Phi Beta Kappa Society Totally Explained

Everything about The Phi Beta Kappa Society totally explained

The Phi Beta Kappa Society is an academic honor society with the mission of "fostering and recognizing excellence" in the undergraduate liberal arts and sciences. Founded at the College of William and Mary on December 5, 1776, it's the oldest and most prestigious honor society in the United States. Phi Beta Kappa is also the first collegiate organization to adopt a Greek-letter name. Today there are 276 chapters and over half a million living members.
Phi Beta Kappa stands for or — "Love of learning is the guide of life."

Membership

Although each individual chapter determines its specific application of the Phi Beta Kappa Council's 1952 Stipulations Concerning Eligibility for Membership and sets its own academic standards, even the most generous chapter will typically elect fewer than 10% among the candidates for degrees at that College of Arts and Sciences.
Phi Beta Kappa is generally considered the most prestigious American college honor society, and membership is one of the highest honors that can be conferred on undergraduate liberal arts and science students.
However, in the last two decades, rates of acceptance of Phi Beta Kappa membership invitations by students or "members in course" have significantly dropped. During the last triennial convention held in October 2006, the national secretary (chief executive officer) of Phi Beta Kappa admitted in his annual State of the Society address that:
ť The data show a generally heartening, but not entirely untroubled picture. At about a third of our chapters, essentially no one turns down the invitation. At almost another third, the acceptance rate is above 80 percent. But at the remaining chapters, almost 100, the rates are lower. At a small number of chapters, the percentage of invited students who are subsequently initiated is as low as 40 percent and 30 percent. Some who have seen these figures question the viability of those campuses as sheltering institutions.

The national secretary then admitted, "It is distressing that anyone should decline this honor. Our aim is to have strong acceptance rates at all our chapters." But clearly, fewer outstanding students consider initiation into Phi Beta Kappa a worthwhile endeavor than in years past.

History

Of the fourteen colonial colleges established in the 1600s and 1700s, the College of William and Mary was the sole royal foundation, prominent for the qualities of its teaching, library, and classroom and residential buildings. Founded in 1693, the College is second in age only to Harvard among American colleges and universities. And it was at William and Mary, an old and elite institution, that, during the Revolutionary War, the first Greek-letter college fraternity was established.
   When the United States Declaration of Independence was read in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, it proclaimed the right of the colonists to have government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Adoption of that galvanizing idea soon reached Williamsburg, Virginia, a hotbed of agitation for independence. The flame of revolution spread among students at William and Mary, and they were eager to discuss the burning issues of the day, especially topics more directly affecting student life.
   However, the opportunity for students to form a group and to debate any issue within college walls was restricted, so they gathered in local taverns (among them, the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg) for the limited discussions which were possible. In this atmosphere, on December 5, 1776, five close and trusted friends remained after other students returned to campus. They formed the first permanent Greek-letter society in North America. The name they chose was the Phi Beta Kappa Society (ΦΒΚ).
   The Phi Beta Kappa was patterned upon (but didn't grow out of) older fraternities at William and Mary: the F.H.C. Society (nicknamed the "Flat Hat Club"), founded in 1750 and numbering such prominent Virginians as Thomas Jefferson among its members; and the P.D.A. Society (nicknamed "Please Don't Ask"). As with these older, Latin-letter fraternities, the Phi Beta Kappa was a secret society. To protect their members and to instill a sense of solidarity, each had the essential attributes of most modern fraternities: an oath of secrecy, a badge or token of membership, mottoes (in the case of the Phi Beta Kappa, in Greek rather than in Latin), a ritual of initiation, and a handshake; to these, the Phi Beta Kappa would soon add another attribute, branches or "chapters" at other colleges.
   Before the British invasion of Virginia forced the temporary closure of the College of William and Mary and disbandment of the Phi Beta Kappa there early in 1781, alumni of colleges in New England, passing through Williamsburg, took charters from the Phi Beta Kappa to establish branches of the society at their own colleges. A second chapter was founded at Yale College in late 1780; a third, at Harvard College in 1781; and a fourth, at Dartmouth College in 1787. From these new chapters, the Phi Beta Kappa evolved from a fraternity with principally academic and some social purposes to an entirely honorary organization recognizing scholastic achievement. While the Phi Beta Kappa developed the distinctive characteristics of Greek-letter fraternities, it was left to other students to fill the natural human need for fellowship with kindred students by extension of fraternity to a purely social context. Further chapters appeared at Union College in 1817, Bowdoin College in 1825, and Brown University in 1830. The original chapter at William and Mary was re-established. In 1831, the Harvard chapter publicly disclosed the fraternity's secrets during a period of strong anti-Masonic sentiment. The first chapter established after becoming an "open" society was at Trinity College (Connecticut) in 1845.
   As the first collegiate organization of its type to adopt a Greek-letter name, it's generally considered a forerunner of modern college fraternities as well as the model for later honor societies. Ironically, it was partly the rise of true "social" fraternities modeled after Phi Beta Kappa later in the nineteenth century which obviated the social aspects of membership in the organization, transforming it into the honor society it's today.
   By 1883, when the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa was established, there were 25 chapters. The first women were elected to the society at the University of Vermont in 1875, and the first African-American member was elected at the same institution two years later.
   Each chapter is designated by its state and a Greek letter indicating the order in which that state's chapters were founded. For example, Alpha of Pennsylvania refers to the chapter at Dickinson College (1887); Beta of Pennsylvania at Lehigh University (1887); Gamma of Pennsylvania at Lafayette College (1890); and Delta of Pennsylvania at the University of Pennsylvania (1892).
   By 1920, there were 89 chapters at a variety of schools. New chapters are continually added; as of 2007 there are 276(External Link

