There are many collegiate secret societies in North America. They vary greatly in their level of secrecy and the degree of independence from their universities. A collegiate secret society makes a significant effort to keep affairs, membership rolls, signs of recognition, initiation, or other aspects secret from the public.
Secret Societies Of America's Elite: From The K...
Some collegiate secret societies are referred to as "class societies", which restrict membership to one class year. Most class societies are restricted to the senior class and are therefore also called senior societies on many campuses.
There is no strict rule on the categorization of secret societies. Secret societies can have ceremonial initiations, secret signs of recognition (gestures, handshakes, passwords), formal secrets, (the 'true' name of the society, a motto, or society history); but, college fraternities or "social fraternities" have the same, and some of these elements can also be a part of literary societies, singing groups, editorial boards, and honorary and pre-professional groups. Some secret societies have kept their membership secret, for example Seven Society and Gridiron, and some have not, like Skull and Bones (the Yale societies had published their membership lists in the yearbooks and the Yale Daily News).
One key concept in distinguishing secret societies from fraternities is that, on campuses that have both kinds of organizations, one can be a member of both (that is, membership is not mutually exclusive). Usually, being a member of more than one fraternity is not considered appropriate, because that member would have divided loyalties; however, typically, there is no issue with being a member of a secret society and a fraternity, because they are not considered similar organizations or competing organizations.[1]
Many secret societies exist as honoraries on one campus and may have been actual meeting societies at one time, kept alive by one or two dedicated local alumni or an alumni affairs or Dean's office person, who see to it that an annual initiation is held every year. Some of these state that they are honoraries; others seek to perpetuate the image of a continuing active society where there is none.
While there are some guideline criteria for the neutral observer to understand what sort of society any given organization is, much of the analysis reverts to what any one society has been traditionally understood to be. There are additional means, such as societies that were more or less explicitly established in emulation of some previous secret society, or using historical records to show that society X was created out of society Y.
There are several common traits among these societies. For example, many societies have two-part names, such as Skull and Bones or Scroll and Key. Many societies also limit their membership to a specific numerical limit in a class year. Extensive mortuary imagery is associated with many secret societies, maintaining a pretense of great seriousness, and clubhouses are often called "tombs".
The archetypical selection process for entry into a collegiate secret society began at Yale University by a process called tapping.[1] On a publicly announced evening, Yale undergraduates would assemble informally in the College Yard. Current members of Yale's secret societies would walk through the crowd and literally tap a prospective member on the shoulder and then walk with him up to the tapped man's dorm room. There, in private, they would ask him to become a member of their secret society; the inductee had the choice of accepting or rejecting the offer of membership. During this process, it was publicly known who was being tapped for the coming year. Today, the selection process is not quite as formal but is in some ways still public.[2] Now, many societies slip seal-stamped letters under the doors of expecting Juniors, and send cryptic emails to students' inboxes, inviting them to rush parties.[3] Formal tapping days used to exist at Berkeley, and still exist in a much more formal setting at Missouri.
Several campuses distinguish societies called "honoraries" from secret societies. An honorary is considered to operate in name only: membership is an honor given in recognition of some achievement, and such a society is distinct from a secret society. However, functionally, such organizations can operate identically to secret societies, and historically, most honoraries operated on a secret society basis. Phi Beta Kappa is the best-known such example, where it originally operated on a secret chapter basis, and it became the progenitor of all college fraternities, and at the same time, sometime after its secrets were made public in the 1830s, Phi Beta Kappa continued as an honorary. Virtually all the oldest honoraries were once clearly secret societies, and the extent to which they are distinct is now ambiguous at best.
The spread of Phi Beta Kappa to different colleges and universities likely sparked the creation of such competing societies as Chi Phi (1824), Kappa Alpha Society (1825), and Sigma Phi Society (1827); many continue today as American collegiate social fraternities (and, later, sororities). Sigma Phi remains the oldest continuously operating national collegiate secret society; it may have declined the founding members of Skull & Bones a charter before they formed their society. A second line of development took place at Yale College, with the creation of Chi Delta Theta (1821) and Skull and Bones (1832): antecedents of what would become known as class societies.
