It seems folks are always fretting about the juvenile hijinks taking place on college campuses. However, going through some BU archives, we find an opinion expressed in 1931 that the immaturity was more or less over. Has this observation been borne out? You be the judge.
From an editorial titled “Growing Pains”, published in a 1931 issue of The Boston University Beacon, the campus literary/commentary magazine first published in1876.:
Signs that the college student is growing up have been a source of satisfaction, in recent years, to educators who have the dignity of the human race at heart. In the more sophisticated colleges hazing has disappeared. Fraternity initiations have become milder and in some cases have been left off entirely as the world rolls on toward bigger and better nobility. Only this year at Boston University, Sophomores have stopped teasing the Freshmen publicly, and Open House night has gone the way of all collegiate indecorum. Even the Junior Prom — almost –. Can it be that the era of jazz is passing; that students are finding more fun in less riotous ways; that even perhaps ye good old stars are again lending themselves for hitching-posts?
A distinction arises here between what is good and what is not so good in this tendency towards quietness. Very few are going to regret those lesser and greater forms of silliness known as “informal initiations.” A large number, on the other hand, who have enjoyed running around from house to house — on such a night as Open House Night, — laughing, singing, remeeting a whole University’s acquaintances in a few hours, will mourn the abolishment of such an institution. But it is understood by all concerned that Boston University is not yet a campus college and Boston citizens still have their privileges — so patience is called in.
But to mourn –? surely this is not the adult spirit! No, we are afraid it is not. We are not even sure that we want it.
So, all those like us, who are having a hard time growing up, who like the Pickwickian flavor in their fun, who could have had a great old time at a Mr. Wardle’s Christmas Party, and who like to shout around the place once in a while just because they feel good — all those, we invite to join with us in a hurray for having had Junior Week, with Prom, “Pirates,” and Nickerson Field with its spring woods, to ease our growing pains in.
[Vol. LV, No. 3]
Whoever remembers when Nickerson field had woods on it? Is BU even now something that could be called a “campus college”? Chew on these and other questions, and we’ll see you next time for #throwbackthursday.
