University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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Blue and The Evolution of Barbarians 1905 These three ages, if you please, represent a growth from primal savagery to one of law an d order, in so far as a college community can be safely called law-abiding and orderly. Your first age shows the young barbarian at play. His hand is against every man, and every man ' s hand against him. As a class, the students in a small college are academic Ishmaelites, arrayed against most everything. The first foes are the unfortunate people whose lot places them in the seat of the university ; and there follows naturally the long and picturesque feud between town and gown, traditional but disquieting. This hostility does not always direct itself to the vulgar herd outside the academic pale. The belligerent undergraduate quickly sees in the personnel of his faculty unexcelled opportunities for pursuing his unpacific bent. The professor, being the time-honored (and battle-scarred) enemy of his students, is regarded as the latter ' s legitimate prey. Ergo, more trouble. And a man ' s foes shall be those of his own household. Internal strife in the University ' s loosely-knit family is further increased by a horrid desire to exterminate the youngest. The undergraduate comes in due process of time to regard the timorous freshman more greedily than he does an instructor. Both faculty and freshmen in common have the happy characteristic of being rather off their guard, and hence offer easy marks to the ever-alert upper class men. Perhaps it is because the freshman is considered something of an interloper that he gets a baptism of fire before being assimiliated into the big university family. Here we get the line of demarcation for the first age. Freshman persecution naturally falls to the lot of the sophomore, partly because the second-year man still retains vivid impressions of his own initiation, and partly because the junior and senior are now commencing to receive vague forebodings of another life more sober than the present. a career where hazing perchance plays no part. In thus delegating to the sophomore the entertainment and purification of all intrants, the undergraduates, unconsciously perhaps, inaugurate an age of class spirit. After a hearty exchange of courtesies, the two lower classes view each other askance, and never fail to remember first impressions. These early-formed ideas persist. They last through the college days easily. ' Even the lapse of years fails to eradicate this animosity, and darkness and light are not harder to reconcile than the odd and even number classes. Class spirit brings with it a whole train of customs and traditions. In fact there is nothing that will give a tradition more tenacity than a vigorous class spirit. But class spirit has its day, and it, too, must die out before the new yes, modern- college spirit, which marks our third age. Here, for the first time, the jarring factional and class strife dies out, and, in its place there comes a unification of sentiment and activity in the university family. Instead of the college against itself or its members, there comes the broader spirit of co-operation and fraternity. No one can doubt that this is social elevation. Neither can there be any doubt as to the annihilation of the older forms of college life that it causes ; for the true college spirit of today is not compatible with the crude class spirit of yesterday or the ruder barbarism of the day before. Two factors make college spirit possible and the previous ideals at the same time impossible. The rise of a rival institution and the development of intercollegiate contests call for a real federation of all previously loose factors in the university and a greater responsibility for common interests. The growth of the university ' s numbers, too, is reason enough for abandoning the more strenuous forms of internal partizanship, be they of class, society or caste. Hence, to those of the modern age the survivors of the past say, Yours is a new era. Its ideals are for you to carve. Like pioneers you enter a new country and you can take with you but little from the old. Let that little be of the best. Popular but not Public Each of these three ages has a whole world of history in itself. Some of the stories are lost, sunk into oblivion and never to be revived for lack of a sympathetic tongue to recite the narratives. Some have been handed down from sire to son. A few in our latter day have crept into print. Nearly any old graduate, once his heart waxes warm over the stirring deeds of the dear old days, will let his memory revert to the age in which he lived as a care-free undergraduate. His talk about that time is calculated to surprise one. It may deal with books and recitations. But it is more likely to deal with the romantic history of some undergraduate enterprise, and the less relationship it has to books and recitations the stronger is its hold on his memory. 18 First Labor Day

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BEN WEED ' S AMPHITHEATER The Light of Other Days A Review of Student Traditions and Customs at the University of California By STUART G. MASTERS THIS is largely the history of things that get suppressed. Many important matters get duly recorded. officers and committees, captains and their teams ; they all go down on the roll of fame as they should. But I sometimes think that the really enduring events slip from the pen of the chronicler and are lost to future generations. Traditions, for instance, rarely get into print. What our college ancestors believed, and fought and bled for are matters about which we know but little and yet would fain be taught. Heretofore the medium for trans- mitting these heroic tales has been by word of mouth, and. for aught you or I can do. there is little reason to believe that any other method will have the same meed of popularity. The Authentic narrative of a college prank is a folk-tale and must be passed along