“Ringing the rust”
was another college custom Madison students observed each August to mark the close of the freshman year. Prolonged ringing of the chapel bell from midnight on, and the general disorders which ensued, announced to disturbed sleepers that the first year men had lost their “rust.”
There is some indication that sophomores hazed freshmen, but this diversion seems to have been quite innocuous. When the Junior Exhibition was postponed in January 1868, sophomores and juniors arranged an elaborate “burial”
service for the third-year men. Wearing white sheets and masks and bearing wooden sticks, each stick representing a junior, they paraded one winter evening, groaning and wailing, to the village park. Here they lighted a pyre and with appropriate eulogies, tossed the “corpses”
into the flames.
Common student pranks included driving livestock from adjacent pastures into the chapel or classrooms, burning outbuildings and students’ woodpiles, and mixing up half a dozen student coal heaps outside the dormitories. On one occasion, a few of the boys removed the pipes from the organ and after marching around the campus blowing the tubes, hid them in odd corners; the faculty is said to have identified the culprits from the brass stain on their mouths. Students often attended donation parties, social occasions to which church members brought gifts of vegetables and other staples for their pastor and his family, in surrounding villages, and made the driver of their hired band wagon go through toll gates at full speed to avoid paying the fee. As they returned late at night it was not uncommon for them to take down the rail fences and replace them diagonally across the road so that travelers who followed in the dark would find themselves in the fields. In .1866 the Students Association requested the faculty to suspend classes on a Wednesday in November so that they might observe an expected shower of meteors. On being refused, they voted “that we do all fall asleep in recitation on said Wednesday.”
The faculty, believing that they stood “in loco parentis,”
expended great energy in attempting to maintain discipline. Pranks were bad enough; worse were outright violations of the many specific regulations in the University Laws. Among them were these:
students, in hours of study, shall abstain from singing, loud talking, playing on a musical instrument, and, at all times, shall withhold themselves from noisy plays in the University buildings…
