May 21, 2007

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Five Furman student-athletes are among 67 students recently initiated into Furman University's Gama Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Basketball player Jessica Lange, volleyball's Kim Tonkin, and track & field performers Page Bridges, Dan Matz and Sam Robinson were initiated into the prestigious academic society, the oldest undergraduate honors organization in the United States dating back to 1776. Its goal is to foster and encourage excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.

Gamma Chapter of South Carolina, while chartered only in 1973, has roots in two local honor societies formed much earlier. In 1917 the faculty of the Greenville Woman's College established Zetosophia to honor its outstanding students, and a decade later in 1927 the Furman University faculty established Hand and Torch. In 1953 the two societies were merged into Hand and Torch.

On August 10, 1973, the Triennial Council meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, voted to grant a charter to the twenty-two Furman faculty members who held Phi Beta Kappa keys. On December 5, on the anniversary of the founding of Phi Beta Kappa, Professor John Hope Franklin, President of the United Chapters, installed the Gamma Chapter of South Carolina. In the spring of 1974 the Chapter initiated its first members in course and its first alumnus member, Charles Hard Townes, Nobel laureate in physics, a member of the class of 1935.