The Jefferson Literary and Debating Society is a debating and literary society at the University of Virginia. Founded in 1825, it is the oldest organization at The University and one of the oldest continuously existing debating societies in North America.
The Society meets at 7:29 on all Friday evenings when classes at the University of Virginia are in session, principally in Hotel C of the University's West Range, known colloquially as "Jefferson Hall", "Jeff Hall", or simply the "Hall". In former times it was popularly known around Grounds as the "Jeff."
The Greek letters of the Hall are Φ Π Θ - Phi Pi Theta - which are the initials of the Society's Greek motto: φίλοι, πατρίς, θεός (philoi, patris, theos, or "friends, fatherland, God"). After Phi Beta Kappa the Jefferson Society is the second oldest continually existing Greek-lettered organization in the country. The Hall's Latin motto, taken from Book 1, line 203 of Virgil's Aeneid, is Haec olim meminisse iuvabit - roughly translated, "In the future it will be pleasing to remember these things."
Well-known members of the Hall include Edgar Allan Poe, Woodrow Wilson, former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, Former University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III, and 2005 Miss America Deidre Downs. Several former and current members of the University's Board of Visitors also are members. Honorary members include James Madison, James Monroe, the Marquis de Lafayette, Margaret Thatcher, and Gordon Slynn, Baron Slynn of Hadley (who frequently visited the Society during his semi-regular trips to speak at the law school). Thomas Jefferson turned down an invitation for honorary membership in an August 12, 1825 letter, citing his need to avoid altering his relationship with the University and its students.
Read more about Jefferson Literary And Debating Society: Events, Membership, History, Historical Possessions, Famous Members
Famous quotes containing the words jefferson, literary, debating and/or society:
“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty, in a feather-bed.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“... my last work is no sooner on the stands than letters come, suggesting a subject. The grandmothers of strangers are crying from the grave, it seems, for literary recognition; it is bewildering, the number of salty grandfathers, aunts and uncles that languish unappreciated.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“The society would permit no books of fiction in its collection because the town fathers believed that fiction ‘worketh abomination and maketh a lie.’”
—For the State of Rhode Island, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)