). In 1988, the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa officially changed its name to The Phi Beta Kappa Society, recalling the name under which the organization had been established in 1776.

The Key

The symbol of the Phi Beta Kappa Society is a golden key engraved on the obverse with the image of a pointing finger, three stars, and the Greek letters from which the society takes its name. The stars are said today to represent the ambition of young scholars and the three distinguishing principles of the Society: friendship, morality, and learning. On the reverse are found the initials "SP" in script, which stand for the Latin words societas philosophiae, or "society of philosophy".
   The "key" of Phi Beta Kappa didn't actually begin as a (watch) key in 1776. The first were in fact medallions, or better, watchfobs, essentially squares of metal with a loop forged integrally to the body of the fob in order to allow for suspension from a watch chain. The post or stem, designed for the winding of pocketwatches, didn't appear on fobs until the beginning of the 19th century. The fobs weren't even gold at first; the earliest extant 18th century models were made of silver or pewter, and again it wasn't until the first quarter of the 19th century that gold largely supplanted the use of silver or pewter; some notable exceptions did occur, such as at Harvard, which continued the use of silver or pewter for some of its keys up until the first decade of the 20th century.
   While several stylistic features have survived since the earliest days - the use of the stars, pointing hand, and Greek letters on the obverse, for example - a number of differences are noted with older keys when compared to more modern examples. For one, the name of the recipient wasn't engraved on the earliest fobs or keys, and it wasn't until the first decade of the 19th century that examples are known on which is engraved the name of the recipient of the honor. The name of the school from which the fob or key came was also not routinely included on the earliest models, and sometimes the only way to trace a key to a particular school's chapter is by researching the name of the recipient against surviving class records (which is possible only regarding keys with the owner's name engraved). The number of stars on the obverse has also changed over the years, with never fewer than three, but on some known examples with as many as a dozen (the explanation as to the meaning of the stars in these early cases varies from chapter to chapter). Also, the date of the awarding of the honor is only seen on relatively later models (from the second quarter of the 19th century onward). Some people mistake the date that appears on the fob or key - December 5th, 1776 - as the date that a particular fob or key was awarded, when in fact that's merely the date of the founding of the society.
   Finally, in 1912, the key was standardized such that its size, golden appearance (some are plated), and engraving with the school's name, recipient's name, and date of the award all became standard, and the key lost much of its earlier archaic charm.

Activities and publications

The Phi Beta Kappa Society publishes The Key Reporter, a newsletter distributed quarterly to all contributing members and biannually to all other members, and The American Scholar, a quarterly subscription-based journal that accepts essays on literature, history, science, public affairs, and culture.
Phi Beta Kappa also funds a number of fellowships, visiting scholar programs, and academic awards.

