What do Father Hesburgh,
former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, John Updike, Stephen
Sondheim and former Buffalo Bills Coach Marv Levy all have in
common?
They're all members
of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most distinguished academic
honor society in the United States.
Notre Dame is one
of 270 colleges and universities nationally that every spring
induct the top 10 percent of their graduating seniors from specific
fields into the society. Not every college qualifies to have a
chapter, however. In fact Notre Dame wasn't granted one until
1968.
"We applied several
times for a chapter and got to the visiting stage but didn't get
accepted," said emeritus philosophy professor Frederick Crosson
'56Ph.D., a former president of the National Phi Beta Kappa Society.
"The problem was partly athletic, I think. We didn't . . . have
any scandals in our program in those days, but that was always
something they looked at."
The Catholic nature
of the university also apparently caused some hesitation on the
part of the national organization.
"It wasn't that they
kept all Catholic schools out, it was more a fear of how open
[Catholic schools] were to intellectual investigation and academic
discourse. The whole purpose of Phi Beta Kappa is to investigate
and be open to all different views," said member Father Tom Blantz,
CSC, '57, '63M.A.
Graduating seniors
hoping to be inducted into Phi Beta Kappa have to wait for an
invitation from a committee of Phi Beta Kappa-member faculty,
which make its selections based solely on academic record. "It's
not anything you try out for or anything like that," said Father
John Pearson, CSC, '68, '71M.Th., formerly president of the Notre
Dame chapter, Epsilon of Indiana.
Inductees generally
have an average cumulative grade-point average of 3.8 and must
have at least 90 hours of humanities credits. They must also possess
an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and have taken
at least two math classes.
Phi Beta Kappa was
founded in a tavern in 1776 by a group of students from the College
of William and Mary in Virginia who based the organization on
principles of friendship, morality and literature. That spirit
of pure intellectual inquiry has endured and is the main reason
why only students from the College of Arts and Letters and the
College of Science are eligible for induction into the Notre Dame
chapter.
Students selected
for membership typically receive their invitations in late March
and are inducted the morning of commencement. They have to pay
an initiation fee of $50, of which $40 goes to the national organization.
The other $10 helps the local chapter support a visiting scholar
program and other activities. Members who want the famous Phi
Beta Kappa golden key have to order it themselves ($29 to $116
depending on size, configuration and karat rating).
Phi Beta Kappa was
founded as a secret society, and although the group repealed its
secrecy provisions in the 1830s because of agitation against another
secret society, the Masons, that aspect of its history remains
an interesting side note to members.
"Apparently at one
time there was a secret handshake," Blantz said, "but it was so
secret that no one knows it anymore!"
(January 2006)
