Seventy Years Of The Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Page 101

discontinued. One member of the class of 1880 was arraigned before the faculty on five counts - "carousals, spending large portions of his nights smoking, drinking and playing cards with two Irish girls on Lafayette St., falling asleep in practice hours, low grades." He was dismissed.

General arrangements for the annual Commencement exercises were in the hands of the trustees, but because on those occasions the faculty, quite as much as its products, was on display there was much anxiety that everything should go well. Each senior was carefully coached on the presentation of his thesis before the examining committee, and warnings were issued concerning deportment of students during the exercises. That these counsels were not taken seriously was a source of irritation to the faculty. In 1873 a burlesque program of thesis subjects was distributed, which contained such titles as "Review of the double-acting squirt-gun, designed to extinguish lucifer matches."

Some of the class functions of Commencement week also suffered faculty disfavor. The class of '74 was informed that its plans for class day were disapproved by the faculty, and some other classes were rebellious over the choice of class day officers. A rule was then adopted by the faculty that they and the senior class would each prepare a list of candidates for valedictorian, and any person whose name appeared on both lists might be chosen by the class. The class of '77, permitted to select the valedictorian by this method, chose their popular president, a good speaker but not held in high regard by the faculty. To the surprise of the class, the faculty accepted him, but added the crushing comment that they regarded the class action an evidence of the failure of this system of choosing a valedictorian.

The appearance of the Antenna of 1875, the first student publication, filled the faculty's cup to overflowing. It was a bright booklet of some fifty pages, and measured by later standards, an innocuous one. The editors, all members of the '76 and '77 classes, made reasonable comments on the need for

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Last Modified: Fri Jul 30 11:15:25 EDT 1999