Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Elects Final 93 Seniors From Class of 2026

When Ben C. LeBuhn ’26 saw an email notifying him of his election to Phi Beta Kappa on Thursday, he didn’t know what it was for.

“I stood up, and I called my dad. I asked him what Phi Beta Kappa was and talked to him for 10 or 15 minutes. He told me he thought it was an honor society sort of thing,” LeBuhn said.

“I thought it was a Greek life thing. I was unsure, but I started to realize what it was, and I got really excited,” he added.

LeBuhn and 92 other seniors rounded out the final members elected to the Harvard College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa for the Class of 2026 — the nation’s oldest honor society, which elects students based on their GPAs or after a nomination from their concentration’s director of undergraduate studies or resident dean.

The 93 seniors join the “Junior 24” elected last spring and the “Senior 48” elected earlier in the fall.

All of Harvard’s undergraduate Houses were represented in the class of inductees, with each House sending at least five seniors. Adams House led with 13 students elected to PBK.

The students represented 38 distinct concentrations, with Government and Economics leading the way with 10 concentrators.

A Faculty of Arts and Sciences committee had argued in an October report that GPA had eroded as a metric of academic achievement, forcing prize committees such as PBK to rely on informal assessments of course difficulty and individual faculty recommendations — a process the committee called “not only unreliable but unjust.”

The Thursday election is the first major College-wide academic distinction awarded since faculty overwhelmingly voted to approve a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades, set to take effect in fall 2027. The proposal also created a percentile-based internal ranking system for honors determinations.

Some seniors said the cap underscored the value of exploring elective classes across a range of fields.

Hana R. O’Looney-Goto ’26, a Government and Economics concentrator, said the philosophy and creative writing classes she took in her senior spring represented “some of the best learning.”

“Pushing myself to think differently, to think creatively, and to put myself in rooms with people who think differently and who see the world in a different light, and who want to contribute to it in a different way was really special,” she said, “and something that I think is the greatest gift to come out of a liberal arts education.”

“I learned a lot from immersing myself in a new environment, and it saddens me that future classes at Harvard won’t necessarily have a culture that encourages that,” she added.

Ari F. Kohn ’26 said she had shifted her approach to academics toward “being driven by questions” instead of by grades.

“I started off my academic journey like my freshman year really scared of trying to optimize for whatever would come next in my academic journey,” Kohn said. “I was not having a satisfying intellectual journey.”

Kohn said she was skeptical that the grading cap on its own would foster the academic culture she had come to value.

“I think that the grading proposal alone doesn’t create the kind of intellectual environments or like really good teaching that is necessary for that,” she added. “It’s the first step of a lot of many more things that need to be done.”

Katharina A.M. Ravichandran ’26, a former Crimson Blog editor, said her appreciation for her academic journey extended beyond the PBK recognition itself.

“I feel incredibly humbled and blessed to be recognized for my academic journey, because it’s something that obviously has been the focus in my past four years,” Ravichandran said.

“But I think it also serves as a reminder that these accolades are somewhat stochastic in the sense that regardless of the accolade, the education itself is what I feel most grateful for,” she added.

—Staff writer Uy B. Pham can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ubp.88. Follow him on X @uybpham.