according to legendary precedent. It has fallen to the lot of the writer to present here in brief form a review of this essential undergraduate life at the University of California as it has existed and still exists. Such a narrative must call for infinite patience from the reader, for. as has just been intimated, the written story is a radical departure from the traditional method of procedure. Only the charm of the subject-matter saves the situation. Roughly speaking, there have been at Berkeley, as in every well-regulated college communitv, three ages of undergraduate development. Yet. while we arbitrarily divide the history of student spirit into these three epochs, we cannot fail to appreciate the fact that the ages telescope into each other and that even now these various phases of undergraduate life occasionally appear simultaneously. a depressing and yet. at the same time, a cheering state of things. 17 Old Class IIivs

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If the history of the older University is ever written it will be as wild and rugged as the chronicle of the Angle and S axon raids upon the British coast. Those were the pioneer days, when history and tradition were made by a handful of men. The college halls were in a country village far removed from city and civilization, and things could be done and said then that the modern and fast-growing town does not tolerate. A pointed case is the very recent train hold-up, which received such general condemnation throughout the State. After an enthusiastic rally the whole under- graduate body adjourned to the station and took a ride on the local train to North Berkeley and back. The howling mob owned the cars. The lights were put out, and daring spirits turned on the air-brakes. Such a custom had been in vogue for years and it hardly ever caused a whisper. But this time town and railroad officials awoke to a realization of the fact that times had changed, and that deeds, permissible in a fresh- water college and a country town, were out of the question under the present conditions. Arrests were made and the whole college was made to realize thoroughly the enormity of the offense. The straightforward manner in which the associated students went to work to remedy the damage speaks well for their appreciation of the responsibilities that modern college spirit places upon the student of today. In the old days private individuals, societies and even corporations having interests in the college town received their share of attention from the students in submission and a half-thankful, half-fearful spirit : thankful that the student depredations were no worse, and fearful lest a second attack might atone for any omissions of the first time. Those were days of real terrorism. They were tolerated by the sufferers as some sort of penance for being allowed to reside in the classic atmosphere of an academic community. Secretly I am inclined to the belief that, except when the pranks directly affected them personally, the people of the old town rather enjoyed the student escapades. However, I may be wrong on that point. The Southern Pacific Company no doubt still has on its records the story of the wild trick played by a few students one night years ago. These worthies started a pair of flat-cars down the long grade from North Berkeley about three o ' clock in the morning. The momentum they got took them to B Street, with luckily no lives lost. The old dummy line, which has since been replaced by the Telegraph Avenue electric line, was another source of amusement. It was quite the proper thing to derail the antiquated engine and cars and interrupt traffic indefinitely. Once one of the cars waiting at the college entrance was given a start and traveled into Oakland alone, also with no casualties, althouh minor considerations like that were not taken into account at the inception of the prank. Once the turn-table was found lifted out bodily and placed in the bed of Strawberry Creek. What undergraduate perspiration was spent in that feat has never been revealed. Suffice it to say that it took six double teams to hoist the huge table out of the creek and put it into place again. Minding One ' s Own Business Concerning the mischief worked on the long-suffering residents of Berkeley no single chronicle could hold more than a small fraction of the tales. They were of all descriptions, from the harmless to the vicious. It was a favorite custom to visit town meetings en masse and take action officially on current questions. Once the students were urged repeatedly to attend a temperance society then holding sessions in the town. Finally the invitation was accepted and a strong delegation of students filled the hall. The question of temperance was to be debated, and the undergraduates plunged heartily into the business of the evening. Sides were taken, and, most regrettable to relate, the pro-temperance side lost. Then the students, far out-numbering the regular members of the society, voted to celebrate appropriately the defeat of the temperance cause and adjourned for a campus beer-bust. This action, heralded as an official move on the part of the temperance organization, caused such general mirth that the society was forced to disband. The beer-bust idea persists even to the present day. On another occasion a political meeting under the auspices of the Workingman ' s Party was held in the town, and a body of student orators repaired to the scene and took a leading part in the deliberations of the gathering. By a pre-arranged agreement. the undergraduates were all introduced as professors and spoke in this guise. At the conclusion of the meeting the party roll was further dignified by the names of most of the prominent men in the faculty, and the next day, when the news of the meeting was spread throughout the State, great was the wrath of the academic council. The Workingman ' s Party, so history tells us, made capital out of the incident and really felt obliged to the festive students. 19 Labor Day, 1904 ue end