These records document important decisions as well as day-to-day operations of your organization. This can include correspondence to and from university offices and administrators, as well as your email about the organization.

Transfer to Archives: Annually

This letter from the Order of the Red Friars—Duke’s best-known (and now disbanded) secret honorary society—requests contributions from the order’s alumni for a new project: the creation of a plaque bearing the text of the aims of Duke University, the first article of Duke’s bylaws. You’ll find this plaque outside the Chapel, within the arcade that connects the Chapel to the Divinity School.

(Incidentally, Grand Friar Randolph Few is the son of Duke president William P. Few.)

The accompanying list shows the order’s alumni who contributed to the creation of the plaque.

Why is this historically important?

• Before the Red Friars’ records were given to the Duke University Archives, no one—save a few chief administrators, perhaps—knew who had donated the plaque. It was, after all, a gift to the university from a secret

Plaque contributions letter and contributors list, 1942. From the Order of the Red Friars Records, 1913-1971. Duke University Archives.