In the Spotlight

Exhibit shows how student rebellion helped create the modern university

A new exhibit at Northwestern University Library highlights a strange irony in the evolution of universities as we know them today: many attributes of college culture that are now deeply institutionalized developed not only without faculty and administration approval—but in direct opposition to their authority.

“Athletics is a great example,” says Library archivist Kevin Leonard, curator of the new exhibit Student Life and Culture: Authority, Opposition, and the Creation of New Traditions, free and open to the public during regular hours, on the first floor of the Main Library, 1970 Campus Drive, from October 3-December 7, 2006. “Sports are so integral to universities’ identities these days that you’ll find many more people who can tell you the name of Notre Dame’s football coach than could tell you the name of its president.”

But, as Leonard’s exhibit demonstrates, athletics were brought to Northwestern by a group of students who were clearly thumbing their noses at the men who were supposed to be educating them. “[A]ll our professors…appear constantly to be physically indisposed,” they informed the Board of Trustees in an 1875 document. Noting faculty members’ “long, leathery faces, sunken, sallow cheeks, loose, flabby muscle,” and their lack of “scruples about long lessons in mechanics or logic, possibly caused by imperfect digestion,” the students concluded that “Such men need a gymnasium.” When the Trustees declined to provide one, the students formed their own gymnasium commission, sold shares in the enterprise for $10 each, and built the gym themselves.

“Competitive sports like football and baseball developed totally outside the purview of the faculty and administration,” Leonard explains. “It was only because of the time and expense involved, and the questions of fairness that came up, and the number of injuries, that the administration started to get involved, and eventually took control. That was true at universities everywhere. And now the public face of most universities is an athletic one.”

As the exhibit also demonstrates, long before the rebellions of the 1960s led to curriculum reform in universities everywhere, radical and nonconformist students were critiquing—and ultimately reshaping—the studies their elders considered appropriate. Today, for example, Northwestern is world-renowned for its academic performance studies programs, but these too were only formally institutionalized and adopted into the curriculum by faculty and staff after students had been staging their own extracurricular productions for decades.

The earliest dramatic tradition at Northwestern—documented in the exhibit—seems to have evolved from a ritual called “Trig,” dating back to at least 1877, in which students expressing their hatred for trigonometry ceremonially “cremated” (i.e. burned) their trigonometry textbooks at the conclusion of the course. As the tradition became entrenched over the years, the annual mock funeral ceremony became more elaborate and theatrical—an early forerunner of today’s Waa Muu show—while the actual burning of the books went by the wayside.

A 1902 flyer from the exhibit pictures a jaunty-looking Northwestern student in a turtleneck letter sweater, smoking a pipe. Says the caption: “Here we have the young College Man/Who’s been to Trig since it began/His head’s in a whirl/For he’ll have his best girl/You had better come too, if you can.”

Regular library hours are 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, and 8:30 a.m. to noon Saturdays.

About the Northwestern University Archives:
The University Archives houses records, publications, photographs, and other materials pertaining to every aspect of Northwestern’s history. Included in the collection are the papers of faculty, biographic information on Northwestern alumni, a complete run of Daily Northwestern issues, a complete set of catalogs and bulletins from each of the schools, and 250,000 photographs. A staff of knowledgeable archivists is available to help with Northwestern-related questions or research needs. For more information, call 847/491-3354, email archives @northwestern.edu, or visit www.library.northwestern.edu/archives/ .