About Us
We develop our fellowship by living as brothers. We have many different brotherhood-oriented events per semester, such as formals and semi-formals, house camping trips, overnight trips to Canada, day trips to Six Flags and much more. By living in the chapter house, each Kappa Sigma at Cornell has the advantage and security of relying on 40+ other men, some of whom will be more experienced and can act as teachers to the younger brothers. Fellowship is the foundation and strongest aspect of our fraternity.
We seek to develop our leadership through the many opportunities open to Greek students at Cornell. For one, there are numerous opportunities to hold positions and offices of responsibility within our own house. These positions teach leadership on a smaller scale, and hold varying degrees of responsibility. All members of Kappa Sigma are also eligible to serve on Cornell's Inter-Fraternity Council (IFC), thereby leading the largest governing body in the country's second largest Greek system. All of our members also hold position in Cornell's many clubs on campus, such as Cornell's Entrepreneurs' Club (President, members), the Pre-Law Journal (staff writers) and more.
Scholarship holds a very important position in our daily lives at Kappa Sigma. The reason that we are all at Cornell, after all, is to achieve the best education possible. We strive to achieve this by incorporating study hours into our pledging program. Our house also has a relatively high GPA (3.4 last semester) and is consistently awarded scholarship awards from our national organization.
Kappa Sigma also serves the Cornell community. Some of the past philanthropy events we have done are our Pizza for Parkinson's fundraiser, benefiting the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and Cornell's Relay for Life, raising money for the American Cancer Foundation for cancer research.
Our History
Kappa Sigma traces its roots back to the year 1400, in the city of Bologna, Italy. Bologna was renown throughout the Western world for its University, the University of Bologna, and for this reason, it was also known as "The City of Letters". Bologna has been home to some of the greatest thinkers of all time, including Dante, Petrarch, Galileo, Copernicus, and many others that contributed to its academic reputation. Unfortunately, the students of Bologna were terrorized by the unscrupulous governor, Baldassarre Cossa. Cossa and his followers would lay in waiting on dark streets to rob students. Manuel Chrysoloras, a teacher of language at the University, formed in 1400 a society of students for mutual protection against Cossa. These students devised secret signs, words, and a ritual to protect themselves for Cossa's spies and henchmen, and it was this ritual that bound them as brothers in fellowship, the fellowship of Kappa Sigma.
The Order of Kappa Sigma expanded to many other great European universities throughout the Renaissance, but was barely active by the 19th century. In the mid-1800s, an American traveler to Europe was revealed the secret of the order, and from this, Kappa Sigma in North America was born.
On December 10, 1869, Kappa Sigma was re-founded at 46 East Lawn at the University of Virginia. The founding fathers were William Grigsby McCormick, George Miles Arnold, Edmund Law Rogers, Frank Courtney Nicodemus, and John Covert Boyd (founder of American National Red Cross). From these humble origins and five friends and brothers, the Order of Kappa Sigma has come to dominate the fraternal world, and is currently the largest and most successful fraternity in North America.