Wolf's Head (secret society)

Wolf's Head Society is a senior society at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Membership recomposes annually with fifteen or sixteen Yale University students, typically rising seniors. The delegation spends its year together answerable to an alumni association. The society remains relevant among current undergraduates.

The society was founded when fifteen rising seniors from the Yale Class of 1884, with help from members of the Yale Class of 1883 who were considered publicly possible taps for the older societies, chose to abet the creation of The Third Society. The society changed its name to Wolf's Head five years later.

The effort was aided by over 300 Yale College alumni and a few Yale Law School faculty, in part to counter the dominance of Skull and Bones Society in undergraduate and university affairs. The founding defeated the last attempt to abolish secret or senior societies at Yale University. The tradition continued of creating and sustaining a society if enough potential rising seniors thought they had been overlooked: Bones was established in 1832 after a dispute over selections for Phi Beta Kappa awards; Scroll and Key Society, the second society at Yale, was established in 1841 after a dispute over elections to Bones. The Third Society's founding was motivated in part by sentiment among some outsiders that they deserved insider status. "[A] certain limited number were firmly convinced that there had been an appalling miscarriage of justice in their individual omission from the category of the elect," some founders agreed.

Before the founding in 1780 at Yale of the Alpha chapter (which still practices a secret handshake amongst members), of Phi Beta Kappa in Connecticut (the second chapter established after that society's founding in 1776) Yale College students established and joined literary societies. By the 1830s, the campus literary societies Linonia, Brothers in Unity, and Calliope had lost stature. Calliope folded in 1853, and the others shut down after the American Civil War. Calliope, Linonia, and Brothers in Unity existed respectively: 1819-1853, 1768-1878, and 1735-1868.

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