The Gamma of Mississippi Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was approved by the membership of the National Phi Beta Kappa Society on August 3, 2018 and formally chartered on April 2, 2019. Mississippi State University is in an elite group of fewer than 10% of universities and colleges in the United States that shelter a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
The initial application to shelter a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at MSU occurred in 1979 and was repeated at three-year intervals until the ultimately successful effort began in 2015. Guided by responses from the national organization, the University worked to enhance programs and resources that support the goals of Phi Beta Kappa, and only some of the many positive developments can be listed here. The number of Phi Beta Kappa members on the faculty and the staff increased from 20 in 1999 to 40 by 2016. In 1984 the fledgling Honors Program, housed in the College of Art and Sciences, counted 296 participants, and by 2016 students in the Shackouls Honors College numbered more than 1550. Degree programs in Latin and in Classics were added to curricular offerings. Beginning in 1996, Mitchell Memorial Library underwent a major expansion of physical facilities, with another expansion beginning in 2012; and between 1989 and 2016 the Library’s annual budget increased from approximately $ 3 million to almost $ 10 million, enabling significant additions to physical volumes held and to electronic resources. In 2012-2016 alone, prestigious awards to students in the liberal arts included 2 Truman Scholarships, 2 Goldwater Scholarships, 1 Princeton Fellowship, 7 Gilman Scholarships for international study, and 1 Rhodes Scholarship. The steadily increasing importance of the liberal arts at the University is reflected in the steadily increasing proportion of undergraduate degrees awarded to students in the College of Arts and Sciences: approximately 11% in 1979, more than 32% in 2016.