Word: signetics
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...election process is largely ritualistic, from the secret ballot by which candidates are elected or rejected to the initiation ceremony in the darkened Signet library where each member-elect must read an original piece of writing before an invisible crowd of taunting members. At the end of the ceremony, a red rose is given to each new member to be saved for posterity and one day returned to the club with the member's first book or significant work. T.S. Eliot's initiation rose is on display in the library today...
Frequent contact between students and faculty is what members find most attractive about the Signet. The club is one of the few undergraduate organizations on campus, aside from the Hasty Pudding and the Lampoon, where professors hobnob with students outside the classroom...
...probably wouldn't have had any contact with the faculty if not for the Signet," says the club's secretary, Michael W. Hirschorn '86, adding that there "are very few organizations and places on campus where you can discuss a whole range of topics...
Associate members agree, saying they, too, enjoy the contact and conversation with students that otherwise would not take place in undergraduate houses. "The Signet provides the most stimulating conversation available in the College, where both faculty members and students talk together on common ground," says Marquand, who lunches about two times each week at the Society. "It's rare that I don't find conversation there fun and enlightening," he says...
...place to practice the dying art of conversation," says Professor John Brewer, chairman of the History and Literature Department. He says that while he goes to the Signet one or two times each week, he rarely journeys to dine at houses. "It's rather different from the house environment where you don't know people...