A real danger of the modern college fraternity lies in its distraction from the real work of the college--study and the intellectual life--through habits of indifference, laziness, or immorality. The chapter-house tends to suggest that college work is optional, not imperative. “Thou shalt not loaf!” as an eleventh commandment, written across the doorposts of a fraternity club-house in the Middle West, is no inappropriate injunction. The undue and distressing waste of time in inconsequent and foolish play, the inevitable interruptions, the dissipations of social events, the inane profligacy, the autocracy of athletics, the feeble conversations that “skim like a swallow over the surface of reality”--all these are too often the doubtful compensations received by the college man as fraternity privileges. “The modern world is an exacting one,” says ex-President Woodrow Wilson, “and the things that it exacts are mostly intellectual.” One often wonders, in visiting the fraternities of America, how large a place this intellectual work holds in college life. Was that Eastern college professor justified in saying that some fraternity men are not unlike the old farmer down East who was usually to be found in a comfortable arm-chair in the post-office, and when asked what he did, replied, “I just set and think, and set and think, and sometimes I just _set_.” The fraternity-house that becomes a place to “set” rather than a place to work is hardly a credit to a college campus. As President Northrop said to some society men at the University of Minnesota, “If your fraternity is not a place for intellectual and moral incitements, it is a failure, and it must go the way of all failures.” Among other gifts, the American college fraternity may justly be expected to bestow upon its members devoted friendship, the ability to live successfully with other men, and such habits of application, industry and sobriety as develop ideas and character. THE UNDERGRADUATE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE But this hint at the somewhat free-and-easy life of the fraternity chapter-house should not leave the impression that the American undergraduate is, as a rule, a thoughtless creature or that he fails to formulate a philosophy of life. Gilbert K. Chesterton remarks, “There are some people, and I am one of them, who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe.” Certain beholders of collegiate conditions have evidently become acquainted with only those students who have thoughtlessly taken their serious views, in second-hand fashion, from their ancestors or from current opinion. These spectators have perhaps justly concluded that the undergraduate has no view of life--no view, at least, which is complimentary to him. [Illustration: The Main Hall, University of Wisconsin]