1905-06 Volume 30 No 1–5 - Phi Delta Theta Scroll Archive

212 THE SCROLL.that he made diligent efforts to obtain reliable informationabout every fraternity, and that he used all material of valuethat was furnished to him. In our opinion, therefore, thosefraternities which failed to supply him with full informationhave only themselves to blame. We are sure that fraternitymen generally will acquit Mr. Baird of being unfair or of harboringa prejudice against any particular fraternity. We considerthe charge that his work is "a Beta spiking book" to bevery unjust. * A 0 is a rival of B @ II, as it is of * K *, butwe do not believe that the article about B © II in the book overratesthat fraternity in the least. Perhaps without impropriety,we may mention that Mr. Baird sent his B ® II article tous before it was published, and asked us to criticise it, andespecially to inform him whether or not we deemed it undulyfavorable to his fraternity, and we returned the article sayingthat we considered it perfectly fair and just.EXTENSION VIEWS OF A CONTEMPORARY.In the last six years B ® n has chartered eight chapters, asfollows: West Virginia U., 1900; U. of Colorado, 1900;Bowdoin, 1900; U. of Washington, 1901; U. of Illinois, 1902;Purdue, 1903; Case, 1904; Iowa State, 1905. Extensioncontinues to be a live issue, as shown by the Beta Theta Pi.Following is an extract from an article in the November •number, written by Prof. F. W. Shepardson, sometime anofficer in the fraternity and now a professor in the Universityof Chicago:It must be a revelation to a provincial mind to read a statement fromthe Illinois chapter, that the freshman class, at Champaign exceeds 1,000 innumber, or the reports from the Nebraska secretary that over 3,000 studentsare enrolled at Lincoln and that the Nebraska glee club will have a trip tothe Pacific coast, a little western outing covering, perhaps, about three timesthe distance from Columbus, Ohio, to New York City. The members of afraternity founded in what was, in 1839, the heart of the central west cannotafford to have any horizon but a national one, and must keep wide awaketo the fact that the far greater "west" than the west of 1839 is moving ineducation, and that many an institution as yet untouched by B9n, right atthis very moment gives far greater promise of increasing power and influencethan some of the old established colleges of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.An Ohio man myself, I can say that conservatively, without suggesting theidea that any institutions east of the "beautiful river" might suffer by comparisonwith some of these growing colleges of the trans-Missouri country.Each year, as my professional duties bring me more clearly to the realizationof actual educational conditions, I see how absolutely untenable myfavorite "extension" position is, that we have enough chapters in our fraternity.The state university is distinctly a western development, and just assurely as the sun shines will every western state have a great central educa-