Canisius College - Azuwur Yearbook (Buffalo, NY)

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12, 1919, of the Canisius Summer School. That same autumn an Extension School, operating on a regular basis, appeared, the nucleus of what would later become a flourishing Evening Session and a populous Graduate Division. Orig- inally conceived of as a series of service courses for the Catholic teaching religious of the area, the new Schools almost immediately outran this intention. From this point on, Canisius began to supply a surprisingly high percentage of the Niagara Frontier's teachers and adminis- trators on the public school plane, a proportion that kept pace with the College's steady output of lawyers, physicans, dentists, and ecclesias- tics. Along with most other American institu- tions of higher learning, Canisius proved a little tardier in acknowledging its responsibilities for professionalizing business. Nevertheless, 1926 witnessed the initiation of systematic business curricula. Until February 14, 1928, fraternities, tolera- ted but never fostered by the administration, had perforce assumed responsibility for the Col- lege's social life-an ingrained conservatism, where a mingling of the sexes was concerned, had been carried over intact from the German period. Now, through the first annual Junior Prom held in the Statler Ballroom, the College officially entered the Jazz Age in the city where, only two decades before, Scott Fitzger- ald had spent his boyhood. Despite this official relaxation of a long-standing tabu, social ma- chinery, over the nextdecade,remainedlargely in the hands of the fraternities which main- tained clubrooms in such divergent places as the Park Lane and certain Burchfieldian mansarded mansions on Linwood Avenue. By filling this social vacuum, whatever their other shortcom- ings, the Greek Letter societies marked an evo- lutionary stage in the College's progress from an invertebrate social organization. What doomed them in the end, at Canisius as elsewhere, was their being grounded on a principle destructive of true fraternity, that of caste and ethnic Apartheid. By the 1960's the social pendulum had swung full circle, and most of the social affairs were held in campus facilities. lf the College, in that decade had been reluctantly driven to abandon its old in loco parentfs stance, by way of compensation it had become the students' social arbiter. Taken together, the twenties and thirties may be said to have enclosed five symbolic events and one physical thrust into a pattern of future expansion. The events were these: two outdoor Passion Plays on a positively Max Rein- hardtian scale: a gathering momentum in the direction of that period's will-o-the-wisp, big- time football, a policy that eventually was to prove abortivep the College's acknowledgement of the canonization of its patron, St. Peter Canisius, whose earlier beatification had played its due part in the establishment of the Canisius ethos, 1930's public commemoration of the 'vm' l MQW' Canisius in 1870 fern lk. . Nl h 3j,.,.'Z 'n ' -f ff at Q ' sh ui' 1 4 f ,j s H, : ii ..- mtg ll , f I 1 f- ' 4' .U wg H 1 qi. fs' i - A 1 9 ' 3. 1 1 -'i- --. ' '47 Y ' im Canisius in 1872 ?'v fi ig 'uf va- iv' T Canisius in 1876 31 .Petrsirli R53

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J a 27 St. Peter Canisius memories stretch back to the quarter century from 1920 to the end of World War ll, remember it as the site of the College's vanished outdoor football stadium. The scholastic regimen was a Spartan one with each hour of the academic day parcelled out between eight a.m. and five p.m., and twen- ty-one hours of outside preparation demanded. lThe Harvard average, during these German years, was thirteen.l lt was an education weighted heavily on the classical side according to the historic Jesuit theory codified in the Ratio Studiorum, a set of methods that by 1920 had already begun to be honored as much in the breach as the observance, and one that eroded rapidly in the decades following. Greek and Latin poetry in the vernacular, plus the rhetoric of Demosthenes and Cicero also in the vernacular, the whole structure crowned by the great Periclean dramatists and leavened by his- tory with a post-Reformation bias, enjoyed the kind of primacy they had known in eighteenth century England. lf, judged by contemporary standards, the methods were pedantic, the stu- dents worked hard: and they read the right books. The Canisius Centennial History, a bit brash- ly perhaps, describes the German period as VaIhalla on Washington Street, situated in cultural time half way between the Nibelun- genlied and the Adventures of Hans and Fritz. It was much more than that: its musical culture, pun., M. Saint Ignatius sends Canisius to Germany especially, was extraordinarily rich. Under the Swiss composer-conductor, Professor Ludwig Bonvin, S.J., the music department maintained, in addition to a band, three full orchestras, one of these a symphony orchestra numbering, at its high point, fifty-two members. Bonvin's predecessor, W. Wallrath, S.J., had actually produced-it would seem in pirated form- Wagner's last opera, Parsifal, on April 27, 1887, five years after its Bayreuth premiere and better than sixteen years before its controversial Met- ropolitan Opera production. The text, however, described as a medieval melodrama, was by the Canisius polymath, Anthony Guggenberger, S.J. The German Province's final connection with its Buffalo offshoot was also Wagnerian, though the closing key was the key of Gotter- diinmerung, not Parsifal. After the formal dis- solution of their American province, which took place on September 9, 1907, the Fathers of the Buffalo Mission carried back to Germany the original records, in crabbed German script, of their long connection with the College, the High School, St. Michael's, and the Mission generally, leaving meticulous copies in their place. ln midsummer of 1944 the bomb at- tempt on Hitler's life, on the part of the Graf von Stauffenberg and his fellow officers, mis- carried. Because the Graf had been Jesuit edu- cated, the headquarters of the South German Province were put to the torch. In the ensuing holocaust, the original Canisius documents for 1870-1907 went roaring to the sky. As elsewhere on American college campuses, it was World War I which proved the catalyst of rapid and far-reaching change, beginning with the overnight conversion of the Main Street campus into a short-lived military establishment for nearly two hundred Canisius members of the Student Army Training Corps. Since the Armistice took place less than six weeks after October 1, 1918's induction day, it was the Canisius old boys who did the fighting in the War that became for American participants their myth-in-action. Letters, redolent of a curiously touching romanticism and now pre- served in the College archives, came from them in trenches, airdromes, base h0SDif3lS- Of The three hundred Canisians who saw service, twelve died, four of them in action. To cele- brate the demobilization of the Canisius S.A. T.C., on December 30, 1918, the alumni hon- ored the student soldiers at the first major social function involving the student body on what might be described as an adult level. lt was a portent of the many changes in collegiate life-style that would now mark the 1920's. One of the earliest manifestations of World War l's huge displacement of social gravity was an unprecedented expansion of college enroll- ment destined to be halted only briefly by the Depression and World War ll. An early reflex of the trend in question was the initiation, on July

