Phi Beta Kappa
Western Key Newsletter

By the time the 40th Triennial Council of Phi Beta Kappa convenes, we will have completed the 18 "Conversations" around the country on "The Social Value of the Liberal Arts." Managed by local associations, four of these were in the Western District: Tucson, Denver, Northern California (Asilomar) and Southern California (Los Angeles). The Conversations have been a great success and Scott Lurding and I have tremendously enjoyed our visits to the associations in this connection.

A Californian, David Alexander, former president of Pomona College and Vice President of the Phi Beta Kappa Fellows, will lead the Symposium in Seattle that will summarize the national conversations.

We are in final stages of planning for our Triennial Council meeting - again, in the Western District - in Seattle on August 6-10. We look forward to seeing many of you there.

From the Chair of the Phi Beta Kappa Western District - Mel Shattuck

Once again it is time for our Pre-Triennial Western Key Newsletter. It contains a great deal of information about the activities of our Chapters and Associations as well as ideas which you may find useful for your own organization.

Thanks to all of you who participated, and special thanks to Ray Hendess for again serving as Editor.

Call for Nominations for District Chair

As of the upcoming Triennial I will be stepping down as District Chair when I will have served for six years. The main reason is that I've been nominated as one of several candidates for the position of Chair, Conference of Association Delegates (to succeed Aubrey Farb) and as one of two candidates for Senator, Western District.

The position of District Chair has few formal responsibilities other than Chairing the District Meeting during the Triennial and forming a nominating committee for District Senator when that seat is open ( I recused myself from that responsibility this year).

However, the position does offer an opportunity to be helpful to Phi Beta Kappa by encouraging the activities and growth of the District and maintaining liaison with the other six Districts and national headquarters.

If you would like to nominate someone for this position, please send me an email along with a brief bio. If you want to send hard copy, email for my postal address. You may nominate yourself if you get someone to second the nomination. We will announce all nominations and vote on them during our District meeting.

It has been a real honor and pleasure to be your District Chair. I look forward to meeting with all of you who are delegates to the Triennial in Seattle August 6-10.

Very truly yours,

From the Editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Western Key Newsletter - Ray Hendess

The Western District includes all those Chapters and Associations in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The Chair of the District is ; the Secretary .

I am really excited to see how many Chapters are now having activities other than induction of students. Twenty-one Chapters and eight Associations responded to this newsletter. Really great response.

If your Chapter or Association has not yet submitted information about your organization, it is not too late. I will be happy to post any information as it is received. This is one of the many nice features of a web-based newsletter.

This is the second time we have done our newsletter completely electronically. There are numerous advantages, including: no cost to the organizations; easier job for the editor (me) - it is actually fun; corrections and late postings can be made; wider distribution possible, virtually unlimited space. A few have lamented the loss of hard copy; clearly not everyone is comfortable with reading on the computer monitor. We now have this newsletter available as an Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file. Click to request a copy. If you need it, the free Adobe Acrobat reader can be obtained from Adobe.

A newsletter is the best way we can keep informed of what is going on in other organizations within our district, and share our successes and failures with others. It's also good to see how many organizations now have a web presence. Again, I ask those who do have a web site to provide a link on it to this newsletter at http://western.pbknca.org, this adds value to our site and yours, and is the best way to get higher rankings in search engines such as Google. Incidentally, our website is a subdirectory on the Northern California Association's website, and we thank them for this.

I thank all of you who sent reports, it would be unwise to provide a list here for fear of missing someone, but I have acknowledged the submitters at the end of each report. It has been a pleasure to deal with each of you; in some cases we have had some fun email exchanges while transmitting information.

N.B. The Fall, 2001 newsletter has been removed from the web, but is available as an Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file.