Exercises Honor Phi Beta Kappa Seniors

Harvard may already graduate some of the best and brightest, but yesterday afternoon's Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises honored those graduating seniors whose academic achievements exceeded even Harvard's typical standard of excellence.

"This is an honor that carries with it no tangible prize," said Professor of English and Comparative Literature James Engell '73, who is the president of the society's Alpha Iota chapter. "It is similar to...an achievement much like a laurel, so to replace it with something concrete would be to devalue it."

"The honor is not to help build a resume but rather is the result of an intellectual one," Engell added.

Engell said that Phi Beta Kappa is the only College-wide honor society which selects its members solely on the basis of academic merit. The honorees are selected based on their GPA and on letters of recommendation.

About 168 graduating seniors were honored in the ceremony, the majority of whom had been notified of their selection only a week before.

Twenty-four of those honored yesterday were inducted in the spring of their junior year. Another 48 students became members of the society this previous fall. The remaining students were officially inducted in a private ceremony earlier yesterday morning.

"It's definitely a high honor," said J. Ryan Clark '97, an environmental science and public policy concentrator who was inducted yesterday. "All these years, I have admired the students around me for their intellect, so it is very exciting to be considered among them."

Vikaas S. Sohal '97 said he agreed with Clark.

"It's always a good thing to be elected," said Sohal, an applied math concentrator who was inducted yesterday. "I've had a good time [at Harvard] and tried to work fairly hard. I've taken classes that I enjoy so that helps to explain why I've done well in them."

Along with music by the commencement choir, the exercises featured a poem by Patrick Muldoon and an oration by Anne L. Fadiman '75, traditional features of the centuries-old literary exercises.

Muldoon, professor and member of the humanities council at Princeton and the 1994 winner of the T.S. Eliot '09 prize for poetry, said that composing a poem for the occasion was "a daunting task" because he wanted the poem to be appropriate for an academic setting.

"I have attempted to write a poem about my father who at 11 or 12 hired himself out at a hiring fair as essentially a glorified slave to a farmer," Muldoon said, before reciting his "Third Epistle to Timothy."

In the oration that followed, "Procrustes and the Culture Wars," Fadiman urged seniors "not to take sides in the culture wars...a peculiar development which takes culture and tries to squish it down to one line, stretching from right to left."

Fadiman likened the culture wars--which ask individuals to define themselves in black and white terms--to Procrustes, a figure in Greek mythology.

According to legend, Procrustes used his bed to measure passers-by and would cut off the body parts of those who were too big for his bed or stretch the bodies of those who were too small to fit the dimensions exactly.

Fadiman said that Procrustes's bed is a good metaphor for the culture wars because people nowadays are expected to choose one of two ideologies.

Fadiman said that people who choose to identify themselves as either liberal or conservative, without the chance for overlap, end up limiting themselves.

"You sign up to toe the party line, and you suddenly find you've lost the ability to judge things on a case by case basis," said Fadiman, who is the editor-designate of The American Scholar, a journal published by the National Phi Beta Kappa Society.

"No one who teaches, writes and researches will ask you to take sides," she added. "But you will find that as you cut off the toes of others, like Procrustes, you cut off your own as well."

Engell said that both speakers kept with the mission of the honor society.

"Muldoon was passionate, powerful and moving," he said. "And the oration's message of 'don't simplify' addressed the important message of intellectual independence."

Others said that Muldoon and Fadiman represented the academic environment that Harvard provides its students.

"It was a truly fitting ceremony," said Patricia C. Clark, Clark's mother.

"I've never heard such a wonderful use of words. If the students are around this all the time, I can see why they come out the way they do," she said.

Yesterday's literary exercises also honored individuals outside the graduating class.

Three members of the Faculty--Stanley Cavell, the Cabot professor of aesthetics and the general theory of value; David Layzer, Menzel professor of astrophysics; and Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of history of science--were granted honorary membership in the society.

Three members of the 25th reunion class of 1972 were given the same honor--Thomas F. Birminghman '72, a state senator since 1970; Jamie Shona Gorelick '72, former U.S. deputy attorney general and current vice chair of the Fannie Mae corporation; and Elizabeth A. Kellogg '72, associate professor of biology and Putnam fellow at the Arnold Arboretum.

Muldoon and Fadiman were also honorarily inducted.

In addition to the honorary memberships, the chapter recognized four professors for their demonstrated excellence in teaching.

Graham Huggan, associate professor of English and American literature and language and of history and literature; Brian J. Hall, assistant professor of economics; Colleen M. Cavanaugh, professor of biology; and Daniel L. Schacter, professor of psychology, were commended for their dedication to their students and specifically their thesis advisees.

"I can only hope to bring to my work the same wit and enthusiasm that Professor Schacter brings to his," wrote the student who nominated Schacter, recalling one Saturday morning when Schacter delayed a family outing in order to deliver his comments on the student's thesis drafts personally.

Seniors and their parents said the ceremony was a fitting way to celebrate their achievements.

"I am incredibly proud, even though I didn't do the homework," said Richard Pepp, father of newly-inducted Jessica A. Pepp '97. "I like to see teachers honored for good teaching and students honored for good learning."