Tau Alpha Pi Honor Society--A brief history

Journal of Engineering Technology, Spring 2000 by Cheshier, Stephen R, Troxler, G William, Moore, Michael

EDITOR'S NOTE

The following article was written at the request of the Editorial Board, with the intention of keeping the engineering technology education community fully cognizant of efforts toward raising the level of professionalism in the ET portion of the engineering spectrum. The Editorial Board gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the authors in their development of this archival synopsis.

History of Tau Alpha Pi

There is only one man who can tell the complete Tau Alpha Pi story-Professor Frederick J. Berger. In fact, it is impossible to separate Tau Alpha Pi's activities from those of Berger. He is Tau Alpha Pi. Unfortunately, Dr. Berger is elderly and in poor health, and thus, he will not be able to write the history we would all love to read. The authors feel grossly inadequate to undertake this task, but out of respect for Fred, and love for Tau Alpha Pi, this brief paper is presented.

The field of engineering technology emerged around the time of the end of World War II, when many military veterans returned to attend colleges or technical institutes on the GI Bill. These students had often received some significant level of technical training in the service and were highly motivated to continue their education as civilians and capitalize on the technical training they already had received. Engineering technology programs available at that time were exclusively two-year programs.

Since engineering technology was a relatively new field at that time, there was no established national honor society available. Thus, it made sense for individual technical institutes to recognize and honor their best students for their academic excellence by creating local honor organizations.

One of the first of these local honor organizations was created by the late Professor Jesse DeFore, who was then on the faculty of the Southern Technical Institute (now Southern Polytechnic State University) in Marietta, Georgia. The year was 1953. This local honor society was named "Tau Alpha Pi" to parallel a more established organization, Tau Beta Pi-- the national honor organization for engineering students.

As engineering technology programs grew and matured, the need for a national honor society developed. Sometime during the 1960s, Southern Tech's Tau Alpha Pi became the basis for the formation of the national engineering technology honorary organization of the same name. The Southern Technical Institute's chapter became the Alpha Alpha chapter of Tau Alpha Pi. Other chapters were added during Dr. Berger's four-decade term as Founding Executive Director. Several of the last chapters established under Dr. Berger's direction were the Mu Eta chapter at Piedmont Technical College and the Zeta Iota chapter at the University of North Texas in the mid 1990s. Other chapters have been chartered since he retired. (See the information box on page 38 for requirements for starting a Tau Alpha Pi chapter at your institution).

Professor Frederick W. Berger, then a dedicated teacher at Bronx Community College of CUNY, took on the daunting challenge of creating a national honorary society for engineering technology because he loved learning and had immense reverence for scholarship. Through his earnest embrace of the project, he became the first and founding Executive Director of the emergent society (a position for which he never received remuneration). It is an understatement to say that the dramatic growth in both number of chapters and reputation of the organization were due to Berger's tireless dedication to its success. He took every opportunity to convince his peers to establish chapters, giving numerous speeches and engaging in hundreds of private conversations advocating the need to recognize students who attain high academic standards. In fact, since at that time the most selective honor society (Phi Beta Kappa) admitted only the top 5% of students, Berger decided to have Tau Alpha Pi admit only the top 4%! It thus became the nation's most selective honor society (a fact that Fred often stated with pride). From the beginning, the Society was open to both associate and bachelor degree candidates.

Berger visited almost every Tau Alpha Pi chapter in the country at one time or another. When attending a ceremony for new members, he added great dignity and solemnity to the event, because he took scholarship very seriously. Berger would often recount how his immigrant parents instilled in him the love of education and the importance of fulfilling one's potential. His father's deathbed advice to him was to excel academically and to always do his very best. He also told of how he was inspired to go into applied electronics education when, after studying electrical engineering for some time, he was asked by his mother to fix a friend's TV. He was so embarrassed that he could not do it that he took a course at the RCA Institute to learn how. From then on, he knew how to blend theory with practice that brought great benefit to generations of his students.