Because the dynamic distinctions within the academic community are invidious only. College is not a republic of letters but a plutocracy of fraternities, sororities, clubs, and “activities.” Scholarship is no attribute of merit for a student. Athletic prowess, especially if conspicuous, could be; but the prepotent properties are wealth, sectarian affiliations, and “contacts and connections.” These delimit members of the fraternities and sororities. Since initiation fees run from $50 to $1000, and membership is correspondingly expensive, a rich father is the prime qualification for the prospective “pledge.” Before pledging, such a prospect is courted like a bride. Pledging is followed by initiation, which often lasts months. It begins in hazing and may grow into sadistic torture, recalling the rites of the primitives. It culminates in a solemn self-dedication with highfalutin’ vows whose practical application to the subsequent daily life amounts to training in the amenities (à la Emily Post); “loyalty” to “brothers” in the competition for the cream in undergraduate activities such as class-politics, proms, athletics, and the like; collaboration, mostly illicit, with brothers and sisters to insure their passing examinations or any other kind of test; and most of all, in the facilitation of “contacts.” Thus the academic aristocracy are indoctrinated in the academic “traditions” and equipped to watch over them. These have primarily to do with the _mores_ of garb and conduct ordained for freshmen, with the prerogatives of upperclassmen, such as wearing shorts and slickers, and similar matters reminiscent of the primitives. If they are moved by social and political questions at all, it is at times of presidential elections, when national committees--Republican, mostly--have been known to put a good deal of money into corralling “the college vote.” In times of strike, as during the Boston street railway strike, some of the better-class Harvard undergraduates had almost as much fun strike-breaking as they used to have rioting after a rare football victory over Yale. But the record hardly ever shows considered idealism, spontaneous, generous giving of goods and self, such as one finds among the students in Europe and Asia. The American undergraduate makes the impression of a self-centered and selfish creature, absorbed in trivialities, comfort-loving, reactionary and irresponsible; in a word, infantile. VIII Graduates, recalling their college life, tend to fall into two groups. One group see college as the happiest time of their lives--and why should they not? This group composes the backbone of the alumni associations, forever whoops it up for “dear ol’ Whatsis,” and proves the life of the party at alumni reunions, especially those where good liquor is poured out in the hopeless effort to make the man a boy again, while he stays a father too.