Twenty Owls Inducted into Cum Laude

The Memphis University School chapter of the Cum Laude Society inducted 20 members from the classes of 2025 and 2026 during a ceremony March 21. Membership in the Cum Laude Society is the highest academic honor students in a secondary school can receive. The MUS chapter, modeled on Phi Beta Kappa, was chartered on December 14, 1967.
Representing the top 10% of their class in grade point average, juniors Albert Ding, Will Fortas, Joshua Gramm, Nicholas Lee, Wilson Pace, Henry Phan, Ashwin Subramaniam, Luke Tjiong, Henry West, Carter Wildrick, and Ethan Zhao received the honor.

Also inducted were seniors Tucker Davis, Houston Donato, Ammar Duldul, Mac Ladd, Kip Stalls, Luke Walters, Samuel West, Dennis White, and Ethan Zaptin, who represent the top 20% of their class in GPA.

They join the Class of 2025 honorees inducted last year: Amrik Chakravarty, Joephen Chen, Alan Cheng, Wills Frazer, Wilkes Gowen, Rushil Komeravelli, Michael Liu, Oscar Liu, Leo Meske, Kushal Patel, Joey Paul, Paxton Silver, Whitt Stockburger, and Gabe Ungab, who represented the top 10% of their class in 2024.

During the ceremony, Headmaster Pete Sanders introduced Science Instructor Shauna Miller who spoke about a driving force behind her field: curiosity. A lightbulb moment in college allowed her to connect her intense curiosity with her interest in the scientific process.

That curiosity has not abated and now extends to lessons created for her Environmental Science courses. The creek through the woods on campus has always interested her, and it has become a perfect lab space.

“The week before Spring Break my AP students did water-quality testing at the creek. This lab stems from my own questions. I wondered when I first came to MUS if that water was clean. It is not. I was curious about the type of pollution in the creek. We have figured out that it’s nutrient pollution from runoff. What, if anything, can we do about it? We don’t have that answer yet.”

Curiosity is integral to most fields, she said, just manifested in different ways. “It’s due to artists wondering ‘what if’ that movements such as Pointillism, Impressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism happened. Even in professions such as accounting, where it’s difficult for us to see examples of curiosity, it abounds. Accountants must regularly ask questions about their numbers. What has changed in their cash flow? Why did expenses increase this quarter? Every field of study, every profession is driven by questions. Driven by curiosity.”

Miller encouraged the honorees and their fellow students to follow their questions. “Let your curiosity guide your academic career and eventually your professional career,” she said.

“For me though, curiosity leads me right back to this creek. Seeking the answers to the questions I had about water quality has led me to new questions,” she concluded. “Last spring my students and I spotted fish in the creek. I have lots of questions about those fish.”

Sue Hightower Hyde Chair of English Lin Askew then took the podium and continued the theme, urging students to be curious in a time where “we seem to be less curious.”

The campus woods provide a retreat for boys in his American Literature class “to contemplate quietly, to be present and attentive to the smallest expressions of nature, to moss and lichen, to insects, to leaves and roots, to bird and bird call,” he said. Like Henry David Thoreau these Owls focus their unfiltered interest on the world around them during this exercise.

“Cultivating our curiosity requires our attention to more than our six-inch screens,” Askew said. … With Mrs. Miller, I say be curious, ask questions, seek answers.”

Describing the Cum Laude honorees as models of curiosity, Askew said they display the Greek virtues of the society: areté or excellence, diké or justice, and timé or honor. “The ideals conveyed by these terms provide the goals that members of Cum Laude should seek within themselves and should encourage in society at large.”

For the induction Upper School Academic Dean Phillip Stalls announced the names of the new members, who stood in front of the stage as Headmaster Sanders, president of the chapter, presented the charge. Afterward parents and faculty joined Cum Laude members at a reception in the Dining Hall.

See photos from the event HERE.
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Memphis University School

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