Harvard got its charter five days before another charter was voted to Yale. The Yale Phi Beta Kappa, however, was an active organization ten months before the Harvard branch organized. Which of the two chapters is the older is still a meet question.

Like the mother chapter, the Harvard branch was basically a social organization. Early records describing the iniation ceremony contain much high flown language such as, "here you are to become the brother of unalionable brothers . . . everything transacted within this room is transacted sub ross, and detested is he that discloses it."

The hocus pocus of Phi Beta Kappa meetings began to fade away in the 1830's largely as a result the work of the Harvard chapter's Edward Everett, Joseph Story, and John Quincy Adams. The Harvard chapter's change in policy probably saved Phi Beta Kappa from becoming nothing more than the oldest collegiate social organization in the United States.

Phi Beta Kappa's metamorphosis to an honor society came at no particular time--it just gradually "happened" in the middle eighteen hundreds. The society of scholars settled down to an annual routine of meeting for election and initiation of new members, holding exercises in June at which scholarly orations and poems are read, and having annual dinners.

In 1883 Phi Beta Kappa Societies all over the country organized into a National Council of United Chapters so that they could combine their "talents." At this time the long defunct Maryland chapter went on the active list again.

During its 168 years the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa has never had a permanent home but has roosted in a Cambridge Unitarian church, Massachusetts Hall, Holworth, and Boylston. It still has no permanent headquarters. Currently business meetings are held in Harvard hall, dinners are served in sundry places, and literary exercises take place in Sanders Theater.

Just Elections

For the duration of World War II, Phi Beta Kappa suspended all its functions except electing new members. It remained virtually dormant since then until this year when under the leadership of Teem, Gootenberg, and Haas the membership decided Phi Beta Kappa could do more at Harvard College than twirlkeys on gold watch chains.

Mindful of being a scholarship organization, Phi Beta Kappa proceeded to try to find its place in undergraduate life. Teem who is stumping for a revitalized. Phi Beta Kappa said, "We didn't want to become just another opinion agency. Nor did we think we ought to try sponsoring forums--the Law School Forum and other are doing that quite efficiently."

Since they were all successful scholars, the Phi Beta Kappas came to the conclusion that they could play a useful and knowing role as an advising body. They hope to set up shop at the Union after the faculty has completed its briefing of the Freshmen on choosing a field of concentration. There the Phi Beta Kappas will dispense informal advice to Freshmen trying to make up their minds.

"We're closer to undergraduate work than some faculty advisers," Teem noted, "and I think we might be able to present a viewpoint different from other undergraduate advising organizations such as the Student Council.

"One of our drawbacks is that our membership doesn't cover every field of concentration but we might work in cooperation with other groups and serve as a nucleus for an undergraduate advising body."

Besides starting its advising service, Phi Beta Kappa intends to initiate a series of dinners and to revive an old custom of publishing the cream of the theses written by its members.

These theses will be chosen from among Summas and Bowdoin Prize winners. The best will be printed at the expense of Phi Beta Kappa as a prize to the author.

Each year in addition to the undergraduates Phi Beta Kappa elects several alumni whom it thinks merit recognition for scholarly achievement; about once every three years an individual outside the student body or alumni is elected to honorary membership on the same basis a alumni members.