The Philolexian Foundation

Hamilton's connection to the Society spans his years at King's College, his later service as a Columbia trustee, and the membership of his son James Alexander Hamilton. As an undergraduate at King's College in the mid-1770s he belonged to an unnamed student literary society, the same continuous lineage that, after the Revolutionary War interrupted it, was restarted at Columbia and formalised in 1802 as Philolexian. A quarter-century later, as a Columbia trustee, he attended some of the Society's earliest meetings; his son James Alexander Hamilton (Class of 1805) was the formal founder.

Multilingual since childhood, Koo debated in English with the unhurried authority that would later characterize his diplomatic career, a skill honed as a Philolexian. He was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator, and took his B.A. (1908), M.A. in political science (1909), and Ph.D. in international law and diplomacy (1912), all at Columbia.

Koo served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, and Acting Premier of the Republic of China, and briefly as Acting President in 1926–1927. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 his refusal to sign the Treaty of Versailles' Shandong provisions made him a household name in China. He closed his career as a judge of the International Court of Justice (1957–1967), a Philolexian on the world's bench.

Ginsberg was Moderator of the Philolexian Society as an undergraduate. The Society's official history describes his tenure with characteristic restraint: "owing to waning interest and, according to some, the infamous presidency of poet Allen Ginsberg, the society entered a 10-year interregnum," a sentence that takes more than a moment to parse and is funnier the longer one looks at it. Whatever transpired on Ginsberg's watch is, by Society tradition, not investigated too closely.

He won the Woodberry Poetry Prize, contributed to the Columbia Review and the Jester, and was suspended for a year after composing an editorial appraisal of President Nicholas Murray Butler in the dust of a Hartley Hall window. The friendships he formed at Columbia with his fellow Philolexians Lucien Carr and Jack Kerouac, became the Beat Generation. Howl followed in 1956.

Stein was at Columbia in the years immediately following the 1985 refounding, taking his B.A. from Columbia College in 1987 and an M.F.A. in film from the School of the Arts in 1990. He sat early enough in the Society's modern era to be, by definition, formative: one of the Philos whose presence proved the refounding had taken.

Stein has worked as a documentary filmmaker (he co-produced The Lunch Date, which won the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short) and as a novelist. The Art of Racing in the Rain (Harper, 2008) is told from the perspective of a dog with strong views on Formula One. It became a No. 1 BookSense pick, sold more than six million copies in thirty-eight languages, and was adapted in 2019 with Kevin Costner, Milo Ventimiglia, and Amanda Seyfried. Stein lives in Seattle.

For all the stories he has told, at Geezer gatherings the students only want to hear one: that time he found a body in a rolled-up carpet in Carmen Hall.