The story of Phi Sigma Kappa began at the Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst (which is now the University of Massachusetts). Among its other students in the early 1870s, it had attracted six men of varied backgrounds, ages, abilities and goals in life, who saw the need for a new and different kind of society on campus that was receptive to experimentation. These, our Founders, banded together in their sophomore year (1873) to form a “society to promote morality, learning, and social culture.”