Theta Nu Epsilon Society - History of Theta Nu Epsilon

The Theta Nu Epsilon Society.

College Secret Societies.

Overview.

College secret societies can include all initiatory societies at colleges and universities. Some predate the fraternity movement and represent survivors of a different branch of the same tree of American college fraternal societies, (i.e. perhaps Chi Delta Theta, et c.). Others were founded contemporaneously with fraternities, but to achieve different purposes. Most so-called secret societies are actually properly described as class societies, meaning they take members of a particular college class year. It is most common for contemporary class societies to take only members in the senior year, but there have been societies for underclass years as well. Skull and Bones at Yale University is a senior class society, while its descendant organization, Theta Nu Epsilon, is a sophomore class society. Class societies are most prevalent in the northeast United States and are most common at older institutions. There actually was a wide profusion of class societies in the ‘Gilded Age,’ that era between the Civil War and WW I.

One of the finer societies at
Wesleyan, Corpse & Coffin.

In some situations, identifying exactly what a society was can be a difficult question. For example, traditionally, Yale was known as a class-society college, where there were separate societies in each class year, and eight main societies in all forming two linked tracks of four societies each, (it was described by one author as each set being the equivalent of a four degree system). And later at Yale, fraternities did co-exist with the class societies.

The idea of a class society system was much less well-spread than that of the typical college fraternity set up. But it did thrive in the Northeast. Brown, Wesleyan and Dartmouth always had fraternities and class societies existing cooperatively together. Harvard and Princeton, generally speaking, never had either but only had local clubs, (at Harvard because of local reasons, at Princeton, because of faculty injunction against fraternities). And at Yale, to add to the complications, the local chapters of Alpha Delta Phi, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and Psi Upsilon, (which were all four-year fraternities on other campuses), were all three Junior Societies at Yale.

Societies also changed over time. Phi Beta Kappa was once an actual society that actually met and conducted its literary business, however its secrets were made public in a very controversial public manner, and the society eventually carried on as an honorary society only. The famous Cammarian Society of Brown was once a senior society, and played a real and tangible arbitratorial role in college affairs, but voted to make itself open after World War II, becoming essentially an honorary society and later voting to dissolve itself entirely.

Making the matter even more complex is that in the very early period of fraternity & secret society history, (the 1830’s and 40’s), many chapters of ‘fraternities’ (like the Yale examples), functioned only as senior societies, or as junior-senior societies, or with some other class year limitation. These could vary on an institution by institution basis. It is not incorrect to say that all the later fraternities originally started out prior to 1850 as class societies in one form or another. What we later come to call fraternities were simply one stream of development in a much larger sea.

Some senior societies are considered honoraries. An 'honorary' is a society that often does not meet as a society except for the admission of new members, and the selection of members can be wholly out of the control of the membership. If, for example, a society automatically admits students based on their grade point average, then there is no membership control over admission to the society. Many honoraries have admission to their society controlled by a Dean’s office or in some instances by an Alumni office. At some institutions honoraries are called recognition societies.