Osler's Razor

Last night, I was digging through the attic looking for Christmas decorations. The attic is an easy place to get distracted, and I was waylaid for a while looking through old boxes of books. Then, something amazing happened.

Underneath a stack of old car magazines was something small and metal. I reached in, and there it was-- something precious I had long thought had been lost.

It is a medallion with the crest of the FHC. The FHC is the oldest college fraternity in the United States, having been founded at William and Mary by George Wythe and Thomas Jefferson before even Phi Beta Kappa (which, according to legend, was started by a student not admitted to the FHC). Though it is often referred to as a "secret society," it doesn't neatly fit the definition of either a modern secret society or fraternity. The unusual thing about it is that both faculty and students are members-- four profs, and six students. Wythe was a teacher; Jefferson was a student. (Wythe's other students included Henry Clay and John Marshall). When I was a student, it wasn't very secret, either.

FHC had a fairly profound effect on me. The experience of seeing faculty as more complete people, as peers, convinced me that learning did go both ways, and let me see them as mentors in a much more full and complete way. It was that lesson that in part shaped me as the professor I am now, in that I do seek to let students see different sides of me, including a sometimes light-hearted side. For example, in the "trash-talk" before the debate, you could perhaps see the friendship that underlaid it. The lessons of FHC, in large part, are what led me to start this blog as a way to make contact with students in a medium that was mostly theirs.

The badge I found is supposed to be worn, discretely, under the robes at academic events. I have always wished that I had it the times I was chosen by the students to participate in commencements. It may be there at some future commencement, now. No one else may be able to see it, but what it will mean to me is that perhaps I have been to a student some faint shadow of what Wythe was to Jefferson and what every teacher, from kindergarten on up, hopes to be.