Delta Upsilon (), commonly known as DU, is a collegiate men's fraternity founded on November 4, 1834, at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is the sixth-oldest, all-male, college Greek-letter organization founded in North America (only Kappa Alpha Society, Sigma Phi, Delta Phi, Alpha Delta Phi, and Psi Upsilon predate). It is popularly and informally known as "DU" or "Delta U" and its members are called "DUs". Although historically found on the campuses of small New England private universities, Delta Upsilon currently has 76 chapters/colonies across the United States and Canada. A number of its buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 2013, Business Insider named Delta Upsilon one of the "17 Fraternities with Top Wall Street Alumni". Notable members include President of the United States James A. Garfield, President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos, Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson, Linus Pauling, Joseph P. Kennedy, Lou Holtz, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Charles Evans Hughes, Les Aspin, James Smith McDonnell and others. Forty-two brothers of the fraternity have sat in the United States Congress, three in the Parliament of Canada, one in the Imperial House of Peers of Japan, and six on the Queen's Privy Council for Canada. Its members have received six Nobel Prizes, five Olympic gold medals, one Pulitzer Prize, four Medals of Honor, one Lenin Peace Prize, one Presidential Medal of Freedom, seven investitures into the Order of Canada, and one investiture each into the Order of St Michael and St George, the Order of Merit, and the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav.
In 2018, the fraternity adopted policies to reduce risk. As of August 1, 2018, hard alcohol was banned from all chapter houses. As of August 1, 2020, chapter houses must be "substance free" (including wine, beer, and drugs), except for chapters that obtained waivers through 2022, based upon good behavior.
History
Founding and early history
Delta Upsilon was founded in 1834, when thirty freshman, sophomore, and junior students at Williams College met in the Freshman Recitation Room at the West College building to form what was then called "the Social Fraternity". The move was in response to the establishment of Kappa Alpha Society and Sigma Phi at the college and, unlike those fraternities, the Social Fraternity was avowedly anti-secret. Its founding came at the tail-end of the anti-Masonic hysteria that had recently swept the United States, though the idea that it was part of the popular backlash to Freemasonry has generally been rejected (a mysterious fire in 1841 destroyed the records of the first meeting of the Social Fraternity, erasing much of the organization's early history).
Growth of the Social Fraternity (whose members were informally called the "Oudens") was exponential. By 1838 two-thirds of all students at Williams belonged to the society which engaged in militant agitation against the other two fraternities. One particularly violent incident occurred in 1839 when Oudens assaulted the Kappa Alpha house, driving its occupants to the top of Consumption Hill. More refined conflict took the form of pamphlets and debate. An 1855 debate proposed by Kappa Alpha against the Oudens was called-off after the Social Fraternity appointed James Garfield, an Ouden well known for his rhetorical skills, to represent them.
In November 1847 Williams' Social Fraternity met with similar societies that had recently been formed at Union College, Hamilton College, and Amherst College and formed the "Anti-Secret Confederation". A second meeting of the Anti-Secret Confederation (A.S.C.) in 1852 saw fraternities from Wesleyan University, Case Western Reserve University, Colby College, and the University of Vermont join.
At the 1862 convention, the fraternity's mother chapter, Williams, declared the purposes of the fraternity had been corrupted and, over the objections of the other chapters, withdrew. Two years later it dissolved itself. A chapter would eventually be restored. However, Williams being the first chapter and, therefore, self-chartering, this would come in the form of a new chapter and not the revival of the original. It was permanently erased when Williams College banned all fraternities in 1962.
The March 1864 convention of the A.S.C. saw the organization formally change its name to Delta Upsilon, standardize insignia and ritual throughout all its member chapters, and establish a centralized administrative structure.
Abandoning "anti-secrecy" In 1879, Delta Upsilon formally disavowed its policy of anti-secrecy, instead adopting a program of what it described as "non-secrecy". According to Delta Upsilon, the reason for this change was because it had been absolutely victorious in its battle against secrecy, "the character of the secret societies so altered, that hostility toward them decreased".
This explanation has been more skeptically received by some, with one period observer caustically noting that Delta Upsilon "reveals very little more of what it does than the latter [secret fraternities]". Others commented that chapter meetings were closed to all but initiated members and the fraternity was now practicing selective pledging and initiation, in contrast to its earliest days at Williams. Therefore, it was proffered, the description of the fraternity as a "private" society rather than a "non-secret" one might be more accurate. The Harvard Crimson, meanwhile, poetically attributed the official change of position as due to "the sheer exhaustion of those that heretofore have maintained a vigorous tilt at the windmill for exercise's sake, on finding that the windmill stands the attack much better than they". Writing in 2013, Benjamin Wurgraft of the New School for Social Research commented that Delta Upsilon's changes made it "nothing more than another fraternity—a rival for pledges rather than a force for unity".
