MOCK DEMOCRACY

A recent issue of the Yale News announces that a series of six lectures sponsored by the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity at Yale will be delivered by certain professors as a proposed step toward making fraternities useful to all instead of only a few undergraduates. The plan is to further the prevalent tendency toward the "open house" system and the divorce of fraternities from their former mystically tomblike atmosphere by bringing all undergraduates together in an understanding of "Undergraduate Problems", the general topic of the series.

However worthy be the objective of making fraternities more of a source of benefit to the College than they have been in the past, it is feared that the importance of this series of lectures has been overemphasized. The idea of advantages for the socially elect, which has always prevailed and is contrary to the object of these lectures in included in the proposed plan. It is stated that, although there will be interfraternity hospitality in that members of all other fraternities are invited to attend the lectures at Alpha Chi Rho, a ruling of the Interfraternity Council forbids Freshmen and Sophomores without Fraternity membership the privilege of visiting a fraternity house.

It is evident, then, that most of the two classes of undergraduates who would derive greatest benefit from the discussion of undergraduate problems is excluded. Freshmen and Sophomores, with their college careers still ahead, are the ones who need guidance more than upperclassmen. Fraternities in their commendable effort toward achieving a Utopian ideal seem to be hampered by their own exclusiveness.