History of North American College Fraternities and Sororities - Phi Beta Kappa

Phi Beta Kappa

The Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded on December 5, 1776, at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, established the precedent for naming American college societies after the Greek-letter initials of a secret Greek motto.

The group consisted of students who frequented the Raleigh Tavern as a common meeting area off the college campus. There is a persistent rumor that a Masonic lodge also met in the same place, but there was a different building used by the Freemasons at Williamsburg. Whether the students organized to meet more freely and discuss non-academic topics, or to discuss politics in a Revolutionary society, is unknown; the earliest records indicate only that the students met to debate and engage in oratory, and on topics that would have been not far removed from the curriculum.

There were Latin-named literary societies at William & Mary, which, according to the founders of Phi Beta Kappa "had lost all reputation for letters, and noted only for the dissipation & conviviality of members." The new society was intended to be "purely of domestic manufacture, without any connexion whatever with anything European, either English or German." The founders of Phi Beta Kappa declared that the society was formed for congeniality and to promote good fellowship, with "friendship as its basis and benevolence and literature as its pillars." At first the only secrets were the mysterious letters used on the badge.

The society was given the motto Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης or "Philosophy is the helmsman of life," now officially translated as "Philosophy is the guide of life". Greek was chosen as the language for the motto because Heath, "was the best Greek scholar in college."

One official historian of the society, William T. Hastings, and others, believes that the "S" and "P" Society, was the original name of the Society and that the name Phi Beta Kappa only came to be taken as the society name over time. The heading on the original list of members states: "A List of the members, who have been initiated into the S.P. alias Phi Beta Kappa Society."

Later, in May 1777, two new signs of recognition were designed: "a salutation of the clasp of the hands, together with an immediate stroke across the mouth with the back of the same hand, and a return with the hand used by the saluted"; these new gestures were for the purposes of distinguishing Phi Beta Kappa members "in any foreign country or place."

By a stroke of good fortune, the society initiated a Yale student before disbanding at the advance of British forces. This student brought Phi Beta Kappa to Yale and Harvard, and from there the society was able to continue. As Phi Beta Kappa developed, it came to be a very influential association of faculty and select students across several colleges. The chapters became larger and focused on rhetoric and class elections while abandoning the close social bond that had defined the first chapter. Membership was becoming more of an honor and less part of a functioning society.

However, Phi Beta Kappa was very different than a typical college fraternity of today in that the membership was generally restricted to upperclassmen, if not seniors, and faculty, (made members earlier in their careers) played an active role. The annual Phi Beta Kappa exercises at Yale were public literary exercises, with as many or more faculty members of the society than undergraduate.

No other Greek letter student society was formed until the inception of Chi Delta Theta, a senior class society at Yale, in 1821. This group, like Phi Beta Kappa had now become, was largely focused on literary debates and elections. Similar groups without Greek letter names (but still clearly inspired by the Greek language) had already been formed like Hermesian, Adelphi, and Philalethean.

A group called Chi Phi claims to have been founded in 1824 at Princeton. However, most independent authors have expressed a high degree of skepticism about Chi Phi's claims to have been founded before the publicly verifiable date of 1851 or 1854.