Surgam
The Philolexian Foundation
In service to the Philolexian Society of Columbia University · Founded MDCCCII
In service to the Philolexian Society of Columbia University · Founded MDCCCII
Members & Alumni · IV.
Tributes to Philolexians who have passed. Each remembrance is open for additional reflections from fellow Philos — reviewed by a moderator before posting.
Philemon, ordained as Father Economou, took a path through Wall Street, fashion photography, the publishing industry, and the Greek Orthodox priesthood that should not have been possible in one life and was. He wrote eight children's books on the religions of the world, co-translated the Book of Revelation for the Millennium Translation Project, and ran the only Orthodox Christian radio program in northern Minnesota. In Philolexian he eschewed the usual partisan divides during debates, preferring to argue (with what successive Moderators recall as unsettling consistency) that monarchy was the form of government best suited to our present age. He died too young, at forty-eight, in Duluth, in 2004.
A space for fellow Philolexians to add a recollection, an anecdote, or a sentence that holds a piece of him. All submissions are reviewed by the Cryptkeeper before posting; please write in the spirit of the Society — particular, affectionate, and unsentimental.
Philemon once held the floor for the better part of an hour arguing that the only honest political philosophy was anachronism, and that we should therefore restore the Holy Roman Empire. The resolution failed 14–3. He took the loss with the same grace he took everything, and bought the winning side a round at the West End.
I remember Philemon at a Surgam editorial meeting in the spring of 1986, refusing on principle to accept any submission that did not contain at least one semicolon. We complied. The standards held.
Pending Board Review
Mounia Abousaid served the Society as one of its Sergeants-at-Arms during her undergraduate years and was among the graduating class of 2015. Her death in December 2016, shortly after graduation, was reported in Columbia-affiliated notices. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew her; contributions may be added below or submitted for moderation.
Pending Board Review
Hannah Weiss was enrolled at the School of General Studies and expected to graduate with the Class of 2020. She died in an aircraft accident in 2018, before completing her degree. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew her; contributions may be added below or submitted for moderation.
Pending Board Review
Physicist; co-authored the V–A weak-interaction theory (1958) with E.C.G. Sudarshan; president of City College of New York, 1970–79. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Editor and publisher; chairman of Farrar, Straus & Giroux; edited Merton, Lowell, Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, and Elizabeth Bishop. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Conservative journalist and biographer; Newsweek; author of a 26-book run of biographies including Nixon (1956) and RFK: The Man Who Would Be President (1967). A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Catholic priest; Providence College English professor and vice-president; author of Francis Thompson: A Critical Biography. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Author and photojournalist; founder-editor of Jubilee magazine; author of The Man in the Sycamore Tree (Merton biography) and Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (NYT bestseller). A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Headmaster of the Dalton School; author of Space Relations, A Planet in Arms, and Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty? A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Editor-in-chief, Reader's Digest Condensed Books; co-author of The Phrase-Dropper's Handbook (Doubleday, 1976). A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Jazz producer and writer; co-founder of Riverside Records; author of The View from Within; three Grammy Awards for album notes. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
University of Chicago English professor; author of The Amiable Humorist and Some Words of Jane Austen. Passed only weeks before the Foundation's July 2026 audit surfaced his death. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Historian of the American Revolution and the Hudson Valley; author of Chaining the Hudson. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Theatre critic and theorist; founding professor of drama at NYU Tisch. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
UPI national editor for 47 years; the connective figure of the early Beat circle at Columbia, linking Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Never sought bylined authorship. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Native American rights attorney; lead counsel in the Sioux Nation's Black Hills claim before the U.S. Supreme Court. Papers held at Yale's Beinecke Library. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Science writer and editor; MIT Neurosciences Research Program; UMass Amherst; also a poet. Published under the byline Theodore Melnechuk. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Springfield, Massachusetts radio and television news director (WHYN); newspaper columnist and author of Ludlow-set fiction. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Philosophy professor emeritus, SUNY Stony Brook; author of approximately seventeen books on Greek and American thought, aesthetics, and semiotics. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Columbia English professor and dean of Columbia College, 1968–72; textual editor of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Philosopher and academic administrator; provost of the University of Pittsburgh; author of Experience and Culture: The Philosophy of Georg Simmel. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis; author of The First Hundred Years of Wagner's Tristan (Columbia UP). A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
