Education: Out of Fashion

“Isn’t it time that the American university prepared a decent, respectable burial for the traditional American college fraternity? They have served an historical purpose and served it well. But we’ve given up banjo clubs and minstrels. Now it’s time to face courageously the task of replacing the alumni-dominated fraternal system.”

So last week said a noted pulse taker of U.S. campus life, President Edward D. Eddy Jr. of Pittsburgh’s Chatham College, before a meeting of U.S. state-university presidents in Washington, D.C. How to preserve small-unit living on big campuses is the problem, says Critic Eddy. The “three, four-and sometimes ten-story hotel which often serves as a dormitory” is no solution. But neither is preservation of fraternities: “Time has run out for the national fraternity system. It has failed to adapt itself to the demands of the new student and to a changing social pattern. The system can and should be replaced—not with more Hiltons or Statlers but with intellectual centers” that keep the best of fraternity-house living without fraternities.