Notable members

Elected as undergraduates

Bushrod Washington — William & Mary, 1778
John Heath — William & Mary, 1779
John Marshall — William & Mary, 1780
James Kent — Yale, 1781
John Quincy Adams — Harvard, 1787
Eli Whitney — Yale, 1792
David Sherman Boardman - Yale, 1792
Joseph Story — Harvard, 1798
Daniel Webster — Dartmouth, 1801
John Calhoun — Yale, 1804
Samuel Morse — Yale, 1810
Joseph Tracy — Dartmouth, 1814
William H. Seward — Union, 1819
Rufus Choate — Dartmouth, 1819
Nathaniel Hawthorne — Bowdoin, 1824
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — Bowdoin, 1825
Asa Fowler — Dartmouth, 1833
Chester Arthur — Union, 1848
William S. Clark — Amherst, 1848
Timothy Dwight V — Yale, 1848
Joshua Chamberlain — Bowdoin, 1852
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. — Harvard, 1861
Robert E. Peary — Bowdoin, 1877
William Howard Taft — Yale, 1878
John Dewey — Vermont, 1879
Theodore Roosevelt — Harvard, 1880
Charles Evans Hughes — Brown, 1881
Edward Bouchet — Yale, 1874
Henry Clay Folger — Amherst, 1879
George Santayana — Harvard, 1886
Henry Stimson — Yale, 1888
Bernard Baruch — CUNY, 1889
W.E.B. DuBois — Fisk, 1890
Bainbridge Colby — Williams, 1890
Edward E. Wilson - Williams, 1892
Learned Hand — Harvard, 1893
Alexander Meiklejohn — Brown, 1893
Harlan Fiske Stone — Amherst, 1894
Owen Roberts — Pennsylvania, 1895
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. — Brown, 1897
Richard B. Carter - Harvard, 1898
Felix Frankfurter — CUNY, 1902
Elihu Root — Hamilton, 1903
Jessie Redmon Fauset — Cornell, 1905
Ernest Everett Just — Dartmouth, 1907
John J. Parker — North Carolina, 1907
John Foster Dulles — Princeton, 1908
Owen Brewster — Bowdoin, 1909
Harold Hitz Burton — Bowdoin, 1909
Walter Lippmann — Harvard, 1909
Paul Douglas — Bowdoin, 1913
Pearl Buck — Randoph-Macon Woman's College, 1914
James Bryant Conant — Harvard, 1914
Dean Acheson — Yale, 1915
Archibald MacLeish — Yale, 1915
Charles Hamilton Houston — Amherst, 1915
Alfred Kinsey — Bowdoin, 1916
Irwin Edman — Columbia, 1917
Jarvis Offutt — Yale, 1917
Paul Robeson — Rutgers, 1919
William O. Douglas — Whitman, 1920
Percy Julian — DePauw, 1920
Countee Cullen — New York U., 1922
Herbert Brownell, Jr. — Nebraska, 1924
Alger Hiss — Johns Hopkins, 1926
Martin Dobelle - Fordham U., 1926
Joseph J. Spengler — Ohio State, 1927
George H. Hitchings — Washington, 1927
Grace Hopper — Vassar 1928
John Stennis — Virginia, 1928
Harry Blackmun — Harvard, 1929
James Michener — Swarthmore, 1929
Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. — Washington & Lee, 1929
Nelson Rockefeller — Dartmouth, 1930
Jonas Salk — CCNY, 1930
Carl Albert — Oklahoma, 1931
Dean Rusk — Davidson, 1931
Eugene V. Rostow — Yale, 1932
John Howard — Western Reserve, 1934
Daniel Boorstin — Harvard, 1934
Richard Helms — Williams, 1935
Milton Babbitt — New York U., 1936
Ed Muskie — Bates, 1936
Robert McNamara — Berkeley, 1937
Potter Stewart — Yale, 1937
Byron White — Colorado, 1937
Caspar Weinberger — Harvard, 1938
Daniel C. Tsui — Augustana, 1939
Wilma Dykeman — Northwestern, 1940
Orville Freeman — Minnesota, 1940
Ella Grasso — Mount Holyoke, 1940
Ruth Barcan Marcus — New York U., 1941
Wade McCree — Fisk, 1941
John Paul Stevens — Chicago, 1941
Betty Friedan — Smith, 1942
Phyllis Schlafly — Washington U., 1943
Cid Corman — Tufts, 1945
Frank Church — Stanford, 1947
Robert Bork — Chicago, 1948
George H.W. Bush — Yale, 1948
Tom Lehrer — Harvard, 1946
William Rehnquist — Stanford, 1948
Brock Adams — Washington, 1949
Edward O. Wilson — Alabama, 1949
Henry Kissinger — Harvard, 1950
Marv Levy — Coe, 1950
Susan Sontag — Chicago, 1951
Arlen Specter — Pennsylvania, 1951
Arthur Levitt — Williams, 1952
Stephen Sondheim — Williams, 1952
John Shelby Spong — North Carolina, 1952
Guido Calabresi — Yale, 1953
Clive Davis — New York U., 1953
Thomas R. Pickering — Bowdoin, 1953
Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Cornell, 1954
Dick Lugar — Denison, 1954
Victor Navasky — Swarthmore, 1954
John Updike — Harvard, 1954
Reynolds Price — Duke, 1955
Ralph Nader — Princeton, 1955
Gloria Steinem — Smith, 1956
Akira Iriye — Haverford College, 1957
Elizabeth Dole — Duke, 1958
Anthony Kennedy — Stanford, 1958
Kris Kristofferson — Pomona, 1958
Stephen Breyer — Stanford, 1959
Francis Ford Coppola — Hofstra, 1959
John W. Dower — Amherst, 1959
Bob Graham — Florida, 1959
Robert Nozick — Columbia, 1959
Richard Posner — Yale, 1959
Robert Rubin — Harvard, 1960
Lester Thurow — Williams, 1960
Fay Vincent — Williams, 1960
Pat Schroeder — Minnesota, 1961
David Souter — Harvard, 1961
Elizabeth Parr-Johnston - Wellesley, 1961
Lamar Alexander — Vanderbilt, 1962
Tom Brokaw — South Dakota, 1962
Lynne Cheney — Colorado C., 1962
Richard Epstein — Columbia, 1963
David Satcher — Morehouse, 1963
John Edgar Wideman — Pennsylvania, 1963
James Woolsey — Stanford, 1963
David Boies — Redlands, 1964
Michael Crichton — Harvard, 1964
Joseph Lieberman — Yale, 1964
Angela Davis — Brandeis, 1965
Terrence Malick — Harvard, 1965
Paul Wellstone — North Carolina, 1965