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two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Ver- gil whose Aeneid had been, for centuries, the archetypal book of the Jesuit curriculum but would be so no longer, the College's participa- tion, on a major scale, in the 1932 centenary celebration of Buffalo's incorporation as a city. The material advance, heralding the massive building program of the next three decades, was the opening of the Horan-O'Donnell Science Building. Except for the unsuccessful football policy, each of the happenings in this parabola of event was a mernorializingof the past and of the traditional. ln sharp contrast to this same dis- carded rhythm, 1969-1970's stocktaking within the Canisius centennial year - and a backward glance was but a part of the Centenary's trans- actions - represented the only major considera- tion of the past's impact upon the present which the College had engaged in over the inter- vening three decades. Moreover, hindsight per- mits a tracing of a curve of tendency from sacred to secular which was to grow more strongly underlined in the years immediately preceding the beginning of the 1970's. When the 1920's began, Canisius was still a religious college in an extremely sectarian sense, its fac- ulty largely, its administration - except for the office of the Registrar - totally clerical. Over the next half century, gradually at first, then at a rapidly accelerating pace, the faculty became mainly lay with Catholic affiliation no longer a shibboleth for entrance even into the depart- ments of Theology and Philosophy. Laymen achieved key positions within the administra- tion and came to dominate the Board of Trus- tees. Insofar as Canisius remained a Catholic college, it did so in an ecumenical, Chardines- que sense - a contributor to The Canisius Pa- pers, a sheaf of centennial year essays, preferred to style it a Christian college: and even this circumscription was not a restrictive one. The De- partment of Religious Studies, for example, which superseded the older Department of Theology, and which had announced a lVlaster's program before the beginning of the Centenary year, the staff numbered, among others, a Pro- testant theologian, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York and the Rabbi of Temple Beth Zion. The two Passion spectacles, given during the summers of 1920 and 1923, marked both the midpoint and, to date, the most ambitious ef- fort within a continuing dramatic tradition. lThis is by no means the same as styling them the apex, a title which, even though comparison is always invidious, might well be reserved for the Shakespearean cycle produced by the Cani- sius Little Theater in the now demolished band- box stage located within old Canisius-on-Dela- van during the years just after the Second World War.l The Passion Plays represented over attempts to relocate the Oberammergau tradi- tion within the geographical context of Western , 1- s 3,3--if ax f ff 9, yi 1 ws 1. 'iff K ' fyfs f'f'l '. .si '9- fx ff , 1 X , . X . New York. If the times had been propitious, they might conceivably have made Buffalo what the two Stratfords, of Canada and Con- necticut, were to become three decades later. ln the upshot, the grand, but very costly, concep- tion on the part of President Michael J. Ahern S.J., 1919-1923, had to be cut back. The sump- tuous open-air theater built in the rear of Old Main, with an electrician from New York's Theater Guild to operate the light panel and Beerbohm-Tree's former stage manager as regis- seur, seating four thousand at its capacity and accommodating upward of a hundred thousand people during each of those two summers, was .5 ,Q 7 -sf' r ' f . ..v ,. ,--1 ,. :al ' ll. . af 5 ,X 1 i v demolished in the fall of 1923. The camels, imported for the Nativity Tableau, which had grazed on the Villa grass from lVlay to Septem- ber, became permanent residents of the Buffalo Zoo. The great adventure was but a memory. The attempt to field big-time football in- volved an even greater financial drain, though the fact was not officially recognized until Feb- ruary 8, 1950, when, after thirty-one years of intercollegiate competition, President Raymond W. Schouten, 1947-1952, announced the aboli- tion of the sport. There were contributory rea- sons in addition to the brute fact of the heavy monetary loss. The Buffalo Bills had come to