College Secret Societies: From Phi Beta Kappa to the Modern Campus

American college secret societies emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a distinctive application of the European fraternal tradition to the new American college. Phi Beta Kappa, founded at the College of William and Mary in 1776, is conventionally treated as the first American Greek-letter society, and its ritual, structure, and symbol of a golden key became a model for the hundreds of secret and semi-secret societies that followed. The most famous of these, Skull and Bones at Yale, is the focus of an entire subliterature of American conspiracy theory, but it is only one of a much larger body of student orders, including debating clubs, engineering honor societies, secret Greek-letter fraternities, and senior societies. This page surveys the major American orders and the comparable but distinct Oxford and Cambridge traditions; a comprehensive list of college secret societies is provided elsewhere.

Phi Beta Kappa and the Birth of the American Greek-Letter Society

Phi Beta Kappa was founded on December 5, 1776, at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, by a group of five students meeting at the Raleigh Tavern. The society’s name came from the initial letters of its Greek motto, Philosophia Biou Kubernetes—“Love of wisdom is the guide of life”—and the order’s central symbol was a golden key, given to each member. The order was originally a debating and literary society with a strong social and political cast, and its members included several of the most influential American founders, including Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe.

The original Phi Beta Kappa was a secret society, and members were bound by an oath not to divulge the society’s proceedings. In 1831 the society opened its proceedings, but it retained its emphasis on academic excellence, and by the late nineteenth century Phi Beta Kappa had become the leading academic honor society of the American arts-and-sciences college. The modern Phi Beta Kappa, with chapters at the most selective American liberal arts colleges and research universities, is the institutional descendant of the original 1776 order and remains a useful reminder that the academic honor society, the secret debating club, and the fraternal brotherhood all share a common ancestry.

The William and Mary tradition also produced two further societies of considerable interest. The Flat Hat Club, founded in 1750, is sometimes cited as the first college society in America, though its fraternal features are less developed than those of Phi Beta Kappa. The Seven Society, a William and Mary group, is a small, anonymous benefactor body that gives anonymous donations to the college and acknowledges each new member with a single seven engraved on campus buildings.

Skull and Bones and the Yale Senior Societies

Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones, formally the Skull and Bones chapter of the Russell Trust Association, was founded at Yale in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft. The order is the oldest of the senior societies of Yale, and the only one of the original “Skull and Bones” group to have remained continuously in operation since its founding. The society meets in a building known as the “Tomb” on the High Street in New Haven, and its membership is famously drawn from the senior class of Yale College and from a small number of selected athletes and other students. The order’s symbols—a skull and crossed bones, the number 322, and the phrase “Bones Reunion”—are widely recognized, and the order’s influence on American political, financial, and corporate life has been a topic of sustained public attention. The full Skull and Bones membership list is discussed in a separate entry.

Scroll and Key, Wolf’s Head, and the Other Senior Societies

Scroll and Key, founded at Yale in 1842, was the first challenger to Skull and Bones and remains the order’s principal rival. The society’s symbol, the “key,” pairs with the Phi Beta Kappa key as a literary motif of the Yale undergraduate experience. Wolf’s Head, founded in 1883, is the third of the major Yale senior societies; Book and Snake, a more engineering-focused body, was founded in 1863 and is associated with the Sheffield Scientific School. Berzelius, founded in 1848, was a science-focused society that no longer operates in its original form. The most secret of the Yale orders, however, was the Illustrious Order of the Skull, sometimes called the “Skull” or “Skull Society,” a small society of senior society members that operated as a kind of meta-society. The influence of these senior orders on the post-Yale careers of their members is one of the most studied phenomena in American sociology, and the broader pattern of secret societies and government is examined elsewhere.

The Final Clubs of Harvard

Harvard, in contrast to Yale, has traditionally organized its elite social life around a set of “final clubs” that operate as social clubs with little of the ritual and secrecy of the Yale senior societies. The major final clubs include the Porcellian Club (1791, the oldest), the A.D. Club, the Fly Club, the Spee Club, the Delphic Club, the Hasty Pudding Club, the Fox Club, the Owl Club, and the Phoenix Club. The Porcellian, the A.D., and the Fly form the “ABC” or “Big Three” of the most prestigious Harvard final clubs, and their members include a substantial fraction of Harvard’s most powerful alumni. Harvard’s final clubs have been criticized at various points in their history for exclusivity, and several have been opened to women since the 1970s.

Princeton and the Eating Club Tradition

Princeton’s social life has been organized around a network of eating clubs that serve as both residential and social institutions. The most prestigious of the senior clubs—Cottage Club, Tiger Inn, Cap and Gown, and the Ivy Club—form a tier of “signing” clubs that admit undergraduates in their senior year. Whig-Cliosophic, founded in 1765, is a political-and-debating society, and the American Whig Society, also dating to 1765, was its historical rival. The senior society tradition at Princeton is less formal than at Yale, but several secret or semi-secret groups, including Cap and Gown, operate in a similar way.

The University of Virginia and the South

The University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, has had a distinctive tradition of senior secret societies. The Seven Society, founded in 1903, is the most prominent of the UVA senior orders. The society, like its William and Mary namesake, is best known for its anonymous donations to the university and for the small, encrypted “Seven” symbols it leaves around the Grounds. The IMP Society, founded in 1902, is a more performance-oriented senior society known for its practical jokes. The Z Society, founded in 1892, is a senior honor society that has been revived in the modern period.

