The University of San Diego’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter inducted Noelle Norton and Nicholas Santilli as honorary members on April 27 in a campus ceremony held on the eve of the Society’s first regional program in its 250th celebration. Norton serves as USD’s Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Santilli, as Assistant to the President for Strategic Initiatives.
Honorary membership is among Phi Beta Kappa’s highest recognitions and one Phi Beta Kappa chapters confer selectively. Norton and Santilli enter a membership that has spent 250 years championing the kind of education and leadership they have built their careers around. The election recognizes them, and the Society is stronger for their joining.
USD President Jim Harris named those qualities directly in his introduction. “Both Noelle and Nick are being recognized for embodying the USD ideal of being a changemaker,” he said, “demonstrating that a deep, multidisciplinary curiosity is the most powerful tool we have for addressing humanity’s most urgent challenges.”
Norton joined USD in 1994 and has shaped its academic life for more than three decades. As a faculty member, she chaired the Department of Political Science and International Relations, directed the Honors Program, and led the design of USD’s Learning Communities Program. Since being named Dean in 2013, she has guided a comprehensive revision of the Core Curriculum, launched an interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and championed the Teaching Pathway Postdoctoral Program. Her scholarship on gender, governance, and public policy has appeared in Political Research Quarterly, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere; she is a co-author of Creating Gender: The Sexual Politics of Welfare Policy.
USD chapter president Rae Robertson-Anderson recognized Norton’s “thirty years of visionary leadership, her steadfast advocacy for the liberal arts through the creation of the USD Humanities Center, and her career-long dedication to fostering a culture of rigorous inquiry and mentorship.”
Norton, in her remarks, called induction “an immense honor.” She added, “I’ve always carried a quiet touch of melancholy that I wasn’t part of this community, a society that puts the liberal arts so unapologetically at the front and center of the human experience.”
Santilli holds the title of Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, at John Carroll University following a 34-year career, and recently served as Interim Provost at USD before assuming his current role. A former American Council on Education Fellow, he has been a national voice in higher education planning, most prominently through the Society for College and University Planning, where he chaired the board, directed the Planning Institute, and led professional learning initiatives as senior director for learning strategy.
The USD chapter honored him for “his national leadership in academic strategy and integrated planning, his deep commitment to institutional integrity, and his lifelong service to the advancement of excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.”
In his remarks, Santilli organized his reflections around what he called “good things in threes”: the three San Diego chapters represented in the room (San Diego State University, UC San Diego, and USD); the three stars on the Phi Beta Kappa key, which mark the founding ideals of friendship, morality, and literature; and a phrase from USD’s co-founder, Mother Rosalie Hill, who described education as “goodness, truth, and beauty… but the greatest of these is goodness.”
He closed with a charge: “There is much good in the work we do in higher education. Let us continue to tell the story of how our institutions serve the public good, not just through the knowledge we create, but through the goodness we cultivate in the world.”
L-R: ΦBK Secretary and CEO Frederick M. Lawrence, USD’s Assistant to the President for Strategic Initiatives Nicholas Santilli, USD’s Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Noelle Norton, and USD’s ΦBK Chapter President and Professor of Physics and Biophysics Rae Robertson-Anderson.
“As we mark 250 years of Phi Beta Kappa, this induction in San Diego reflects exactly what the next era should look like for our Society: recognizing and honoring the people whose work, on campuses, in communities, and beyond, sustains the case for the arts and sciences,” said ΦBK Secretary Frederick M. Lawrence. “Phi Beta Kappa inducted our first honorary member, Elisha Parmele, in 1779. We owe our very existence to Parmele’s visionary understanding of what we could be, as it was he who first extended our reach beyond the founding chapter. Norton and Santilli now take their place in this great story. They have each spent their careers building institutions that reflect the quarter-millennium mission of Phi Beta Kappa. Their election is a well-deserved recognition of their impactful work.”
This honorary induction ceremony was part of Phi Beta Kappa’s 250th celebration in San Diego. The following evening, the national office hosted a public program, “The Human Algorithm: The Liberal Arts and the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” the first of a slate of gatherings the Society will hold across the country through August 2027. Santilli’s remarks pointed to a thread to which the celebration is likely to return: the case the arts and sciences continue to make in turbulent times. Norton and Santilli have spent careers making that case. Phi Beta Kappa is fortunate to have them.
By Mackenzie Galloway-Cole, Director, Communications & Digital Strategy