Education: Greeks' Week

Last fortnight U. S. college fraternities held their annual interfraternity conference in Manhattan. The delegates had a few headaches. Fraternities found it harder these days to fill their expensive houses, make ends meet. The burgeoning of new house plans in private Eastern colleges, the current revival of dormitory building in State universities made their own houses less dazzling. At Wisconsin, dormitories had gone so far as to take over a time-honored fraternity function: they gave their boys instruction in table manners.

Delegates' biggest headache, which they quickly fell to discussing, was disagreeable publicity. In picture magazines and films there had lately been many a display of fraternities' swank, pranks, necking parties.

The fraternity men proceeded to pass resolutions: condemning Hell Week (initiation week) shenanigans, deploring "recent lapses from good taste on the part of certain fraternity chapters that have lent themselves to pictorial exploitation." Elected president of the National Undergraduate Interfraternity Council was a model boy, Michigan State's Arthur Howland, a student who is working his way through college by leading a dance band.

All this good work was promptly undone last week by developments at University of Wisconsin. Into the office of the dean of men irately marched Madison's Police Chief William H. McCormick. Chief McCormick threatened to arrest the members of Sigma Nu, Chi Psi and Alpha Delta Phi en masse. His complaint: Sigma Nus, Chi Psis and Alpha Delts had taken to whiling away evenings by shouting obscene names at one another. Worse, a fraternity man was caught in the act of painting on the sidewalk in front of the Alpha Epsilon Phi sorority house: "Poo on A E Phoo."