Prof. John Burt (ENG) gave the Phi Beta Kappa address to this year's inductees into the Brandeis chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at the induction ceremony held last Saturday in the Spingold Theater Center. This year, 75 members of the senior class and six members of the junior class were elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest honors organization in the United States, according to information given to attendees of the ceremony. According to the official Phi Beta Kappa website, "The ideal Phi Beta Kappa has demonstrated intellectual integrity, tolerance for other views, and a broad range of academic interests." Each year, about 1 percent of college students are invited to join Phi Beta Kappa, according to the website.

Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe welcomed initiates after a brief introduction from Prof. Andreas Teuber, chair of the Philosophy department and president of Brandeis' chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the Mu chapter of Massachusetts.

"This group of students are our most outstanding academic accomplishers," Jaffe said.

After Jaffe's welcome, Prof. Patricia Johnston (CLAS) called the initiates up one by one, and Jaffe presented them with their awards and honor cords

During his address, titled "Suffering and the Old Masters," Burt read the W.H. Auden poem "Musée des Beaux Arts." He suggested that the "ostensible subject" of the painting upon which Auden based the poem, Pieter Breughel's "'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," appears only as a single part of a much larger story. According to Burt, Dutch artists during Breughel's time widely embraced the idea of depicting the world as it appears in the here and now-what Burt deemed the "thisness" of the world. This was important to Auden, suggested Burt, because Auden wrote this poem as he was realizing that no idea, no matter how large, can substitute for the "here and now . of actually, worldly experience."

The lesson to be learned from this poem is not only that people must "refrain from brutalizing the world, this world, in the name of big ideas that transcend that world," said Burt, but also that one should not entertain an idea unless one holds it with a "certain skeptical detachment." Burt said that poet John Keats' term for this sort of stance toward ideas is negative capability.

In an interview with the Justice, Teuber added that some people have their best ideas when they take their mind off the task at hand and that sometimes discovery must be unconscious.

In an interview with the Justice after the ceremony, Burt said that the inspiration for his address came from the idea of "negative capability, by which I meant the ability not to be imprisoned by your own big ideas."

He added that in his view, education has always been about cultivating negative capability and that it is something that everyone must learn. He added that he thought induction into Phi Beta Kappa was a very high honor because it is not simply about grade-point average: the faculty "has to say, 'Oh yes, that is someone we think of as very special.'"

Teuber said in his interview, "The very fact of receiving the award itself expresses a truly extraordinary accomplishment." He said that Phi Beta Kappa honors scholarship in a way that is unique at the University because it requires a breadth of academic interests along with a good GPA.

Ethan Meltzer '10, a Phi Beta Kappa inductee, said that it was nice to have this honor at the end of his time at Brandeis and that he found the ceremony interesting. Meltzer noted however, that the sciences were not widely represented by those who spoke during the ceremony.

Another inductee Clarence Friedman '10 said, "It's definitely an honor. . It's sort of a pretentious society, but we're all happy to be in it.