Tag Archives: Student Discipline

p. 305 – The Cutten Period, 1922-1942

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freshman caps, attendance at cheer and song practice, and in general maintaining campus traditions, was taken over by the Sophomore Vigilance Committee in 1930. Paddling was a common punishment for violating the rules to be found in the Frosh Bible. By 1939 the senior honorary society, Konosioni, had assumed the duties of the sophomore committee.

Undergraduate support of the honor system had so declined by 1922 that on recommendation of the Students’ Association the faculty abolished it. Many undergraduates had come to believe that the crime was not so much cheating as being caught. Later college generations sought unsuccessfully to create sufficient public sentiment to revive the no-proctoring arrangements.

Interclass rivalry was a marked feature of student life in the ’20’s, especially between the Freshmen and sophomores, as had been true in the past. From time to time it was channeled into supervised events such as athletic competitions, the salt rush, and the pushball contest but the most violent encounters were likely to come when the classes held their banquets, usually off-campus, and before Moving Up Day in the spring. In 1923 they pelted each other in the center of the village with decayed eggs and the next year repeated the performance on two successive nights, on the second of which nearly the whole student body seems to have joined them. Irate businessmen with befouled storefronts and innocent bystanders who had been in “line of fire” demanded an end to such misbehavior and town and gown efforts averted it thereafter. The normal relations between students and merchants were very cordial and the latter were among the staunchest supporters of many campus activities, including athletics.

The undergraduate publications of the preceding years continued in the Cutten period. The Maroon editors by the middle ’20’s gave more space to non-athletic news items than formerly and in the spring of 1924 introduced “The Weeping Willow,” a column of comment and gossip which lasted until the fall of 1940 and at times gave considerable spice to the paper. The Salmagundi changed from a Junior to a Senior yearbook in 1934. Banter, the humor magazine, enjoyed the distinction of being suspended by the faculty in 1928 for publishing “objectionable” jokes. The literary magazine, The Willow Path, expired in 1931 for lack of support.

Dramatics made a strong bid for student attention. Russell F. Speirs, a Syracuse graduate in 1923, joined the faculty that year as a member

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p. 304 – The Cutten Period, 1922-1942

Posted on June 21, 2012 by | Comments Off on p. 304 – The Cutten Period, 1922-1942

Sponsored by the chapter, the Phi Society elected annually those sophomores whose first year’s work merited recognition for excellence. Nine members of the Class of 1931 became its initial members in December 1928.

Since the A.B., B.S., and B.Th. degrees were nearly equivalent the faculty in 1926 decided upon one degree, the A.B., with uniform requirements; the B.D. was retained for theological students who had taken two extra years. With the increasing emphasis on the undergraduate work the faculty came to recognize that the college was not prepared to maintain programs for the master’s degrees in arts and science, which had never attracted many students, and in 1926 gradually began to eliminate them; ten years later they had disappeared.

Enrollment in the College in the Cutten period showed a steady gain, save a slight decrease in the Depression years 1932-35, with the total rising from 664 in 1922 to a high of 1,092 in 1939 and declining to 1007 in 1942. Seminary enrollment stayed at about 60 until the removal to Rochester in 1928. It was in the fall of 1930, however, that the enrollment reached the 1,000 mark. Though the totals after 1930 frequently went beyond the 1,000 limit set by the Trustees in 1924 the excess was slight and attrition through the academic year was sufficient to prevent serious overcrowding of facilities.

As was to be expected, student life reflected the spirit and behavior on eastern campuses in the carefree “roaring twenties” and Depression ’30’s. Colgate was noted for its athletic enthusiasm which often overshadowed its genuine non-athletic accomplishment. Mobility became increasingly easier with the greater number of student automobiles. In 1923 it became necessary to restrict owning and operating motor vehicles to juniors and seniors and to require that vehicles be registered at the Registrar’s Office. By 1928 parking had become so much of a problem that the Trustees adopted a set of rules to deal with it. Student dress of the 20’s featured coonskin coats for the more affluent, and sheepskin-lined khaki coats with high collars for their fellows. Red rubber overshoes and maroon sweaters were worn in winter, and distinctive class blazers in the fall and spring. The Class of 1926 seems to have been the first to adopt the blazer which remained in vogue until 1931. Perhaps white bucks were the hallmark of the less flamboyant ’30’s.

Student discipline, long the province of the Senior Governing Board  which concerned itself about such matters as enforcing the wearing of

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p. 277 – The Bryan Period, 1908-1922

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tradition, one of its most violent aspects, lasted until 1919 when the faculty abolished the institution because of increasing intensity of the conflict, the dangers involved, and the money and time squandered. After a freshman accidentally drowned in the “proc” rush in 1919 this contest was replaced the next year by a frosh-soph tug-of-war. Under-classmen faithfully observed the pre-Moving-Up Day customs such as
burying the hatchet in Taylor Lake and smoking the peace pipe. On occasion their exuberance got out of bounds as when some of them in 1915 sheared the “flowing locks” of a villager and were hailed into court, or in 1921 when they burned the Whitnall Field grandstand and in 1922 the horse sheds behind St. Mary’s Church. The behavior of a minority reflected to a degree a relaxed attitude to law and order found throughout the country following World War 1.