William Weld — Harvard, 1966

Philip Lader — Duke, 1966

Bill Clinton — Georgetown, 1968

Henry Paulson — Dartmouth, 1968

Laurie Anderson — Barnard, 1969

Hillary Clinton — Wellesley, 1969

T. E. D. Klein — Brown, 1969

Jon Corzine — Illinois, 1969

E. Annie Proulx — Vermont, 1969

Frank Easterbrook — Swarthmore, 1970

Louis Freeh — Rutgers, 1971

Nadine Strossen — Radcliffe, 1972

Samuel Alito — Princeton, 1972

Benazir Bhutto — Radcliffe, 1973

Jeb Bush — Texas, 1973

E.J. Dionne — Harvard, 1973

Rita Dove — Miami U., 1973

Glenn Close — William & Mary, 1974

Christie Hefner — Brandeis, 1974

Condoleezza Rice — Denver, 1974

Ben Bernanke — Harvard, 1975

Susan Collins — St. Lawrence, 1975

Harold Hongju Koh — Harvard, 1975

Gale Norton — Denver, 1975

Robert Zoellick — Swarthmore, 1975

Lawrence Lindsey — Bowdoin, 1976

John Roberts — Harvard, 1976

Karen Hughes — Southern Methodist, 1978

David Addington — Georgetown, 1978

Jennifer Granholm — Berkeley, 1980

Nicholas Kristof — Harvard, 1981

Eliot Spitzer — Princeton, 1981

George Stephanopoulos — Columbia, 1982

Kateryna Yushchenko — Georgetown, 1982

Patrick Fitzgerald — Amherst, 1982

Miguel Estrada — Columbia, 1983

Dinesh D'Souza — Dartmouth, 1983

Daniel Pearl — Stanford, 1985

Carol Queen - University of Oregon 1985

Jeff Bezos — Princeton, 1986

Paul Clement — Georgetown, 1988

Ashley Judd — Kentucky, 1990

Niki Burnham — Colorado State University, 1990

Joshua Redman — Harvard, 1991

Paul Adelstein — Bowdoin, 1991

Carson Kressley - Gettysburg, 1991

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin — Georgetown, 1993

Bobby Jindal — Brown, 1993

Emily Bergl — Grinnell, 1997

Peyton Manning — Tennessee, 1997

Brad Delson - UCLA, 1999

Rivers Cuomo — Harvard, 2006

Honorary members

Angela Davis

Alexander Graham Bell

Mark Twain

Woodrow Wilson

Calvin Coolidge

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Henry Adams

Henry James

Louis Brandeis

John D. Rockefeller

Eudora WeltyFurther Information

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