Cornell Fraternities Drink, Eagerly Wait Wild Weekends

Cornell is a big university. The Cornell student's search for intimacy amid the bigness has led to a huge fraternity system that includes more than fifty chapters. But despite the fact that fraternities are a big force "on the Hill" only 35 percent of the men at Cornell are members of them.

The remaining 65 percent live mostly in the organized dormitory system provided by the university. Its life may not be quite so socially hyperthyroid as that of fraternity men but it is somewhat less costly (about $2000) and by no means devoid of the fun fraternity men allegedly have.

Even the most austere Cornell undergraduate who may lead a sterile social life most of the year has two annual flings, the Spring and Fall Weekends. The "Big Weekends" are time for calculated abandon during which, on a structure of football or crew races, as the season demands, the University student body consumes an immense amount of drink, stages float parades, and throws an endless number of parties.

The drinking habits of Cornellians, usually not at all immodest, brought them national notoriety last year when an undergraduate, desirous of demonstrating his drinking prowess during the initiation ceremonies of a social fraterity, guzzled a quart of martinis at one throw. Within minutes, the initiate was out and fading. Moved to a hospital, the drinker recovered but he had come close enough to death to cause the university to ban two of the three social fraternities (drinking societies) and impose strict regulations on the third.

Nor is social life the only, or even the main facet of undergraduate life in Ithaca. Over 235 student organizations prosper on the campus. Among the most vocal among these are the political clubs which represent about the same proportion of Republicans to Democrats to far leftists as is extant here.

Religion plays an unusually influential part on the Cornell campus and this is zealously encouraged by the administration which recently spent a million and a half dollars to build Anabel Taylor Hall, an inter-faith center. The center houses an extraordinarily large number of separate religious groups and is also the home base of the University Committee on United Religious Works whose chief function is to make orientation of freshmen less painful through religious contacts.