|
History of
Washington State
University
Delta Iota Chapter
HISTORY
WANTED!
Do you have any documents providing the history of the Delta Iota
Chapter? If so, please send to John Filicetti
at johnfili@yahoo.com for inclusion in this page!
We can use stories, pictures, and anything that is scanned or in
electronic format. Once you send the
item, it becomes property of the webmaster, so please don’t send original data.
History
of Sigma Nu
Sigma Nu's past
is a proud and colorful one. The
principals of Love, Truth, and Honor were the basis for the founding of Sigma
Nu Fraternity.
The story of Sigma
Nu began during the period following the Civil War, when a Confederate
veteran from Arkansas enrolled at the
Virginia Military Institute in Lexington,
Virginia. That cadet was James
Frank Hopkins, and it is to him and two of his classmates that Sigma Nu owes
it's existence. When Hopkins
enrolled at VMI, the south was in a state of turmoil and just beginning to
recover from the devastating military defeat it had suffered.
At the Institute
cadets suffered, not only because of the ravages of war and a disrupted
homelife, but because of the system of physical harassment imposed on lower
classmen by their fellow students in the upper classes.
Hopkins had experienced
military subservience during the war, and was willing to tolerate a
reasonable amount of constraint intended to induce discipline. However, Hopkins was unwilling to
accept any amount then being allowed at VMI. Not one ounce of hazing was he
willing to suffer and he was doggedly adamant about eliminating it.
Hopkins soon was joined
by two classmates and close friends who were also equally unhappy with the
hazing situation. They were Greenfield Quarles, from Arkansas,
a Kentuckian by birth, and James McIlvaine Riley from St. Louis, Missouri.
These three men began a movement to completely abolish the hazing system at
VMI. Their efforts climaxed on a moonlit October night in 1868, presumably
following Bible study at the superintendent's home, when the three met at a
limestone outcropping on the edge of the VMI parade ground. Hopkins, Quarles
and Riley clasped hands on the Bible and gave their solemn pledge to form a
brotherhood of a new society they called the Legion of Honor.
The vows taken by
these three Founders bound them together to oppose hazing at VMI and
encouraged the application of the Principle of Honor in all their
relationships. That the founders should adopt Honor as a guiding principle
was a natural move since a rigid code of Honor was already an established
tradition of the VMI Corps and Cadets. The Honor system at VMI required each cadet
to conform to the duty imposed by his conscience that each act be governed by
a high sense of Honor.
|
