Yale Celebrates 75 Years of Excellence in Psychology

A celebration marking two watershed events in the history of the discipline of psychology at Yale will be held at 1 p.m. Friday, September 3, 2004, with remarks from several officials, including Yale President Richard C. Levin.

The convocation will be held in the President’s Room in Woolsey Hall.

The two landmark events were the Ninth International Congress of Psychology hosted by Yale on Sept. 1-7, 1929, and the founding of the first National Honor Society in Psychology, Psi Chi, by two graduate students attending the Congress.

The international meeting was said to be the most impressive gathering of psychologists in the history of the discipline with more than half of all psychologists in the United States in attendance. Of the 826 psychologists present from 21 nations were such luminaries in the field as Ivan Pavlov and Lev Vygotsky of Russia, Jean Piaget of Switzerland, and Kurt Lewin of Germany.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano will read a proclamation declaring the day “Psi Chi Day in New Haven,” in honor of the founding of the organization, which is the world’s largest academic honor society with chapters at 1,000 campuses across North America. Psi Chi is also the world’s largest psychology membership organization by far, with over 500,000 individual life members around the world.

The convocation also will include a keynote message from historian John Hogan of Saint John’s University and brief messages by Yale Dean Peter Salovey, Psi Chi officers Harold Takooshian and Vincent Prohaska, other society officers, and international psychologists Richard Velayo and Florence Denmark.

Yale also will be presented with a gift to recognize it as the birthplace of Psi Chi.