BRASS TACKS

Last week, representatives of 58 national fraternities met in Washington. They worried about incidents which "had given fraternities a bad name" such as Dartmouth's Cirotta Case, Brown's brawls last spring, and Williams' troubles with fraternity drinking. They discussed the perpetual problem of raising money. But most important of all, they talked about bias.

Discrimination in fraternities is important because fraternities themselves are important. There are more than 2,750 Greek-letter chapters in the United States, and at many schools they house and feed most of the student body. They frequently run the social and extra-curricular life of those schools. Educational authorities estimate that 90 per cent of these fraternities have discriminatory clauses in their charters. Most specify "non-Semitic members of the Caucasian race;" some southern groups go even further, and admit only White Protestants." Last week, the fraternities voted that chapters should "take steps" to climinate such admission bars.

Three Obstacles

The odds are very good that this weeding out of fraternity bias will be a long and slow process. There are three big obstacles:

1.) A fraternity is much like an iceberg--only about ten per cent of it shows. There are more than a million fraternity brothers in the U. S.; about 100,000 of them are undergraduates. The rest of the fraternity men comprise graduate boards, which have consistently fought lifting bias rules. And the graduate boards pay most of the bills.

2.) U. S. fraternities are organized on a broad national level, affiliated with brother groups. A fraternity can lose these valuable affiliations if it deviates. When Amherst's Phi Kappa Psi strayed last year by electing a Negro, it was promptly cut off from its national tie-ups.

3.) Fraternities have an extremely important social position on most U. S. campuses, and they feel that they can keep this position only through restriction of membership. A few months ago, a Williams man told this writer that "we personally don't much care what religion a guy is when we pledge him, but if we didn't pick our members carefully, nobody would want to join us." As long as people like the Williams man must disregard their personal convictions because of outside pressure, no one-shot resolution will cure fraternity discrimination.