20th century
At the turn of the century the fraternity's growth plateaued due, in part, to opposition from a group of chapters to what was seen as the lessening of the fraternity's standards through colonization. In 1898, Delta Upsilon joined the recent trend of fraternity expansion into Canada by chartering a chapter at McGill University in Montreal. However, most expansion in this period came in the form of the annexation of established local fraternities. Zeta Chi at Baker University was one local which unsuccessfully petitioned for annexation by Delta Upsilon. In 1909, Charles Evans Hughes led the incorporation of the fraternity.
By 1920 the fraternity had grown to 44 chapters. Gen. John Arthur Clark, the celebrated former commander of the Seaforth Highlanders and a Member of Parliament from Vancouver, was elevated to "international president", the fraternity's penultimate office, in 1944, holding it for three consecutive terms. Clark became the first Canadian to hold the Delta Upsilon presidency.
In the 1950s, former Delta Upsilon international president Horace G. Nichol served as president of the North American Interfraternity Conference (NIC). He was recognized for his work leading the NIC with the NIC Gold Medal in 1959.
The turbulence the Greek system experienced in the middle 20th century began for Delta Upsilon in 1956. That year's sitting of the Undergraduate Convention was dissolved by emergency action of DU leadership to "prevent open dissension" in the wake of the election of an African-American as president of the Brown University chapter. The election had been denounced by a number of the fraternity's new southern chapters.
Similarly in 1951, the local chapter at Bowdoin College was suspended by the national body for admitting a black member, Theophilus McKinney Jr. US senator Paul Douglas urged the local chapter not to back down and the university chapter later withdrew from the national fraternity.
By 1986 Delta Upsilon had 88 active chapters, increasing to a high of 92 in 1991. During the 1990s chapters at Rutgers University, Cornell University, Oklahoma State University, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Union College were closed or placed on probation after it was revealed pledges at those houses had been branded, paddled, and forced to eat garbage, among other things.
21st century Beginning in 2009 the Fraternity implemented a series of changes that radically reshaped the organization. The fraternity closed a quarter of its chapters for poor performance, including risky behaviors, poor grades, and weak service records. Then it opened a similar number of new chapters under the close guidance of the national organization. The fraternity doubled its staff, from 11 to 22 and added new employees with advanced degrees in higher education or nonprofit management. The fraternity placed an emphasis on the number of members attending educational programming, including international service work and today more than half of undergraduate members participate in at least one educational program per year. Among the chapters targeted for closure was one of the fraternity's longest enduring chapters, the 120-year-old Technology chapter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Though the shuttering of the Technology chapter was for what fraternity officials would only describe as inappropriate behavior, The Tech reported an investigation by Delta Upsilon had allegedly uncovered a prohibited "secret ritual" that had been performed by the chapter for the preceding 70 years. Officers of the Technology chapter, which one account described had a "growing distance from [the] international fraternity", rejected the charges, though acknowledged they had effectively stopped participating in the fraternity's programs. In denying an appeal for restoration of the chapter, Delta Upsilon headquarters explained that they had "been working in coordination with university staff" but had been unable to reach a solution by which the chapter could continue at MIT.
On March 28, 2009, Delta Upsilon established its 152nd chapter, and the second of the 21st century, at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. The initiation was significant as it was the first time in more than a century that Delta Upsilon established a chapter at a school where no previous fraternities and sororities existed.
Secessionist chapters
University of Vermont In 1854 the University of Vermont chapter, which was named Delta Psi, severed its connections with the Anti-Secret Confederation. The cause of separation is lost to history with Delta Upsilon's own records recording that the exit of Delta Psi is "from causes unknown to us". A Delta Psi historian later claimed the withdrawal was due to the expenses the fraternity was incurring sending delegates to the meetings of the Anti-Secret Confederation. It has also been speculated that Delta Psi felt local pressure in maintaining the A.S.C.'s militant stance against secret ritual; after separating from the A.S.C. it began to undertake secret work. (Delta Upsilon has maintained that it does not consider members of Delta Psi during the period it was affiliated with the A.S.C. to also be members of Delta Upsilon, the separation being so total that the "action removed all its members from membership in the Delta Upsilon fraternity".)
Delta Psi continued as a very successful local fraternity for 150 years after leaving Delta Upsilon. During this period, DU avoided attempts to colonize the University of Vermont. In 2014, ten years after the collapse of Delta Psi, Delta Upsilon entered the Burlington campus for the first time since its split with Delta Psi, chartering a colony.
Harvard University