Phi Kappa Phi charter signing in pictures

At a ceremony on Friday, April 22, President Brooks A. Keel and the academic leadership of Augusta University met in the Lee Auditorium on the Health Sciences Campus to officially ratify the new charter for the Phi Kappa Phi honor society. At the same ceremony, they also inducted a new class of students and faculty into the organization.

In a brief speech before the ceremony, Keel focused on Phi Kappa Phi’s motto: “Let the love of learning rule humanity.”

“It seems to me it would have been very easy for the founders of this organization to cut it short and say, ‘Let learning rule humanity,’ and I think it would have been a very fine and noble motto for this organization,” he said. “But they went one step further and they said, ‘Let the love of learning rule humanity,’ and I am just delighted that the forefathers of this great organization had the forethought to do that, because there is nothing better in life than having a love of learning.”

Signing the charter were Keel, Provost Gretchen Caughman, eight of the nine deans (Peter Buckley, dean of the Medical College of Georgia, was unable to attend) and several other members of the Augusta University academic community, including President Emeritus William Bloodworth, who was the national president of Phi Kappa Phi when the charter for Georgia Health Sciences University was ratified.