Page 54 - 1925 September - To Dragma

TO DRAGMA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 43

THE SMALL COLLEGE AN EXTENSION FIELD

THIS INFORMAL editorial comment is not intended to be a brief in defense
of the small college in comparison with the large college. The pros and
cons of that subject have been discussed and rediscussed ever since Mark
Hopkins sat on a log with his first college student, and we have nothing
to add except as may be incidental to our present topic.

State universities and other large institutions are rapidly becoming
Upperclass and graduate schools. One who is more or less familiar with
conditions in the larger universities would at the present time undoubtedly
hesitate to send a young daughter to meet the exacting conditions of scho-
lastic and social life that one finds there. An unprejudiced observer who
herself attended a large university believes that this feeling will steadily
increase and that it is not impossible that the type of young women Alpha
Chi Omega wishes most to attract will at least begin their collegiate educa-
tion in the smaller, endowed colleges.

Granting that the large universities will continue to attract upper
classmen in greater numbers, will not the time come when our chapters
will be composed largely of women who will have at the most only a little
more than a year of active fraternity life? We find such a condition in
almost every large state university, especially those in states where there
are a number of excellent endowed colleges, and there is every reason to
beliVve that it will become increasingly true. Is it not going to be difficult
to interest and hold women who have had so little of actual fraternity
life? Their college habits will have been formed as nonfraternity women,
and the fraternity is very likely to be much less of a real influence in their
lives.

It seems, therefore, as if the small college would have to be looked
to as the real backbone and background of the fraternity world, not alone
of Alpha Chi Omega. May we suggest, therefore, that extension in some
of these institutions be given serious consideration?

In addition to the advantage to the fraternity that chapters in smaller
colleges would bring, there is another side to the question that is at least
worth mentioning, and that is that a fraternity doubtless means much more
to a student in a smaller college than to one in a larger institution. Every
college fraternity finds that it continually has to combat a tendency among
its university chapters to regard the fraternity house as a pleasant club or
eating place. There is not engendered the idealism among its members
that makes a fraternity house a home rather than a club. In the small
college, on the other hand, the fraternity engenders that ardent partisan-
ship that one displays toward one's real home and that is a lasting source
of pleasure and happy memories throughout life.—The Lyre of Alpha Chi
Omega, via the Anchora of Delta Gamma.

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