and Spear. In a joint session, the University and Education Society Trustees agreed on replacements and thus enabled Henry Tower, the new President of the University Board, to give out their names at the close of the week’s exercises when he announced that instruction would be resumed as usual in the fall.
During the period 1847 to 1850, teaching had often become secondary to the question of location. One or more of the faculty was usually absent from classes on removal business, especially Eaton and Raymond. As was to be expected, the students took sides on the exciting issue. Influenced by the professors who favored Rochester, several were eager for relocation. When the Gridley injunction in the spring of 1850 obviated that possibility they eagerly awaited the announcement of the opening of the new institution so that they might enroll and in due time 21 did. Others, uneasy because of the strained atmosphere on the campus and the University’s uncertain future, withdrew, 24 going to Union College. Registration shrank from 216 in 1847 to 140 in 1850. The losses were particularly severe in the collegiate department where the decline was from 140 to 93. Students had been warned on all sides that the institution would soon be dead. Yet not all could believe this prediction. A minority swayed by William T. Biddle, Class of 1849, then in the theological department, and a few like-minded companions, agreed that if classes met in October they would return.
Numerous cases of student discipline reflect the unrest which resulted from the Removal Controversy. The most serious, that in connection with Professor Maginnis’s delivery of Dr. Kendrick’s funeral sermon in January, 1849, has already been mentioned. Disturbances in the dormitories were frequent. George B. Eaton, son of Professor Eaton, no doubt greatly embarrassed his father by instigating several, one involving the exploding of gunpowder under the bed of a fellow student. In many cases the culprits were required to make public confession in chapel as part of their punishment.
The most recalcitrant, perhaps, was George G. Ritchie, Class of 1849, who won distinction for starting the first student publication. As a freshman he discussed with some of the faculty his plan for issuing a paper and, notwithstanding their apparently mild objections, got out the first number on November 2, 1846. He called it the Hamilton Student with the subtitle, “A Semi-Monthly Mirror of Religion, Litera-
