Xenos Young Clark was a Bostonian, a practical joker, an excellent writer and the founders’ “local contact ” his father was on the faculty.
He was always “Big Chief” to his friends, constantly amazing them with his feats of memory and mental acuity (he entered college at 16), and served as Grand President for a total of 10 years. Joseph Francis Barrett was the youngest of the six, likely the most brilliant, and destined to take an active part for more than 45 years in the affairs of the group he helped to found. Their contemporaries described them as natural partners. Jabez William Clay, from whose fertile mind came the original suggestion for a new fraternity, was a giant both physically and mentally, and came from a hardy Green Mountain family.Ĭlay was joined by another Green Mountain boy, Frederick George Campbell, a practical youth who possessed the dynamic ability to put into operation the ideals that flowed from Clay’s creative mind. These, our Founders, banded together in their sophomore year (1873) to form a “society to promote morality, learning and social culture.” Among its other students in the early 1870s it had attracted six men of varied backgrounds, ages, abilities and goals in life, who saw the need for a new and different kind of society on campus that was receptive to experimentation. Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst-now the University of Massachusetts-is the setting for our founding. It is more than 100 years old but its principles are timeless. When all of the lists and names and reports and speeches are gone-what is left is our heritage. The heritage of Phi Sig is what transcends all of these things. It is not a financial balance sheet, nor an annual treasurer’s report, nor the agenda and program for a convention. It is not a recital of legislation and debates. The heritage of Phi Sig is not cold lists of names and dates. Just as the humblest individual has his own character traits and physical appearance, so does Phi Sigma Kappa have many things that set her and her brothers apart from all others.
Her beginnings were different-though similar to many. Her idealism is different from that of all others-though similar to many.
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