The Eclectic society of Phi Nu Theta was founded by Jonathan Coe, Clark Titus Hinman, Chester Dormund Hubbard, Herman Merrills Johnson, and Joshua Newhall.

In 1863, the Eclectic society's meeting place was said to have been vandalized and robbed by rival fraternity Chi Psi, which was shut down the same year.

[1] In 1912, at the seventy-fifth reunion of the society, Stephen Henry Olin reported in an address to the society that after a detailed analysis of the academic standing of each college fraternity chapter at every major university in America back to the 1820s, Phi Nu Theta then had the highest academic ranking of any chapter of any fraternity in the country.

[4] At the same time, the undergraduates abandoned both the initiation ceremony and the constitution, women were elected to membership, and the name Phi Nu Theta was disavowed as too much like a Greek-letter fraternity.

[4] The alumni closed the Alpha Dining Club, the permanent staff (housekeeper and chef) was dismissed, and the house was sold to the university.

The existing society has operated without a constitution for extended periods, and adopted a Quaker-style consensus decision-making system.

[4] In 1906, the society hired Henry Bacon, formerly of the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White, to design a Doric Greek revival structure at 200 High Street.

Alumni of the old Phi Nu Theta Eclectic include Chester D. Hubbard, a founder of Eclectic, and his son, member William P. Hubbard, both prominent at the founding convention of the State of West Virginia, Frederick W. Pitkin '58, two-term governor of Colorado from 1879, the congressman and banker Frederick M. Davenport, Walter B. Wriston, who presided over the development of modern consumer banking and the ATM while serving as president and CEO of Citibank, now known as Citicorp, and poet Charles Olson.

[6] Alumni of the newer Eclectic include Le1f, Chris Wink, co-founder of Blue Man Group; Amanda Palmer, songwriter and singer of The Dresden Dolls; Ben Goldwasser, Will Berman and Andrew VanWyngarden of the neo-psychedelic band MGMT; Jem Cohen, an independent film maker who has worked with R.E.M.

and Fugazi, filmmaker Joss Whedon, Willie Garson, character actor in many movies and TV shows such as Sex and the City and White Collar, Himanshu Suri of the rap group Das Racist, Simon O'Connor of the band Stylophone and Amazing Baby, and Keenan Mitchell and Fareed Sajan of the band Bottle Up and Go.

Many buildings on Wesleyan University's campus are named after prominent Eclectic members, such as Crowell Concert Hall, Olin Memorial Library (Stephen Henry Olin, '65 and his father), Hall and Atwater Labs, the Zilkha Gallery (Ezra Khedouri Zilka, '46 and his wife), and the Van Vleck Observatory, (Astronomy Professor John Monroe Van Vleck).

On January 19, 2010, Eric Conger's play The Eclectic Society premiered at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia.

The play centers on a fraternity at an unnamed New England college in the early 1960s, as they collide with race, class, and gender issues, while a new world prepares to unfold under the JFK administration.