President of NBC News; senior vice-president of ABC News; professor at the Columbia Journalism School. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Editor of Alfred A. Knopf, then The New Yorker; author of the memoir Avid Reader. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
UCLA political theorist and psychoanalyst; author of The Victims of Democracy (a psycho-political study of Malcolm X). One of the small refounding-era cohort of 1962 who briefly reconstituted the Society on May 16, 1962. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Tom Vinciguerra was the connective figure of the modern Philolexian Society. As an undergraduate he led the refounding of the Society in October 1985; for the next thirty-five years he served in every capacity the by-laws allow (Scriba, Treasurer, Director of the Foundation) and cheerfully invented some the by-laws had not yet imagined. A prolific writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Columbia Journalism Review, Columbia Magazine, and the Nieman Reports, he was also the founding editor of the U.S. edition of The Week. His books include Cast of Characters (2015), a group biography of Wolcott Gibbs and the golden-age New Yorker, and Backward Ran Sentences (2011), the selected Gibbs. The Vinciguerra Award for graduating seniors was named in his honor. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Editorial director of Random House; co-founder of The New York Review of Books; founder of Anchor Books (the modern trade paperback) and of the Library of America. Author of Book Business, Eating, and other volumes drawn from a working life at the center of American publishing. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Sociologist of architecture; long-tenured professor at Rutgers and Princeton; author of People and Buildings and other studies of the professional and social contexts of design. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Founder of Harcourt, Brace & Company (1919); publisher of Sinclair Lewis, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and John Maynard Keynes. Author of the memoir Some Experiences (1951). A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
American film director and screenwriter of the silent era; among his credits, the 1930 sound feature Dixiana. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
New York attorney; Corporation Counsel of the City of New York under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia; longtime civic reformer. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Chinese diplomat and jurist; ambassador to the United States, France, and the United Kingdom; briefly Premier and acting President of the Republic of China; judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Author of the multi-volume Reminiscences of Wellington Koo, published from the Columbia Oral History collection. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Founder of the Thom McAn shoe chain; benefactor of Stony Brook University; his Long Island shoe-industry papers reside at the Stony Brook Libraries. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Governor of North Dakota and United States Senator; author of The Nonpartisan League (1920) and later pamphlets on wartime famine and foreign aid. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Historian of colonial and early-republic New York; president of Union College, 1934–45; author of The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Political scientist; long-tenured Columbia professor of government; president of the American Political Science Association; author of Federalism, Mature and Emergent and Delegation and Autonomy. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Essayist and cultural critic; author of the incisive First World War essays “The State” and “The War and the Intellectuals”; contributor to The Seven Arts and The New Republic. Died at thirty-two in the 1918 influenza pandemic; his major essays were published posthumously in Untimely Papers (1919). A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Political scientist at Columbia; author of Imperialism and World Politics (1926), the era's standard textbook on the topic; his early death interrupted a productive scholarly career. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
President of Doubleday & Company for more than two decades (1946–63); trustee of Columbia University; instrumental in American publishing's post-war expansion. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
American ornithologist; curator at the American Museum of Natural History; author of the four-volume The Birds of the Belgian Congo (1932–54), for which he received the National Academy of Sciences' Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
New York attorney; State Senator; five-term U.S. Congressman from Manhattan; author of law-review and foreign-policy commentaries. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Astrologer and gay-rights advocate; grandson of President Chester A. Arthur; author of The Circle of Sex (1966), a diagram-driven treatise on sexual variation. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Journalist and essayist; foreign editor at Life; author of Social Astonishments (1963) and other essay collections. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
Real-estate lawyer and philanthropist; assembled the syndicate that purchased the Empire State Building in 1961; founding chairman of the Wien International Scholarship at Brandeis. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
Pending Board Review
American theatrical producer; general manager of the American National Theatre and Academy; producer of Broadway and touring productions across a six-decade career. A fuller tribute is being solicited from Philolexians who knew him; contributions may be submitted for moderation below.
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