Although restrictive membership clauses are disappearing from constitutions, America’s college fraternities are still choosing their members on the basis of “Aryanism,” it is charged in a survey conducted by the National Committee on Fraternities in Education and published today.
Written by Dr. Alfred McClung Lee, president of the NCFE and chairman of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Brooklyn College, the survey discloses that most college fraternities–and sororities–continue to accept and reject applicants on grounds of race, religion and national origin. The survey encompassed 125 leading colleges which have twelve or more fraternities on their campuses.
“Although it is disappearing from formal documents, “Dr. Lee reports,” Aryanism has not died out; in most cases it is very much alive even though underground. To the extent that Aryanism persists in them, social fraternities represent a basic threat to democracy in the United States and to the effectiveness of American-leadership in world affairs. If men’s and women’s fraternities will rid themselves of this disastrous theory and practice, they will contribute to the development of democratic leadership.”
The NCFE, which includes prominent educators throughout the United States, finds only 10 of the 61 leading national men’s fraternities and only one of the 32 leading women’s sororities continue to retain formal religious and or racial restriction. “Very quietly and, in all but one case, without written statements of policy–sororities segregate themselves even more effectively than fraternities do,” Dr. Lee asserts.
Based on the trend revealed in the survey, only two or three national fraternities will still have discriminatory clauses by 1960, according to Dr. Lee, who expresses satisfaction that “among the 61 men’s national fraternities in the National Inter fraternity Conference, the number with discriminatory clauses fell from 25 to 10 between 1948 and 1954.”
Dr. Lee points out that although student and faculty opinion is preponderantly against discrimination, only eight college administrations have taken positive steps against discriminatory membership practices in fraternities. “College administrators thus do not, in most cases, use their institutional authority to prevent the nationals from perpetuating biased practices in local chapters,” he explains.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
