The Vulcans: A Reflective and Critical History of the College of Engineering's Secret Society

Abstract

The Vulcans, a senior engineering honorary society, was organized in 1904. In addition to social activities, the society raises money for scholarships for engineering students. "VULCAN is a society consisting of juniors, seniors, and graduate students who have shown leadership and service to the College of Engineering and the University of Michigan. The purpose of the society is five-fold: 1. To promote comradeship among its members based on their mutual interests. 2. To develop cooperation between student organizations by promoting this friendship among their leaders. 3. To bestow private recognition upon those who are deserving by electing them to membership. 4. To provide service to the College of Engineering in situations where VULCANS has unique capabilities. 5. To maintain the decades of tradition on which our organization was founded."3 The society was named after the Greek god who first welded together iron and steel. The emblem is an anvil bearing the word "Vulcan" and the class year. Three kinds of membership were established: active, graduate, and honorary. Scholarship is not the sole requirement for initiation; a candidate must be popular and active in both scholastic and social affairs in the College of Engineering to be considered for membership. Junior students who fulfill these requirements are voted on by the active members and their initiation is conducted late in the spring. For eligible senior students who have been passed by in the spring, initiation is held in the fall. A full-length initiation ritual was leaked in 2017 on the website Imgur.4 No definite annual number of new members was set, but a limit of about twenty members a year has been established by precedent. Meetings were held in the Vulcan room in the tower of the Michigan Union every second Sunday evening. Shortly after the Winter 1995 initiation, the suggestion was made to select a Greek place name and assign it to each class. In 2000 the Vulcans lost their room in the Union and were displaced to hold their ceremony in College of Engineering rooms on North Campus. Since 2010, no written records from the organization have surfaced leading to a mystery as to their current whereabouts. A Vulcan scholarship, first established in the 1950s, is still offered at the University, although attempts to contact the organization via the scholarship have been unsuccessful. Aside from providing its members with this form of fellowship and inspiration, the society's principal active function is to participate in student affairs of the College of Engineering and of the University as a whole, in cooperation with the other honorary societies on the campus. Engineering Deans and Professors are regularly offered membership and Google Cofounder Larry Page was one of the hundreds of Vulcan alumni making a difference in their respective engineering fields.