History of Phi Beta Kappa
Phi Beta Kappa was founded on December 5, 1776, in a tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia by five students at the College of William and Mary. At that first meeting, the students agreed on a guiding principle for their fledgling society: Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης (“love of wisdom as a guide to life”) – the first letters of which are phi beta kappa.
The society provided students an avenue for robust debate and discussion, often on topics far from the prescribed college curriculums of the day. (It was partly for this reason that until the 1830’s Phi Beta Kappa societies were mainly secret.) Phi Beta Kappa survived in New England during the early part of the nineteenth century, with prominent chapters at Dartmouth, Yale, and Harvard Colleges. It was at Harvard on August 31, 1837, that Ralph Waldo Emerson gave his famous Phi Beta Kappa address on “The American Scholar.”
The society slowly grew in the mid-nineteenth century, taking on its familiar role as an honor society. Still, following the Civil War, there were no active chapters remaining in the Southern states. In 1893 the chapter at William and Mary was re-chartered. The next year, Herbert Cushing Tolman, a Professor of Greek at the University of North Carolina, took a position at Vanderbilt, with the idea of beginning an honor society here. He opened a chapter of Alpha Theta Phi, a society he had himself begun at North Carolina, to help prepare the way toward recognition by the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. That recognition came in 1901, Phi Beta Kappa’s 125th anniversary, when Vanderbilt’s Phi Beta Kappa application was accepted and the chapter officially chartered. It was the first in Tennessee, thus the state’s “alpha” chapter.
John Thomas McGill (Vanderbilt class of 1879) was the secretary of the chapter from its founding into the 1940’s. His 1943 book, The Vanderbilt Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, is the standard history of the early decades of our chapter.
Phi Beta Kappa has grown tremendously in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and now comprises more than 290 chapters throughout the United States. Seventeen U.S. Presidents, 42 Supreme Court Justices, and more than 150 Nobel Laureates have been members of Phi Beta Kappa.
Today Phi Beta Kappa, through its promotion of the liberal arts and sciences, and its championing of free speech, remains committed to its core values of scholarship, morality, and friendship.