by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
Members of Phi Beta Kappa certainly have all the appearances of being in a fraternity. They gather for regular meetings. They probably have a beer or three. They likely watch football and compare notes on women. Sounds like most frats, right?
Not really.
Unlike many fraternities, the members of Phi Beta Kappa have something very special in common — impressive grade point averages while they were in college. As in, 3.4 or higher in most cases.
Locally there are about 1,000 Phi Beta Kappas in nearly every profession and Jacksonville University history professor John Garrigus is the local president. Tonight the local Phi Beta Kappas will gather at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Riverside to hear from David Courtwright, Ph.D., the John Delaney Endowed Presidential Professor of History at the University of North Florida.
Like other Phi Beta Kappas, Courtwright’s no dummy. He earned his doctorate from Rice University in Houston and is a former Mellon visiting faculty fellow at Yale.
“We were the first fraternity ever formed and we started as a social club,” explained Phi Beta Kappa member Bill Boling, who retired after spending 40 years in the mortgage banking business. “It started as a social club where invitations were sent out to those with higher grades. It kind of morphed into a fraternity to honor those with high grade point averages.”
Boling is a graduate of the University of the South in Suwanee, Tenn. He was asked to join Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year when he was maintaining a nifty 3.83 GPA. Boling explained that in college, being a member of Phi Beta Kappa is much more honorary than anything and the only time they gathered was to elect new members.
“Many of us belonged to other organizations,” said Boling, who retired in 1999 as senior vice president of LaSalle Home Mortgage Corp., a Chicago-based mortgage company. Today, he kind of wishes he’d given it a few more years. ”I missed a really good move. Interest rates went down and those guys have been swamped.”
Boling said the fraternity is always looking for new members and with 1,000 Phi Beta Kappas locally, the club could be bigger. Interestingly, some of the area’s brightest folks not only aren’t in the fraternity, they aren’t eligible because of the requirement that all Phi Beta Kappas be either liberal arts or science majors in college. For example, Haskell CEO Preston Haskell isn’t a member.
“He’s probably the smartest person in town, but he was a civil engineering major,” said Boling.
Haskell did speak at the club’s spring meeting, where he talked about the current state of collecting contemporary art. The annual spring meeting is also when the fraternity gives out its scholarships.
“We award four scholarships worth $1,000 each to baccalaureate students at Edward Waters College, Flagler College, Jacksonville University or the University of North Florida,” said Boling. “They have to apply and write an essay.”