d to the Legislature, accompanied by a reply made by the seven
reinstated students, who denied the charges. They even maintained that
Rule 20 was a dead letter and that one of the Professors, when consulted
at the time one of the fraternities was founded, did not disapprove, or
quote this law. A memorial was also submitted by fifteen "neutral"
students sustaining the Faculty and suggesting that the threatened
legislation, which was advocated by the committee of Ann Arbor citizens,
was the greatest obstacle to harmony. Unfortunately this legislative
action was just what seemed inevitable for some time. The Ann Arbor
citizens represented that the University was failing, and that the only
way to save it was by an entire change in its organic law, the
appointment of a new Faculty, and the recognition of that natural right
of man--to form secret societies if he so elects.

Their case before the Legislature, however, had been weakened by the
action of two students who had circulated a week or so in advance a
garbled and caricatured form of the Faculty report, which had been
submitted honorably to the students to enable them to make a reply if
they so desired. This undoubtedly prejudiced the student case when the
truth became known, and the net result was no action by the Legislature
on any of the memorials. With the withdrawal of the bill, the Faculty
and the Regents were left to handle the question as seemed best to them.
In the meantime, however, the opposition to the suppression of the
societies had become so widespread and aggressive that one by one the
fraternities were "conditionally" reinstated in October, 1850.

While the upshot of all this hostility was, superficially, only a return
to the _status quo_, the students had won their point. The germ of the
trouble probably lay in the difference between the paternalistic
attitude of the Faculty, traditional in all colleges of the time, and
the beginning of a new and progressive spirit in University life. The
students had been brought up in an atmosphere which developed
individuality and self-reliance and they resented a meticulous
regulation of their lives and doubtless contrasted it unfavorably with
what they knew of European Universities. The whole fraternity struggle
of 1848-50 may then be regarded, in part at least, as a successful
effort on the students' part to ensure a different and more liberal
policy toward student life and affairs on the part of the authorities.