Wolf's Head (secret Society)

Wolf's Head (secret Society)

Wolf's Head Society (W.H.S.) is an undergraduate senior or secret society at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. Membership is recomposed annually of fifteen or sixteen Yale University students, typically rising seniors from the college. A delegation spends its year together answerable to the Phelps Association, composed of past members.

The society was founded when fifteen members of the Yale Class of 1884, with help from a few members of the Yale Class of 1883 who were considered possible taps for the existing societies, chose to abet the creation of The Third Society, later known as Wolf's Head Society. The society tapped eventually over 300 Yale College alumni and some prominent Yale Law School faculty soon after the incorporation. The fellowship was joined in part to counter the dominance of Skull and Bones Society in undergraduate and university affairs.

The incorporation defeated the last attempt to abolish undergraduate secret societies at Yale, and continued the tradition of founding a society if enough potential members thought they had been overlooked by the extant groups. Bones was organized in 1832 after a dispute over selections for Phi Beta Kappa awards. Scroll and Key Society, the second society at Yale, was organized in 1841 after a dispute over elections to Bones. The Third Society's founding was likewise motivated by the sentiment among some outsiders that they deserved insider status. " certain limited number were firmly convinced that there had been an appalling miscarriage of justice in their individual omission from the category of the elect," the society founders among the Yale Classes of 1883 and 1884, and some earlier classes, agreed.