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Phi Kappa Psi
Phi Psi was founded on February 19th, 1852 by William Henry Letterman and Charles Page Thomas Moore.
These two gentlemen bonded while helping fellow students recover from a nasty typhoid fever outbreak in the Fall of 1850. This contagious outbreak was so bad that many students left school, and of those that remained, a quarter got sick and died. They risked their lives tending to the needs of their classmates. They eventually decided to found a fraternity based on the "great joy of serving others."
Phi Kappa Psi would be the first fraternity founded neither as a literary society, nor in opposition to another fraternity. These higher ideals caused other fraternities to start calling us the "Noble Fraternity."
Also, we were, by almost half a century, the first fraternity founded that is non-denominational and non-sectarian.
We like to think that in our 152 years, we have helped young men emerge as men of excellence who go onto to better the world. The funeral of T. Woodrow Wilson, a chapter president while in college, featured one flower: the Sweet Pea, Phi Psi's flower during his college years.
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