The South’s college secret-society tradition is closely tied to the Bohemian Club and the Knights Templar Masonic orders of the late nineteenth century, and the influence of the Southern chivalric tradition can be seen in the dramatic regalia and Latinate mottoes of many Southern senior societies.

Engineering and Honor Societies

The MIT campus has produced a striking range of secret and semi-secret bodies. Several are tied to specific departments: the Order of the Engineer, an engineering honor society best known for the stainless-steel ring worn by its members; the Sigma Xi scientific research society; the various “Tool” societies of the engineering departments. The RPI campus at Troy, New York, has long been a center of Greek-letter fraternity life. The Tuskegee, Lehigh, Stevens, and Carnegie Mellon traditions include their own distinctive secret bodies.

The Order of the Engineer, although not a secret society, is one of the most visible institutional descendants of the American fraternal tradition in the engineering professions. The “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer,” originally written by Rudyard Kipling for the 1925 dedication of the Seven Wonders Bridge in Quebec, has been performed at the initiation of engineers across North America and is a useful point of comparison for the larger pattern of ritualized professional brotherhoods.

The Yale Undergraduate Greek-Letter System

A separate, and much larger, tradition of the American college secret society is the social Greek-letter fraternity. The first of these, Phi Beta Kappa at William and Mary, was followed by Kappa Alpha at Union College in 1825, Sigma Phi in 1827, and Delta Phi in 1827. By the mid-nineteenth century, the modern Greek-letter fraternity system had taken shape, with the Chi Phi, Alpha Delta Phi, Psi Upsilon, and Delta Kappa Epsilon chapters forming the early “Miami Triad” and the “Union Triad” of national fraternities. Several of these early chapters were secret or semi-secret, with elaborate rituals drawn from the Masonic and chivalric orders.

The Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, founded in 1856 at the University of Alabama, is best known for the “True Gentleman” ritual of the order and for the elaborate fraternal mythology that surrounds it. The order’s pattern of secret rituals, passwords, and signs is a useful counterpoint to the public Greek-letter system and an example of how the fraternal tradition continued to operate within the American college system even after Phi Beta Kappa had become a public honor society.

Oxford and Cambridge: Bullingdon, Piers Gaveston, the Apostles

The British university tradition has its own distinctive forms. The Bullingdon Club, an Oxford dining society best known for its reputation for destructive high-spirits, has had an outsize influence on British political life: David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and many other Conservative prime ministers were members. The Piers Gaveston Society, named after Edward II’s controversial favorite, is a parallel social club at Oxford. At Cambridge, the Apostles—an intellectual secret society that has counted a remarkable fraction of British intellectual life among its members, including Roger Fry, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster—stands as a defining example of a secret debating society that has shaped its members’ subsequent careers.

The Oxford and Cambridge traditions are connected to a wider British pattern that includes the Painted Hall in Greenwich, the architectural elaborations of the Oxbridge colleges, and the Piers Gaveston, Bullingdon, and Apostles groups, all of which are discussed in the list of college secret societies.

The French Grandes Écoles and Other Continental Traditions

The French grandes écoles—the École Normale Supérieure, the École Polytechnique, the École des Mines, the École Centrale, the HEC Paris, the ESSEC, and the EM Lyon—have their own internal traditions of student societies, sometimes called “BDEs” (Bureaux Des Élèves), and the older normaliens and polytechniciens societies have a fraternal-and-political cast that resembles the American system. The French student secret societies are less well documented than the Anglo-American ones, but they have been a significant feature of French elite formation since the nineteenth century.

The Pattern of the College Secret Society

A few general observations close this survey. First, the American college secret society is in many ways a specific application of the European fraternal tradition to the American college, drawing on the Masonic template, the Knights of Pythias pattern, and the Knights Templar chivalric vocabulary. Second, the major American orders have a remarkable record of producing influential alumni, and the relationship between college secret societies and the larger American elite is a topic of legitimate scholarly and journalistic inquiry. The pattern of secret societies and government, the role of conspiracy theories and hidden power, and the relationship between private clubs and political networks are discussed elsewhere. Third, the American campus has been, and remains, one of the most fertile environments for the formation of new fraternal and quasi-fraternal bodies, including honor societies, professional fraternities, and secret senior orders. The list of college secret societies provides a comprehensive current inventory.

Sources and Further Reading

For the standard treatment of the American college tradition, see the essays in The Book of the Scroll and Key (Yale Scroll and Key Society, occasional), and Alexandra Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb (2002), which treats Skull and Bones in context. The institutional histories of the major universities are the relevant primary sources: Yale: A History (2005) by Brooks Mather Kelley, the online Harvard University Archives, and the various Princeton University histories. For the sociological literature on the network effects of secret-society membership, the relevant articles are in the American Journal of Sociology and Social Networks (1990s–2010s).

The Skull and Bones society, Fraternal Orders and Lodges, Freemasonry Explained, and History of Secret Societies treat the broader context. The Skull and Bones Membership List and the list of college secret societies are the most consulted specific pages.