"There has been an increase of Greek letters going missing" reads an email sent by Mercer Police on Tuesday, Oct. 7. The police department went on to mention that Alpha Tau Omega is missing its first letter, and that "the severity of the situation is increasing."
In October 2024, the Mercer chapter of Pi Kappa Phi experienced an unofficial and undesired name change of its own.
Mercer Bears' football took on Princeton University on Oct. 12, 2024, beating the Tigers 34-7 on a day when members of Mercer’s fraternity and sorority programs were honored in the end zone and were also given the chance to display their wooden letters on the grass berm below the scoreboard.
Those letters, some as tall as four feet high and often made of plywood, are hallmarks outside of houses in Greek Village. At tailgates and various Greek events, the letters are painted with the colors, and occasionally designs, near to the heart of the organization.
For much of the fall 2024 semester, though, Pi Kappa Phi was left with a lacuna on its lawn, exhibiting the last two letters of their name due to a bit of petty larceny.
“The first letter, the ‘Pi,’ was stolen by the Princeton marching band,” Morgan Kesler ‘25, Pi Kappa Phi president, said.
After asking around Greek Row, Kesler said that Connor Kenworthy ‘26, the fraternity’s tailgate chair at the time, went to Mercer Police to find out where the sign had ended up, and he said that Mercer Police let him know the security footage showed the Princeton students removing the sign from the berm on their way out of the stadium. Kesler was not at the game that day, and he said that no member of the fraternity saw the sign taken from the stadium themselves. Kenworthy did not respond to The Cluster’s request to clarify what MerPo told him in October.
Leadership from the Princeton marching band did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
“We think they did it because, you know, Mercer beat them,” Kesler said. “So they just kind of wanted, you know, to do something to get back, and it’s just like, ‘Come on, bro.’ That’s a little pointless.”
The band is an anomaly among universities against whom Mercer football regularly plays. They are perhaps the first visiting team’s marching band to play at Five Star Stadium, though the practice is commonplace in the deep-pocketed Ivy League. Their performance in October was unique in its own right, as the script alluded to everything from peaches, the late Jimmy Carter and the 11,780 votes Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” in 2021, among other Georgia-centric topics.
In an interview after the game, the band’s drum major, Kate Volz, said that the tongue-in-cheek performance was typical for the band. Indeed, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and nearly every other Ivy League school have a history of their bands conducting mischief both between and outside the hashes.
In the months that followed the heist, the fraternity’s front lawn had a Pi-shaped gap. But not for long.
In an email in December, Kesler said that the fraternity’s alumni network procured funds for a new letter and that they were able to paint the new Pi in the spring. When asked in December what the design would be, Kesler said they would have to figure that out when they get there. Perhaps tiger stripes?
“It would be funny, but I guess it just depends on our mood,” Kesler said. “Let’s be 100 percent honest, here at Mercer, it’s not like Princeton would find out about it.”
This week, when Mercer takes on the Tigers this Saturday in New Jersey in the second part of a home-and-away series, Pi Kapp's three letters will sit on their lawn, unmoved by the marching band. In the end, the fraternity opted for a more clean, sleek design. And, though the new Pi does not pay homage to its previous run-in with Princeton, the fraternity's letters feature the fraternity's colors and a geometric pattern that could, if one squints hard enough, resemble the markings of Princeton's mascot.
Gabriel Kopp '26 is double majoring in Journalism and Law and Public Policy at Mercer University. He has written for The Cluster since he started at Mercer, and currently works as Editor-in-Chief. When he isn't working on a Washington Post crossword, he enjoys going for runs around Macon and reading The New York Times or the AJC while sipping coffee.
