Phi Delta Theta - Shippensburg University

Phi Delta Theta provides an opportunity for growth as an individual, and as a member of a high-class organization. We offer social, scholastic, athletic, philanthropic, and leadership opportunities, but the most important opportunity is Brotherhood.

In early 1996, eight men met in the recreation room of Naugle Hall, a campus dormitory at Shippensburg University. It was there that Justin Kaufman described his visit to the Phi Delta Theta chapter at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Kaufman's older brother Clinton is a Phi from RIT, and while visiting him Kaufman had seen a successful Phi Delta Theta chapter in action. Convinced that the ideals and beliefs of his brother's fraternity were exactly what was missing at Shippensburg, Kaufman set out to form a chapter of Phi Delta Theta at Shippensburg University.

On April 4, 1998, the Pennsylvania Omicron Interest Group was officially colonized. The colony by now had twenty-nine members, each distinctly individual, but also bound by a bond of brotherhood as strong as any other. These twenty-nine men will forever be remembered as the Founding Fathers of Pennsylvania Omicron.

Less than a year later, on March 26, 1999 the Founding Fathers and four members of the first pledge class known as the Alpha Class were initiated into Phi Delta Theta. The folowing day, the fraternity was officially installed as a chapter and granted a charter from Phi Delta Theta headquarters.

Phi Delta Theta (ΦΔΘ) is an international fraternity founded in 1848 and headquartered at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.The fraternity has nearly 260 charters across the United States and Canada. Today, there are over 170 chapters and colonies 43. The United States and five Canadian provinces have initiated more than 228,000 men between 1848 and 2007. There are over 142,000 living alumni. Chartered house corporations own more than 120 houses valued at $50 million. There are nearly 100 recognized alumni clubs across the U.S. and Canada.

The fraternity was founded by six undergraduate students: Robert Morrison, John McMillan Wilson, Robert Thompson Drake, John Wolfe Lindley, Ardivan Walker Rodgers, and Andrew Watts Rogers, who are collectively known as the The Immortal Six. The object of this Fraternity is to instill into all of its members three cardinal principles: friendship, sound learning, and moral rectitude; and to attain an organized brotherhood that will assist all of its members to conduct themselves at all times in accordance of these principles.These cardinal principles are contained in The Bond of Phi Delta Theta, the document to which each member, known as Phis or Phi Delts, pledges on his initiation into the fraternity.

Among the most well-known members of the fraternity are Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President of the United States, Baseball Hall of Fame member Lou Gehrig, actor Burt Reynolds, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

"I will strive in all ways to transmit the Fraternity, to those who may follow after, not only not less, but greater than it was transmitted to me."Robert Morrison

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