countryside, sleighriding, coasting, dancing, and had happy times with the village young people. His academic achievements included winning the Lewis Oratorical Prize, election to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduation honors.
Student discipline in the Dodge period seems to have raised no problems which the President could not handle with equanimity. There were, of course, the usual student pranks-burning fences and dilapidated plank walks, putting a wagon in the chapel, stealing apples from Dart’s orchard near the campus, and substituting an unabridged dictionary for the chapel Bible. The custom of publishing “mock schemes,”
the scurrilous false programs for the Junior Exhibition, ended in 1888. “Ringing the rust,”
however, continued unabated each spring as the sophomores celebrated their promotion from the freshman class. An altercation in 1872 between sophomores and Academes over whether the latter should carry canes, had become the traditional freshman-sophomore cane rush by the 1880’s. Freshmen also enjoyed the “Cremation of Livy,”
a burning of their textbooks when they completed the course based on the writings of that Latin historian. A new custom in imitation of a practice at other colleges seems to have begun in the early 1880’s when freshmen started throwing salt at the sophomores and then both sides staged a free-for-all. Combat between freshmen and sophomores as they left chapel was not uncommon.
The President had no use for military discipline as applicable to a college; rather he sought to inspire and counsel students toward good behavior. He set aside two afternoons each week for conferences at his home and students who came with problems found him approachable and understanding as they sat in his book-lined study. When, however, some unusual deviltry or delinquency came to his attention and the culprits had been summoned, he “put the law into the foreground and every student knew it would be executed to the last iota.”
On such occasions he would often present them with a pledge to be signed, expressing regret for an incident and promising not to repeat it. According to various accounts, one student, present with his classmates at such a session, asked with amazing impertinence what would happen if, on the grounds of conscience, he did not sign. Looking him squarely in the eye, Dr. Dodge slowly and in his most impressive way replied, “Then I shall expel you for having such a conscience.”
All the
