness, clubbiness, concepts of what is shoe or weenie--being the ideals of the alumni, have come to dominate Yale."

Nowhere Else to Drink

While one is repelled by the charge of the Yale press that their fraternities rest on liquid foundations and by the sinister descriptions of their alumni, it is still necessary to ask why the institutions exist. The answer seems to be that in their college system there is nowhere else for the Yalies to drink and be social. As one New Haven collegian is quoted in his press as saying, "I joined a fraternity because I couldn't fit a bar in my room." Other reasons seem to be prestige, ambition and the desire subsequently join to a secret society.

The secret, or senior societies, unlike the frats, or rather fraternities, are an institution peculiar to Yale. Each is a group of fifteen people dedicated to privacy and generally either self-im-provement, literature, liquor, athletics, or discussion. While they are public to the extent that the names of new members appear in the paper every year, they are secret in that no one ever reveals what goes on inside. Some have no windows. Others have many exits. Many retain mystical ceremonies and most have strange customs. Skull and Bones, for example, has the tradition that every member must leave the room when an outsider says the name of their society. This has led to numerous jokes, such as the hiring of a gang of bums to get up and leave when the words "Skull and Bones" were mentioned in the Princeton triangle show.

Underground Societies

Besides the seven regular secret societies, some of which are over a century old, there are now numerous underground ones. Fraternity membership is not actually necessary for election to a secret society, but potential members are well investigated. Even the deans and faculty members join in, and make recommendations to the societies.

The future of the societies is far more secure than that of the fraternities. Whereas some fraternities contribute to their national chapters and others are financially dependent on them, six of the nine fraternities are operating in the red. The established senior societies, on the other hand, are extremely well-endowed, and the loyalty and resources of their alumni make them influential with the administration. and no need for doing so.

Ironically, it is the most repellent qualities of the Clubs that give the system this advantage. Their snobbishness, their secrecy, their uncreativity, their preoccupation with an isolated social world all tend to dissuade most undergraduates from any any wish to join. Dean Bender, in the same breath as he criticizes the Clubs for "narrowness," feverently hopes "that the Clubs never start getting democratic." If the Clubs were to elect people on a basis of creative merit, he points out, then undergraduates might really begin to care about joining. The Clubs would become a generally recognized elite, and the punching season would become a bitter college-wide scramble. There seems little chance, however, that the Clubs will take a turn in this direction.

Despite the dim view that University Hall may take of the Clubs, there is little likelihood that Harvard will ever officially abolish them. In the first place, the administration takes quite seriously Harvard's tradition of giving students free reign until they interfere with others.

Secondly, there is a strong suspicion that the Clubs could never, realistically, be destroyed. Greek letter fraternities were outlawed 100 years ago, and the present Clubs simply sprang up in their place. And of course there is the crass but major consideration that much of the Universitiy's financial support comes from wealthy Club alumni who might be reluctant to feed the hand that bites them.

By all appearances, the Clubs will last as long as they can support themselves. Already they have survived a good many hard knocks from the outside: the one-two punch of the 1929 Depression and the founding of the House system, for instance, before which time members usually ate three meals a day in the Club, enjoyed special benefits such as theatre ticket services and private Club railway cars for the Yale football game and crew race, and generally ran up bills of $150 to $200 a month.

World War II came as another shock to the system. The Hasty Pudding Club, normally the first step towards Final Club membership, was turned into an Officers' Club, and undergraduates were speeded through college in an accelerated military program.

Today the Clubs' problems are not so dramatic as wars or depressions. Rather they are the result of gradual changes in the College itself. With rising standards of admission at Harvard, less and less "club material" from the Eastern prep schools is being accepted into the University. And the "preppies" that do come are often so interested in their academic work or else forced to spend so much time on their studies that they don't use the Club as much more than an occasional convenience. There is a good deal of grumbling from graduates in the Club lounges that "Things are not what they used to be here. In my day, you could come into the Club and find the bar filled from five o'clock till midnight."

Nor is the new type of "Clubbie" interested in devoting a lot of time and money to the punching season, and Club presidents often have to scramble around to recruit members to attend the various punching functions. Of course there is still a hard core of devoted members who haunt the Clubs morning, noon, and night--but they seem to be a slowly-dying breed.

A great many of the more liberal Club members are also eager to dispose of some of the stuffer rules of the Club game. Abortive movements have recently been started in some Clubs to admit ladies more frequently, and a few members feel that the Clubs would enjoy a friendlier place in the College if classmates could be brought in for meals. At least, they say, older guests should be invited more often. But these movements generally run into polite but firm opposition from the graduates, who remember a day when the Clubs were close-knit little bands of intimate friends, which might be broken up by frequent intrusions of outsiders, no matter how attractive and pleasant. The Clubs, tradition-bound as they are, are strongly tied to graduate opinion.

The punching season also seems to be lagging in a world gone by. There once was a time when practically all the sophomores punched were convinced from the very start that they wanted to join a Club. They had been brought up in families or schools where the Clubs were considered an integral part of a Harvard career. But this is no longer true today. A great many punchees have little idea of what goes on in a Club and, because of the general mystery that surrounds the Club's inner workings, they are never really told. And so they join for rather shallow reasons--all their friends are doing it, or they hope their Club connections will help them later in a business career. Later some of shot-in-the-dark types grow to like Club life, but a few are disillusioned.

Finally, the Clubs are being caught in a financial squeeze of varying proportions. Real estate taxes are extremely high, the upkeep of those massive brick buildings is pretty exorbitant, and the maintenance of a steward and staff of waiters and cook does not come cheap. The average Club bill totals between $351