What is Tau Beta Pi?
Tau Beta Pi is an honor society –
It is not a fraternity.
It is not an honorary organization.
It is not a civic club.
It is not an insurance agency or tour service.
It is not an employment bureau.
It is not a protagonist or antagonist for any
cause, except the cause of excellence.
Tau Beta Pi’s basic purposes are stated in the
Preamble to its Constitution: “… to mark in a fitting
manner those who have conferred honor upon their alma
mater by distinguished scholarship and exemplary
character … and to foster a spirit of liberal culture in
engineering.” These are Tau Beta Pi’s only purposes.
To fulfill its purposes, Tau Beta Pi performs the
following functions:
It identifies people of excellence.
It rewards those it finds to be excellent and
holds them up to public view, as members.
It encourages excellence in its members and in
all people.
It fosters liberal culture as opposed to narrow
technical specialization.
What is this liberal culture? The term and its
ideas come from two Latin root words – “liber,”
meaning to free, to liberate from ignorance, to broaden
understanding. The opposite of liberal in this sense
would be narrow, restricted, limited. “Cultura,” means
compassion and enlightenment, refinement, and good
taste. Its opposite would be crudeness.
To Tau Beta Pi, liberal culture involves a deep
and compassionate understanding of people and of the
universe in which we live, beyond the narrow confines
of our particular technical specialty.
Robert H. Nagel
January, 1983