On December 5, 1776, Phi Beta Kappa, America’s most prestigious undergraduate honor society, was founded at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Membership in the organization is based on outstanding achievement in the liberal arts and sciences and typically limited to students in the upper tenth of their graduating class.
Organized by a group of enterprising undergraduates, Phi Beta Kappa was the nation’s first Greek letter society. From 1776 to 1780, members met regularly at William and Mary to write, debate, and socialize. They also planned the organization’s expansion and established the characteristics typical of American fraternities and sororities: an oath of secrecy, a code of laws, mottoes in Greek and Latin, and an elaborate initiation ritual. When the Revolutionary War forced William and Mary to close in 1780, newly-formed chapters at Harvard and Yale directed Phi Beta Kappa’s growth and development.
By the time the William and Mary chapter reopened in 1851, Phi Beta Kappa was represented at colleges throughout New England. By the end of the nineteenth century, the once secretive, exclusively male social group had dropped its oath of secrecy, opened its doors to women, and transformed itself into a national honor society dedicated to fostering and recognizing excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.
Today, Phi Beta Kappa has over 250 chapters and over half a million living members, including six of the current Supreme Court justices and presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. In addition to sponsoring scholarships and campus activities, Phi Beta Kappa grants book and essay awards, and publishes The American Scholar, a quarterly journal named after Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1937 Harvard lecture warning against pedantry, imitation, traditionalism, and scholarship unrelated to life.