A century of Phi Beta Kappa 

By Cornell Report Staff

For exactly 100 years Cornell’s Phi Beta Kappa inductees have signed this historic book, graduated, and left to do great things. The inaugural 1922 cohort included:

  • A closeup of the first page of Cornell’s official Phi Beta Kappa signature book shows Cornell’s first female faculty member with an endowed professorship, Mary Burr Norton, Class of 1877.
    A closeup of the first page of Cornell’s official Phi Beta Kappa signature book shows Cornell’s first female faculty member with an endowed professorship, Mary Burr Norton, Class of 1877.

    Governor of Iowa and Secretary of Treasury under President Theodore Roosevelt, Leslie Shaw, Class of 1874.

  • Chief engineer for Chicago’s Navy Pier, Edward Shankland, Class of 1875.
  • Cornell’s first female faculty member with an endowed professorship, Professor of Mathematics Mary Burr Norton, Class of 1877.
  • Goodwill founder Edgar J. Helms, Class of 1889.

Although there are too many outstanding Phi Beta Kappa members since then to list them all, we offer these three notables:

  • Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln scholar Don Fehrenbacher ’44.
  • The first woman appointed as a U.S. District Court judge in the Middle District of Tennessee, Aleta Grillos Trauger ’68.
  • Black Engineer magazine Scientist of the Year Tahllee Baynard ’97.

And one of our most recent Phi Betes: Sunny Kahn ’21, a Pakistani native now attending Harvard Divinity School and serving as a Cornell College Young Trustee. 

The Phi Beta Kappa book signed by members since 1922.
The Phi Beta Kappa book signed by members since 1922.