Greek Life

Rho Nu Kappa Sorority

Rho Nu Kappa (ΡΝΚ) is a historically selective women’s organization originating in 1922 as a private society, later formalized into a Greek-letter organization in the early 1980s. Unlike traditional sororities, ΡΝΚ has never prioritized…

Aurelia Valen

Aurelia Valen was born into a prominent East Coast family, raised within an environment that emphasized education, social awareness, and cultural refinement. She received private schooling before attending a respected women’s academy in New…

Zeta Phi Lambda

Zeta Phi Lambda (ΖΦΛ) is Oakridge College’s oldest co-educational academic fraternity — and, by long reputation, its home for the dorks, the outsiders, and the students who never quite fit the mold of the…

Sigma Upsilon Sigma Fraternity

Sigma Upsilon Sigma is a fraternity built on a simple truth: a man is known by his friends — the plain English of its motto, Noscitur A Sociis. Under the patronage of Dionysus and…

Alpha Chi Epsilon Fraternity

Alpha Chi Epsilon, or AXE, is a fraternity founded at Oakridge Institute of Forestry and Land Sciences in the winter of 1919 by three students who built it less as a social club than…

AXE Founding Lore— First Winter

Alpha Chi Epsilon took first shape in the autumn of 1919, on the new campus of the Oakridge Institute of Forestry and Land Sciences, in a small coastal town along the rugged Northern California…

Fen Calloway

Fen Calloway was the second of the three co-founders of Alpha Chi Epsilon (AXE). A scholarship student from the Central Valley, he arrived at Oakridge Institute of Forestry and Land Sciences in 1919 carrying…

Ward Ashton

Ward Ashton was the third of the three co-founders of Alpha Chi Epsilon Fraternity (AXE), and in some ways the least obvious candidate for what he became. The nephew of a former Hartwell Timber…

Holt Briggs

Holt Briggs was the son of a Briarmont millworker and the first of the three co-founders of Alpha Chi Epsilon Fraternity (AXE) . He was the only founder who had grown up inside the…

The Season of Storms

The winter of 1919 brought six weeks of sustained rain to the Briarmont coast, with two major flooding events in the harbor and widespread slope failure on the bare hillsides above town — the…