On Founders Day, we remember four men who refused to accept the way things were — and built something that has lasted more than a century.
On the night of March 17, 1906, two college students found their way into the wrong office at Miami University.
They weren’t there to cause trouble. They were there to change everything.
William Shideler and Dwight Douglass had come back to campus early from spring break, restless with an idea they couldn’t shake. They made their way into Old Main, tried a few doors, and slipped into the one room that happened to be unlocked: the office of Dean Hepburn. Douglass settled into the dean’s chair, helped himself to one of the cigars he found in the desk, kicked his feet up, and said to Shideler, “Well, Doc, let’s see what you have.”
What they had was a vision. And when Dean Hepburn walked in on them mid-conversation, cigar smoke curling under the door, he didn’t send them away. He listened. Then he said, “Well boys, I wish you all the success in the world.”
Two weeks later, 21 men climbed the steps of Old Main to become the Non-Fraternity Association. Phi Kappa Tau was born.
Why It Happened
The story behind that night is worth knowing, because it makes what Shideler, Douglass, Taylor Borradaile, and Clinton Boyd built mean a lot more.
In the early 1900s, three fraternities controlled campus life at Miami University. If you weren’t in one of them, you were largely shut out — from athletics, from student government, from any meaningful role on campus. The track meet of March 1905 made that painfully clear. Shideler and Douglass coached an unaffiliated team that year. The fraternity men colluded and swept the competition. Their runners didn’t place.
That was the moment something shifted.
Over the following months, the four men organized non-fraternity students into political coalitions and competed in campus elections. They won some. They lost some. But when Borradaile and Douglass showed up to a meeting called by Miami’s president to address the tension on campus, they were told something that crystallized everything: without a formal organization behind them, they didn’t represent anyone.
So they built one.
They didn’t call it a fraternity. They called it a Non-Fraternity Association, because the fraternities of their day had come to represent exclusion, entitlement, and politics over people. What they wanted was the opposite: a community built on genuine brotherhood, open to men who earned their place in it, with no shortcuts and no gatekeeping.
The Values That Founded Us Are Still the Point
More than 100 years later, that original instinct is still the DNA of Phi Kappa Tau.
The men who founded this fraternity weren’t the most powerful men on campus. They were the ones who saw something wrong and decided to fix it. They weren’t motivated by status. They were motivated by belonging — by the belief that every man deserves a community where he can compete, contribute, and grow, regardless of who he knew walking in the door.
That’s still what Phi Kappa Tau asks of its members today. The Strategic Plan isn’t just a document. Recruitment growth isn’t just a number. New staff, new programs, and new chapters — all of it traces back to that same original commitment: building something real for men who want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
The founders didn’t have a playbook. They had each other and a conviction that it was worth doing right. And on a cold March night in Ohio, they sat down in a borrowed office and got started.
Here’s what the history books don’t quite capture: the founders eventually became alumni, too. At some point, every one of them walked off the Miami campus for the last time as an undergraduate. So did the men who came after them, chapter by chapter, decade by decade. Each one left something behind — not just memories, but a living organization that the next generation would inherit and make their own.
That line has never broken. It runs through every chapter, every initiation, every conversation in a chapter house that turned into something a brother still thinks about years later. It runs through you, wherever you are in it.
For the Undergraduate: You’re Part of What They Started
Founders Day is more than a date on the calendar. It’s a reminder of where this fraternity comes from and what it has always stood for.
Shideler, Douglass, Borradaile, and Boyd weren’t famous men. They were students, just like you, who decided that what they were building mattered. The brotherhood they started has now spanned more than a century, hundreds of campuses, and hundreds of thousands of men.
You are part of that line.
On March 17, take a moment to think about what they handed you — not a name, not letters, not a social calendar — but a brotherhood with a purpose. And then ask yourself what you’re going to do with it.
That’s what the founders would have asked, too.
For the Alumnus: You Helped Build It for Them
As an alumnus, Founders Day hits differently.
You’re not being asked to imagine what you’ll do with what the founders built. You already know. You lived it. You took it somewhere, used it in ways you probably didn’t expect, and carried the values of this fraternity into a career, a family, a community — whether you think about it that way or not.
What Founders Day asks of you now is simpler: remember it.
Remember what it felt like to belong to something that asked something real of you. Remember the brothers who pushed you, the experiences that shaped you, and the version of yourself who showed up because of Phi Kappa Tau.
Shideler himself returned to the Miami campus and served on the faculty for many years, staying involved with the chapter there for most of his life. He stayed connected because what they built still mattered to him.
If it still matters to you, stay connected too. The fraternity our founders started 120 years ago is still being built. The men building it today could use the reminder that what they’re part of has always been worth the effort.
That’s something only you can give them.