Key figures: John Heath, Thomas Smith, Richard Booker, Armistead Smith, John Jones, Elisha Parmele
Summary
Phi Beta Kappa (ΦΒΚ) was founded on December 5, 1776, when five students of the College of William & Mary met in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia. John Heath, then about seventeen, served as the society’s first president; the other founders were Thomas Smith, Richard Booker, Armistead Smith, and John Jones. The society took its name from the initial letters of the Greek motto Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης (Philosophia Biou Kybernetes), rendered as “Love of learning is the guide of life,” a phrase that remains inscribed on the organization’s gold key.
The founders conceived Phi Beta Kappa as a secret literary and debating fraternity. The tightly regimented curriculum of eighteenth-century colleges left little room for open discussion, and secrecy allowed members to debate any subject — however controversial — without fear of censure. Meetings combined formal disputation and oratory on assigned questions with the fellowship of a social club. Over its first months the society developed the apparatus that would define it: an oath of secrecy, a badge, mottoes in Greek and Latin, an elaborate initiation, a code of laws, a seal, and a special handshake devised in May 1777.
The American Revolution soon threatened the young society. As British forces moved into the York peninsula in the winter of 1780–1781, the College of William & Mary closed and the parent chapter suspended its meetings in early 1781. Before the disruption, the society had begun to expand: Elisha Parmele, its only non-Virginian member, carried charters north and established chapters at Yale in 1780 and Harvard in 1781, with Dartmouth following in 1787. These northern chapters preserved the organization and became the foundation of its later national structure.
Significance
Phi Beta Kappa was the first American collegiate society to adopt a name formed from the initials of a secret Greek motto, and in doing so it set the pattern for the Greek-letter fraternities and sororities that proliferated across American higher education in the nineteenth century. The features it assembled in 1776 and 1777 — a Greek-letter name, an oath of secrecy, a badge or key, Latin and Greek mottoes, a written constitution, a formal initiation, and a distinctive handshake — became the common vocabulary of American student societies.
Over the following century the organization’s emphasis shifted from secret debate toward the public recognition of scholarship, and Phi Beta Kappa became the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honor society, election to which marks distinction in the liberal arts and sciences. Its founding at Williamsburg in the same month that Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis rallied the Continental Army places the society within the wider intellectual ferment of the Revolutionary year, when Enlightenment ideals of free inquiry and self-government were being asserted in both politics and education.