Thomas McAuley (1778–1862), Presbyterian clergyman and educator, was a native of Ireland. By 1799 he had immigrated to the United States and served as a frontier missionary. McAuley lived in Salem, New York, before attending Union College in Schenectady, from which he graduated in 1804. He then remained at the college as a tutor, 1805–06, lecturer in mathematics and natural philosophy, 1811–14, and professor of the same, 1814–22. In 1818 McAuley was ordained a Presbyterian minister, and in 1822 he became the pastor of the Rutgers Street Church in New York City. Moving to Philadelphia in 1827 to officiate at the Tenth Presbyterian Church, he returned to New York in 1833 as pastor of the Murray Street Church. McAuley helped found Union Theological Seminary in 1836 and served as its first president and professor of pastoral theology until 1840. He remained a director of the seminary until 1845, when he gave up that post and retired from his pastorate. McAuley died in New York City (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Ezra H. Gillett, History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America [rev. ed., 1864], 2:244–5, 247, 501–2, 505–6; A General Catalogue of the Officers, Graduates and Students of Union College, from 1795 to 1854 [1854], 7, 13; Albany Gazette & Daily Advertiser, 18 July 1818; The General Catalogue and Early Annals of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New-York, 1836–1876 [1876], 3, 7; New-York Times, 13 May 1862).

In 1776 students at the College of William and Mary founded phi beta kappa, originally a literary society of a type then common at American colleges. The William and Mary chapter became dormant in 1781 and was not revived until 1851 (Richard Nelson Current, Phi Beta Kappa in American Life: The First Two Hundred Years [1990]).