Campus leaders wrestled with disciplinary and other problems in the Student Association and the senior honorary societies. The latter, in imitation of those established in American colleges as early as the 1890’s, were composed of those students who were outstanding primarily for extracurricular achievements and service to the University. The first, Skull and Scroll, was organized in 1908 for “the guardianship and promotion of the fair name of the college” with Professors Hoerrner and Whitnall as honorary members. The second, a rival, was Gorgon’s Head, founded in 1912 “to encourage the growth of manly character, scholarship, and College spirit”; Professors Alton, Allen, and Brigham were its sponsors. Distinguished off-campus recognition came to a Colgate undergraduate when Whitney H. Shepardson, ’10, son of the Academy Principal, and member of Skull and Scroll, was named the University’s first Rhodes Scholar in 1909.

To the five existing Greek letter fraternities six were added to meet the needs for social life, dormitory accommodations, and eating facilities brought about by the increased size of the student body. The Iota Chapter of Theta Chi was chartered in 1912 and Alpha Zeta Zeta of Lambda Chi Alpha in 1916. In 1917 three received charters-New York Delta Gamma of Alpha Tau Omega, founded as the Madison Club in 1902; Delta Upsilon of Sigma Nu, founded as Theta Delta Sigma in 1914; and Delta of Kappa Delta Rho. The last of the six, New York Zeta of Phi Delta Theta, originated in 1907 as the “Owl Club” which became Sigma Alpha in 1908 and was chartered in 1918. There had been only one house on the campus constructed for a fraternity,

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p. 205 – Student Life, 1869-1890

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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

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p. 166 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

Posted on May 3, 2012 by | Comments Off on p. 166 – Recovery and expansion, 1850-1869

“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…

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Hamilton Student, the first student newspaper (p. 136)

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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-

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Boarding Hall erected (p. 84)

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The Campus, a theorem print, c.1840, A1000-25, Theorem Print B, p84

Boarding Hall was erected on the site of the present Huntington Gymnasium, about a quarter of a mile down the Hill. All students ate there except those excused by the faculty. Some, no doubt, objected to the long walk, especially in winter, The chief cause of dissatisfaction, particularly in, the early 1840’s, seems to have been the food. Yet, in only one case of the many complaints reaching the faculty and Executive Committee is poor food specifically mentioned. In this instance, the authorities suspended a student for taking from the table a dish of meat which he considered offensive, instead of speaking to the Steward about it and then haranguing his fellow diners on, the subject when the Steward objected to his behavior. Students repeatedly asked permission, however, to board with private families, alleging as reasons, ill health or parental desire. Dr. Kendrick, who maintained that they had plenty of good food, thought that the real reasons were more often “Female society, and tea parties, and other village influences.” Usually these requests were refused. To have done otherwise would have meant keeping the Boarding Hall open. only for needy students.

Like most other American colleges of the period, the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution, had an elaborate set of Laws, which were adopted in 1840 to regulate student behavior in minute

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p. 50 – Teaching and learning, 1820-1833

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A.M. 5-5:30 chapel
5:30-6 private devotions
6-6:30 reading and studying
6:30-7 breakfast
7-8 exercise by manual labor
8-8:30 private devotions
8:30-12 studies and recitations
12-12:30 dinner

P.M. 12:30-1:30 exercise by manual labor
1:30-5 studies and recitations
5-5:30 chapel
5:30-6 supper
6-6:30 private devotions
6:30-9 meetings, reading, and writing
9-9:30 devotions in room
9:30-4:30 sleep*

Relations between students and faculty were open and cordial. Whenever there was misunderstanding or disagreement among them, Kendrick was always the one to present the faculty viewpoint. Occa­sionally he failed to give the main reason which dictated faculty action, in which case, though the students grumbled, his prestige and moral appeal always disarmed them. The faculty never seems to have acted as policemen and student indiscretions were few. That the Executive Committee could be aware there might be some, appears in their statement in 1823 that “persevering attempts have been made to . . . suppress whatever might appear like youthful imprudences,” though they fail to reveal just what the “attempts” were. They later “Resolved that no Student belonging to the Seminary be permitted to smoke in the Seminary, without special license for that purpose, and that those who chew Tobacco shall furnish themselves with spit boxes in the Chapel and in their study rooms to avoid polluting the house.”

Kendrick and the other officers experienced considerable irritation because of the “youthful imprudences” of a member of the Class of 1826, and of the Class of 1827. They dismissed the first because he had “conducted himself unworthy [sic] of a beneficiary … by neglecting his studies, manifesting a spirit of insubordination, frequently propos-

*F. B. Spear, In Memoriam,  Philetus Bennett Spear, D.D.  (Marquette, 1901), 33-34. Morning Chapel varied from six in winter to five in summer, probably so that students might take advantage of daylight.

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