Skull & Bones aroused competition on campus, bringing forth Scroll and Key (1841), and later Wolf's Head (1883), among students in the senior class. But the prestige of the senior societies was able to keep the very influential fraternities Alpha Delta Phi and Psi Upsilon from ever becoming full four-year institutions at Yale. They remained junior class societies there. There were sophomore and freshman societies at Yale as well. A stable system of eight class societies (two competing chains of four class societies each) was in place by the late 1840s.
Delta Kappa Epsilon is a highly successful junior class society, founded at Yale in 1844. None of the 51 chapters the parent chapter spawned operates as a junior society, but DKE did come from the class society system. Likewise, Alpha Sigma Phi started as a Yale sophomore society and now has 68 chapters (although, again, none of Alpha Sigma Phi's chapters have remained sophomore societies).
The development of class societies spread from Yale to other campuses in the northeastern States. Seniors at neighboring Wesleyan established a senior society, Skull & Serpent (1865), and a second society, originally a chapter of Skull and Bones, but then independent as a sophomore society, Theta Nu Epsilon (1870), which began to drastically increase the number of campuses with class societies. William Raimond Baird noted in the 1905 edition of his Manual that, "In addition to the regular fraternities, there are Eastern college societies which draw members from only one of the undergraduate classes, and which have only a few features of the general fraternity system."[4] From Wesleyan, the practice spread more widely across the Northeast, with full systems soon in place at Brown, Rutgers, and other institutions.
Kappa Sigma Theta, Phi Theta Psi, Delta Beta Xi, Delta Sigma Phi,[5] were all sophomore societies at Yale, and the two large freshman societies of Delta Kappa and Kappa Sigma Epsilon lived until 1880.[6] Delta Kappa established chapters at Amherst College, the University of North Carolina, University of Virginia, University of Mississippi, Dartmouth College, and Centre College. Kappa Sigma Epsilon had chapters at Amherst, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Dartmouth.[6] Other class societies existed at Brown, Harvard, Syracuse, Colgate, Cornell, and other Northeastern institutions. At universities such as Colgate University, these secret societies have evolved and morphed over the years.
It is from this class society's historical base and the desire to emulate the best-known of all the class societies, Skull & Bones, that senior societies in particular began to spread nationally between 1900 and 1930. Junior, sophomore, and freshman class societies also are to be found at campuses across the country today.
Although the pressures of the American Civil War forced several societies to disappear, many were revived during the 20th century. Some of the secret societies known to currently exist at the college are: The 7 Society, 13 Club, Alpha Club, Bishop James Madison Society, The Cord, Flat Hat Club, The Spades, W Society, and Wren Society.[10][16]
Columbia University has three secret societies: St. Anthony Hall (1847) and the Nacoms and Sachems (1898 and 1915, respectively). St. Anthony Hall is a fraternal organization and literary society founded at Columbia that has ten other chapters, notably at Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.[17] The Nacoms and Sachems are senior societies of fifteen members each. Though efforts have been made by the university's student body to force them to abolish their secrecy and register with the administration, efforts have been unsuccessful.[18]
Cornell University has a rich history of secret societies on campus. Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell University and himself a Bonesman, is said to have encouraged the formation of a "secret society" on campus.[19] In the early years, the fraternities were called the "secret societies", but as the Greek system developed into a larger, more public entity, "secret society" began to refer only to the class societies, except for the Sigma Phi Society on campus. In the early twentieth century, Cornell students belonged to sophomore, junior, and senior societies, as well as honorary societies for particular fields of study. Liberalization of the 1960s spelled the end of these organizations as students rebelled against the establishment. The majority of the societies disappeared or became inactive in a very short period, and today, the four organizations which operate on campus are: Sphinx Head (founded in 1890), Der Hexenkreis (founded in 1892), Quill and Dagger (founded in 1893), and Order of Omega (founded in 1959).[20][21]
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