Ave Atque Vale, Phi Beta Kappa

It was from my godfather, Gordon Newcombe, that I first learned about Phi Beta Kappa and the meaning of the Key. For a child growing up in a downwardly mobile blue-collar neighborhood, the glittering square-shaped charm seemed an almost magical sort of key, an instrument that could unlock the door between the hardscrabble existence I knew and the world of intellectual discourse and artistic refinement I longed for. The Key opened the door to opportunities inaccessible to his immigrant parents, and to mine.

Uncle Gordon’s lot had been far harder than my own: his mother, widowed young, scrubbed floors to support herself and her only child, a brilliant, reflective little boy who, though painfully nearsighted, hungered after books. Through the grace of God and the generosity and guidance of a friend, he attended Kenyon College (’48), then Harvard. Eventually, he became a teacher, then Headmaster, at the Barnard School for Boys and then Horace Mann, where, though he passed away in 1988, he is still remembered fondly. He was also a devout Christian, a man who sought not merely erudition, but also Truth. For many years, he was a leader in Christ Church in Bronxville, a place so lovely that, though an atheist until my 40s, it convinced me as a child that, if God existed, He must be a high-church Episcopalian.

So it was, then, Uncle Gordon who first explained to me the significance of that shining golden square. This "charm" was his Phi Beta Kappa key, he said proudly, yet modestly, as a soldier would explain what his Silver Star was. The Key signified that he was a member of a small group of intellectuals of high achievement and good moral character. Membership in Phi Beta Kappa was more than a mere prize. Its solemn ceremony was a formal, public commitment to Wisdom and Truth, and an affirmation of one’s kinship with others who, however divergent their views, also bring intellectual rigor and moral introspection to the great questions of life.

I longed to be worthy of possessing such a key, and such friendships. As Uncle Gordon had been in his family, so would I be in mine -- the first to attend college, and the first to become a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

When the time came for me to choose a college, my parents asked Uncle Gordon’s advice. He brought me along with his family to visit the campus of the University of Vermont, where he’d sent his son. I was then 16, and this the first college campus I’d ever visited. Immediately, I felt a sense of being, for the first time, at the right place in the universe, a place aesthetically lovely and devoted to learning, with its elm-lined green quadrangle, Federalist chapel, and especially the unspeakably beautiful interior woodwork of Billings Library/Student Center, where the boy who would become my husband and I spent hours each day studying. I knew immediately the University of Vermont was where I should seek and might find a Key of my own.

This was not the UVM of today, of course, where Billings is shabby and neglected, and where each structure is a more designedly soulless slab. Aesthetic concerns matter not to the careerist Socialists who dominate the current faculty, for whom architecture is just something on which you hang Protest March announcements, or announcements that the Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts will feature Peter Singer for its inaugural lecture, the ethicist who argues that parents of handicapped babies should have 30 days to do them in, what with disabled children being -- from his perspective -- inconvenient, expensive, and eminently replaceable. The belief in the value of individual human life that is Christianity and Judaism’s greatest gift to the world has been replaced by contempt for Western Civilization. The vaguely churchlike Billings Library interior — warm wooden walls bearing the intricate tracery of Gothic arches — is undusted, unpolished, unloved. UVM’s most amazingly beautiful building now has the look of a Catholic church converted for Party use by the Soviet occupiers of Eastern Europe.

That analogy is all too apt, by the way. If you took every Republican on UVM’s faculty and put them in a room with all the pro-life faculty of any political persuasion, and herded in every member of UVM’s faculty who doesn’t believe capitalism is evil, you still wouldn’t have enough people for a game of poker. You’d be lucky to have enough people for a game of solitaire.

As intellectual diversity was rooted out, tree and branch, from UVM, so, too, was intellectual rigor — which brings us back to Phi Beta Kappa.

I was fortunate to experience UVM back when it prided itself upon being a "public Ivy" — as close to an Ivy League school as one can get while paying public university prices. That was why Uncle Gordon sent his son there, and thought it a fit for me as well. UVM also had a long tradition, rooted in Vermont Senator Justin Morrell’s innovative Land Grant Act , of making a university education available to citizens who were not wealthy. By the 1970s, UVM had long been a place where one succeeded or failed on the basis of whatever brains, talent, and drive one mustered. I would be working toward my Phi Beta Kappa key on the campus whose PBK chapter was the first in the nation to admit women (1875) or African-Americans (1877).

The solemn, lovely ceremony in which I was made a keeper of the key meant a great deal to me. So it’s been with considerable sadness that I’ve watched the slow erosion of what this once-great organization offered. I stopped reading The American Scholar when the delightful Joseph Epstein left, for the reasons Erich Eichmann eloquently outlines. But at least, I consoled myself, at least Phi Beta Kappa still stood for intellectual and moral rigor.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Phi Beta Kappa has transformed itself into its antithesis, taking up as a great, heroic cause the "defense" of a narcissistic, mendacious political propagandist — a multimillionaire whose fashionably contemptuous politics make him the darling of American campuses where ignorance of history and economics flourishes (which is almost all of them) — hardly someone in desperate need of assistance to get his message out. Defending Michael Moore on campus ranks, as a measure of moral courage and intellectual sophistication, right up there with defending the cuteness of puppies.

What, then, should we disaffected members do? Should we press for the closing of the most embarrassing chapters? Hold photo-op protest events, where, Kerry-like, we stand before the cameras and toss our keys (or someone else’s medals or not medals but ribbons or or or or) away in some grand gesture of protest?

Let the members of this collapsing shell parade as widely as possible their fashionable, politically correct politics. Let’s let the market solve the problem. Real intellectuals know illogic when they see it, and those with character recognize the immorality of illogic.

Those of us who still believe in Philosophia Biou Kubernetes — in "Love of wisdom, the guide of life" — can, if we feel the need, form a new organization, just as Phi Beta Kappa was once reformed long ago. Perhaps the motto for the new organization should be, as a reminder, Esse Quam Videre: To Be, Rather Than to Seem.