The two senior societies dominated school life for the next 41 years. Keys, which holds the values of “Truth, Beauty and Troubadour,” adopted C.S.P and C.C.J for their secret letters. Members met in rented rooms that burned down in December 1842, forcing them to relocate. It was founded by William Kingsley 1843, John Porter and William Huntington, both 1842, who were dissatisfied with the fact that Huntington had not been tapped for Bones. Scroll and Key, the second senior society, was created in June 1842. Two seniors, Alfonso Taft and valedictorian William Huntington Russell, both 1833, founded the order after Russell did not receive an invitation to the prestigious academic secret society Phi Beta Kappa. The first senior society, the Order of Scull and Bones (yes, “Scull,” not Skull), was created in December 1832. Or maybe, just maybe, the old boys’ clubs have failed to adapt to the modern world. Times have changed, and perhaps the role of secret societies has evolved. When women were admitted to the school in 1969, all but the senior societies at the top of the social hierarchy allowed them to join.Īnd when the members meet, dine and debate on Thursday and Sunday nights, they do not drink 15-year old scotch they drink Keystone Light or, in the case of Skull and Bones, Snapple. Yale’s big men are no longer all white, Anglo-Saxon and class-obsessed. Today, most Yale students do not wear letterman sweaters and tweed. To be tapped is to be, on Yale’s campus and around the world, what Stover would deem “a big man.”ġ00 years have passed since the time of Stover and Le Baron. And practically all of Yale’s most illustrious alumni. This is how savvy sophomore Hugh Le Baron explains the world of Yale to freshman Dink Stover his first night on campus in 1900 in Owen Johnson’s 1911-12 serial novel “Stover at Yale.” For the Stovers of the time, the society system was the reason to attend Yale - the reason, even, to exist in “a crowd you’ll want to know all through life.” The lists of those “tapped,” selected by the graduating class, were published in The New York Times every year until the 1970s.
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