From the Academy

In Defense of Fraternities: Part I

Samuel Johnson and his friends spoke of “clubbable men.” Not being one such, I never joined a fraternity. When I take up my cudgel in defense of fraternities, therefore, it is from no private motive. And fraternities nowadays seem to need some disinterested champions. Surely they do not lack for energetic assailants. Nor will it do to say that all the opposition to college fraternities comes from the envious, the malign, and the collectivistically-minded. A good deal of the abuse heaped upon them does indeed come from such quarters; but there also are sharp criticisms from persons of a different stamp. In a number of Commentary last year, for instance, there appeared an account of fraternity exclusiveness by James Rorty. Mr. Rorty, a liberal journalist of the old school, courageous, sincere and informed, always deserves to be taken seriously, whether one agrees with him or not: he deliberately sets himself against them that sit in the seats of the mighty, and his principles are a world away from the assumptions that dominate the fashionable leftward-verging collectivistic liberalism of our day. So Mr. Rorty’s criticisms, and those of some other gentlemen, are not to be dismissed as malicious or somehow subversive.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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In Defense of Fraternities: Part I

Samuel Johnson and his friends spoke of “clubbable men.” Not being one such, I never joined a fraternity. When I take up my cudgel in defense of fraternities, therefore, it is from no private motive. And fraternities nowadays seem to need some disinterested champions. Surely they do not lack for energetic assailants. Nor will it do to say that all the opposition to college fraternities comes from the envious, the malign, and the collectivistically-minded. A good deal of the abuse heaped upon them does indeed come from such quarters; but there also are sharp criticisms from persons of a different stamp. In a number of Commentary last year, for instance, there appeared an account of fraternity exclusiveness by James Rorty. Mr. Rorty, a liberal journalist of the old school, courageous, sincere and informed, always deserves to be taken seriously, whether one agrees with him or not: he deliberately sets himself against them that sit in the seats of the mighty, and his principles are a world away from the assumptions that dominate the fashionable leftward-verging collectivistic liberalism of our day. So Mr. Rorty’s criticisms, and those of some other gentlemen, are not to be dismissed as malicious or somehow subversive.