life such as academic honors or the college and the professions. He and the faculty sought not only to encourage scholarly effort but to stem the mounting emphasis on extracurricular activities and their financial cost which many students could ill afford. The age-old struggle between the teacher and the taught had intensified at most American colleges and Colgate was no exception. More important for many students than the curriculum was “college life,”
made up of fraternities, athletics, public speaking contests and YMCA programs, publications, and musical organizations. As Henry Seidel Canby in his Alma Mater noted of Yale at the turn of the century, behind these activities was “college spirit-naive intellectually but emotionally vigorous, the still youthful soul of the last great age of American individualism.”
His observation holds for Colgate as well.
A revival of interest in the honor system, which had been in existence a decade before, stimulated in part by the examples of Princeton and other colleges, led to its re-adoption at Colgate in 1906. Despite serious reservations that fraternity men would not report on their brothers who were caught cribbing, the general opinion seemed to be that it operated successfully.
Interclass rivalry in the College, especially between the freshmen and sophomores, was still one of the most cherished college customs. It manifested itself particularly in the autumn in the rushes over “salting” the freshmen, the right to carry canes, and the posting of “proclamations”
on the campus and in the village, in which each class made scurrilous remarks about the other. The spring prank of “ringing the rust”
was retained as late as 1907 and “burning the algebras”
by the freshmen on completing a mathematics course seems to have superseded the earlier “Cremation of Livy.”
Recognition of promotion, or hoped-for promotion, came at the Moving-Up Day chapel service in the spring in which each class marched to the seats of the preceding class, with the seniors occupying those vacated by the freshmen, while singing “Where, oh where, are the pea-green freshmen….”
This custom started around 1900, as Professor Aude remembered it.
No tradition caused more excitement than the rivalry between the freshmen and sophomores over the possession of Mercury, the battered remains of a statue of the god which the Class of 1879 had presented as a class gift. Originally placed on a pedestal in front of Alumni Hall, its “bronze” surface began to peel after a few years and students then