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

THE SCROLL. 85In his advice against the building of over-costly fraternityhouses.President Faunce, of Brown, put his finger on one ofthe lines in which the scale of undergraduate expenditure hasmost strikingly increased of late years. But there is reasonfor it. To begin with, it was demonstrably a good investmentfor some twenty or thirty young men of common tastesand interest to rent a house and rent it co-operatively. Thenext step was for some young men to arouse the pride of thealumni and pledge the credit of future college generations tobuild a house of their own. And the temptations to go beyondreasonable requirements is really far stronger in a Greekletterbrotherhood than in almost any other sort of organization.In recruiting its membership every autumn it has tocompete for the favor of prepossessing freshmen, who havebeen on the ground so short a time and know the men solittle that they are necessarily guided by externals. It is arule, tested by many successful experiments, that the way torevive a moribund chapter is to beg or borrow somehowenough money to build the best house on the campus. Thisfault is really inherent in the absurd rushing system, underwhich a student, with comparatively few exceptions, mustmake his choice between fraternities in his first fortnight atcollege, or not at all.—New York Evening Post.The Sewanee chapter of * A 0, in 1884, one year after itwas established, built a frame house of two rooms. It wasbuilt on ground leased from the university for 33 years. Itwas the first house erected by any fraternity in the south.-The claim has often been made by * A © that it was the firsthouse owned by any fraternity in the south, and the claimhas been made in the 1890, 1898 and 1905 editions of ' Baird'sManual of American College Fraternities." So far as we areinformed this claim of over twenty years was never disputeduntil the K 2 Caduceus for June, 1905, was printed. Thatmagazine says: "K 2 acquired a house in 1882 at the Universityof the South, the first fraternity house owned in thesouth." We challenge the statement, but are perfectly willingto abide by the results of a thorough investigation, andwe suggest that the members of * A © and K 2 at Sewaneeget together and investigate this very interesting historicalpoint. K 2 does not claim to have built a house in 1882 butto have acquired one in that year, the year its chapter atSewanee was established. If it purchased a house it musthave purchased it from the university, and it ought to be easy