SPARTANBURG, S.C. – The Hon. Costa M. Pleicones, a 1965 Wofford College graduate and retired chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, will give the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture, “Civility in an Uncivil World,” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 19.
The program, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Leonard Auditorium in Main Building.
Pleicones, a native of Columbia, S.C., serves as secretary of the Wofford Board of Trustees. He received a degree in English from Wofford. He received his J.D. in 1968 from the University of South Carolina School of Law. He previously served as an enlisted member and officer in the U.S. Army in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, a public defender for Richland County, a municipal judge for the city of Columbia and a resident circuit court judge for the Fifth Judicial Circuit.
Initiation of new members of Phi Beta Kappa will be held at 4 p.m. Tuesday, May 9, in Leonard Auditorium.
Wofford received its chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at the 1940 triennial meeting of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, bringing to fruition more than 10 years of work by three Phi Beta Kappa members who then were serving on the faculty: President Henry Nelson Snyder; Dr. David Duncan Wallace, class of 1894; and Dr. John West Harris, class of 1916, a brash and brilliant young English professor not afraid to campaign vigorously in the conviction that his alma mater deserved membership. Harris later founded the National Beta Club, which still has its headquarters in Spartanburg.