Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst-now the University of Massachusetts-is the setting for our founding. Among its other students in the early 1870s it had attracted six men of varied backgrounds, ages, abilities and goals in life, who saw the need for a new and different kind of society on campus that was receptive to experimentation. These, our Founders, banded together in their sophomore year (1873) to form a "society to promote morality, learning and social culture."