Delta Upsilon
North American collegiate fraternity
Delta Upsilon (ΔΥ), commonly known as DU, is a collegiate men's fraternity founded on November 4, 1834, at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is the sixth-oldest, all-male, college Greek-letter organization founded in North America (only Kappa Alpha Society, Sigma Phi, Delta Phi, Alpha Delta Phi, and Psi Upsilon predate). It is popularly and informally known as "DU" or "Delta U" and its members are called "DUs". Although historically found on the campuses of small New England private universities, Delta Upsilon currently has 76 chapters/colonies across the United States and Canada. A number of its buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 2013, Business Insider named Delta Upsilon one of the "17 Fraternities with Top Wall Street Alumni". Notable members include President of the United States James A. Garfield, President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos, Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson, Linus Pauling, Joseph P. Kennedy, Lou Holtz, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Charles Evans Hughes, Les Aspin, James Smith McDonnell and others. Forty-two brothers of the fraternity have sat in the United States Congress, three in the Parliament of Canada, one in the Imperial House of Peers of Japan, and six on the Queen's Privy Council for Canada. Its members have received six Nobel Prizes, five Olympic gold medals, one Pulitzer Prize, four Medals of Honor, one Lenin Peace Prize, one Presidential Medal of Freedom, seven investitures into the Order of Canada, and one investiture each into the Order of St Michael and St George, the Order of Merit, and the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav.
The public source identifies “Delta Upsilon” as north American collegiate fraternity. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Delta, Upsilon and North.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5254771. The first chronological checks are 1834 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Delta Upsilon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.