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College of William & Mary -

Founded in 1693, the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the English-speaking world.

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Flat Head Club -

Established in 1750 at the College of William & Mary, the Flat Head Club (F.H.C.) Society is the first recorded collegiate secret society in the United States. Founding Father and third president of the United States Thomas Jefferson is its most famous member. The F.H.C. was a Latin letter society, its name taken from the initial letters of a Latin motto, very likely Fraternitas, Humanitas, Cognitioque.

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Phi Beta Kappa -

The oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, was also founded at the College of William & Mary, in 1776—Phi Beta Kappa. ΦΒΚ is the first collegiate Greek letter fraternity. The names of almost all fraternities and sororities consist of a sequence of two or three Greek letters. But why is this so?

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Why Greek? -

In the US in the late 1700s and early 1800s, higher education was almost completely dominated by the study of Latin and ancient Greek.

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More prestigious than Latin -

Ancient Greek was regarded as more prestigious than Latin. Whereas Latin was taught in high schools, if you wanted to study Greek you had to go to university. The Phi Beta Kappa Society therefore chose a motto in Greek, which translates into English as "Wisdom [Love of learning] is the guide of life." The Greek acronym for this motto, ΦΒΚ, eventually became the name of the organization itself.

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Secret society -

The founders declared Phi Beta Kappa a secret fraternal society. This was to protect its members and to instill a sense of solidarity and good fellowship.

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The initiation ceremony -

Students invited to join Phi Beta Kappa underwent an initiation ceremony, which included taking an oath of secrecy. They were given a badge, or token, received a diploma of membership, and were taught a handclasp of recognition, rather like that of the Masonic handshake.

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First female members -

It took 100 years before chapters invited the first African Americans or women to participate in ΦBK. The first women were elected as members to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at the University of Vermont in 1875.

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First African-American member -

The first African-American member of Phi Beta Kappa was George Washington Henderson, elected to the society in 1877, also at the University of Vermont.

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Kappa Alpha Society -

The Kappa Alpha Society was established in 1825 at Union College in Schenectady, New York. It was the progenitor of the fraternities that would eventually become known as the Union Triad that pioneered the North American system of social fraternities.

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Union Triad -

The Union Triad remains as a group of the three oldest existing Greek letter social fraternities in North America: the Kappa Alpha Society (established 1825), the Sigma Phi Society (1827), and the Delta Phi (1827), the latter of which the pictured logo represents.

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"Mother of Fraternities" -

Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, can also be spoken of as a college that founded many early fraternities. The rise of the Miami Triad—Beta Theta Pi (1839), Phi Delta Theta (1848), and Sigma Chi (1855)—afforded the institution, together with Union College, the label "Mother of Fraternities."

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Oldest secret society for women -

Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, is the birthplace of Alpha Delta Pi and Phi Mu sororities. Alpha Delta Pi was founded on May 15, 1851. It is the oldest secret society for women. Phi Mu, established on January 4, 1852, is the second oldest. Both are known as the "Macon Magnolias." The word sorority, a social organization for female students, had yet to be coined.  Image: Wesleyan College, circa 1877.

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The first sorority -

On November 11, 1874, Gamma Phi Beta was founded in Syracuse University, New York. The term "sorority" was coined for Gamma Phi Beta by Dr. Frank Smalley, a professor at the university. The word sorority in fact comes from the Latin word soror, meaning sister, but was nonetheless adopted despite the preferred use of the ancient Greek language system.

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Equal rights and equality -

Actually, sorority and fraternity were, and still are, both used as words to describe a society for female students in a university or college. The development of fraternities for women in the late 1900s was a major accomplishment in forging women's rights and equality.

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Alpha Tau Omega -

The three decades after the end of the American Civil War are often referred to as "the golden age of fraternities." On September 11, 1865, students from the Virginia Military Institute founded Alpha Tau Omega. Its establishment was seen as a way of facilitating reconciliation between the North and South during the Reconstruction era.

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Kappa Alpha Order -

On December 21, 1865, the Kappa Alpha Order was established at Washington and Lee University (W&L) in Lexington, Virginia. The college, founded in 1749 and originally called the Augusta Academy, benefitted from a sizeable financial contribution from George Washington; former confederate general Robert E. Lee was the president of the college from the summer of 1865 until his death in 1870.

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Sigma Nu -

And the Virginia Military Institute is also where Sigma Nu was founded, on January 1, 1869. Sigma Nu, Kappa Alpha Order, and Alpha Tau Omega make up the Lexington Triad, with Sigma Nu especially proud of its military heritage and the concept of personal honor.

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Farmville Four -

The so-called Farmville Four—Kappa Delta (1897), Sigma Sigma Sigma (1898), Zeta Tau Alpha (1898), and Alpha Sigma Alpha (1901)—were four sororities established at the State Female Normal School in Virginia, today known as Longwood University.

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Chapter houses -

Each fraternity has its own chapter house, a building designed for specific use by undergraduates. The first house in America built solely for fraternity use is located at Cornell University in New York. Inaugurated in 1877 for the Alpha Delta Phi brotherhood, it was later replaced by a building designed by John Russell Pope, pictured here. The original premises, however, still stands on the campus.

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Alpha Delta Phi -

The Alpha Delta Phi (ΑΔΦ) fraternity was founded as a literary society in 1831 by Samuel Eells (pictured) at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. It evolved into one of the most distinguished of the original American college fraternities. Notable Alpha Delta alumni include former presidents and senators of the United States, among them Franklin D. Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, and well-known names in literature and journalism.

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Phi Beta Kappa alumni -

Movie director Francis Ford Coppola, actress Glenn Close, and former US president Bill Clinton number among Phi Beta Kappa alumni.

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Alpha Phi Alpha alumni -

Alpha Phi Alpha is the oldest intercollegiate historically African-American fraternity, founded in 1906. Famous Alpha Phi Alpha members include Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Owens, and Lionel Ritchie.

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Chi Omega -

Chi Omega is the largest women's fraternal organization in the world with over 402,000 Initiates, 181 collegiate chapters, and 248 alumni chapters. It was founded in 1895 at the University of Arkansas.

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Chi Omega visited by a serial killer -

On January 15, 1978, Ted Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. The serial killer murdered two students and severely injured three others.

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The controversary surrounding hazing -

One of the most controversial aspects of fraternity lifestyle is hazing—the ritual initiation of students into new chapters where the objective is to humiliate, degrade, or abuse freshmen regardless of their willingness to participate. Pictured is the hazing of Harvard freshmen in the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1914.

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Alcohol-fueled behavior -

As the 20th century progressed, the activities surrounding this traditional rite of passage became more aggressive, with excessive alcohol consumption fueling bizarre and debauched behavior.

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Hazing deaths -

In fact, alcohol intoxication is a leading cause of injury and death associated with hazing. According to the Hank Nuwer Unofficial Hazing Clearinghouse, there has been at least one university hazing death each year from 1969 to 2021 in the United States. Alcohol poisoning is the biggest cause of death.

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Perpetuating the "frat boy" image -

The extreme drunkenness and toxic masculinity of the hazing ritual has been captured in a number of movies, notably 1978's 'National Lampoon's Animal House,' where the members of a trouble-making fraternity challenge the authority of the dean of the fictional Faber College.

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'Neighbors' (2014) -

In 'Neighbors' (2014), the peaceful lives of a couple and their newborn baby are turned upside down when they are forced to live next door to a noisy and disruptive fraternity house.

Sources: (The Gettysburg Compiler) (Town & Country) (CBS News) (The Guardian) (Hank Nuwer Unofficial Hazing Clearinghouse)

See also: Higher education—the world's best universities

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