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A GREATER WORK student would not join a.secret society while enrolled in the College, the faculty revised the rules and regulations in 1865 to include as grounds for dismissal joining or countenancing any combination "which has a tendency to create opposition to the discipline of the Institution." In the years after 1868, faculty opposition to the fraternities softened. The fact that Professors Baugher, Bikle, Breidenbaugh, Jacobs, McKnight, Sadtler, and Stahley were all fraternity men helps explain why this occurred. Whatever may have been the danger which fraternities presented to the order and authority of the institution in the 1850s and 1860s, College officials, perhaps drawing upon their own undergraduate experience, came to believe that they now saw little or none. They were prepared to grant that students had the right to form such organizations, even secret ones, and to maintain them so long as they did not violate the existing rules and regulations.185 In 1877, the first year of its publication, the editor of the College Monthly opened its columns for several months between July and December to an extended discussion of fraternities. This gave both friends and foes the opportunity to deal with the major issues being argued at the time: their secrecy, alleged insubordination, reported domination of campus politics, and claimed social and other benefits for both undergraduates and alumni. Clearly, the fraternity case was the one more strongly presented. Ten years later, in October 1887, the same journal ran excerpts from a recent Forum article by former President Andrew D. White of Cornell University. Using arguments which probably reflected the sentiments of most of the Gettysburg faculty, White answered many of the charges directed against the fraternities. For example, he thought "their secrecy is rather nominal than real" and that few concerned college officials lacked "a fair knowledge" of their "interior organization." White refused to lay more than a modest share of the blame for the decline of literary societies on the social fraternities. Even that could be removed if "half the lung power expended by college officers in declaiming against the fraternities" were directed to supporting the literary societies. Fraternity involvement in college politics, he argued, is "simply one form of an evil which, in some form, is, as things go at present, inevitable." Wipe out the fraternities and some 185In June 1885 the faculty lectured the members of Phi Kappa Psi and Phi Gamma Delta, following an incident in which the grades of certain seniors were lowered by other students who gained access to the records. It is not clear who the guilty parties were, but the faculty reminded the two fraternities that, "in all institutions of civilized government,. . . administration of justice rests upon the power to obtain in every case the best and fullest testimony." It called upon all students to cooperate in the investigation. 33