Written by Thomas Hendrickson
Years ago, nearly a century now, the University of Illinois campus was rife with traditions that undergraduate classes were supposed to observe. Many of these traditions were written down for incoming freshmen in student handbooks published by the YMCA. These were traditions that involved the Senior Bench, the Gettysburg Tablet, a no-smoking custom, and many more sensible observances. Yet these traditions fell by the wayside due to their inherent practicality.
The Senior Bench tradition dictated that the Senior Bench donated by the Class of 1900 could only be used by the senior class, and this was written in the student handbooks until the late 1920s. However, the tradition did not last long because students began to simply ignore the rule. Freshmen even got into the habit of decorating the bench with their class numerals as soon as the year started.[1]
Another tradition involved the Gettysburg tablet in Lincoln Hall. It was not required but students were recommended to avoid walking over the Gettysburg Address tablet. This was done in honor of President Lincoln and to simply avoid wearing out the tablet itself. The tablet tradition was also written down for incoming students to read, but (also like the Senior Bench) the students completely ignored it and continued to walk over the tablet.[2] In a similar vein the University of Illinois had practiced a no-smoking custom since the earliest days of the campus, but nevertheless by the 1930s the campus was rampant with smoking. Evidently it was “notorious that the walks from Wright street up to many campus buildings were covered with smokers between classes.” [3]
Now, why did traditions such as these fail? After all, they seem to be entirely practical. Well, the dissolution of such customs on the Illinois campus may have everything to do with their practicality. The students began to not even bother passing traditions along to the incoming students because they were simply boring. Students would much rather pass on traditions that were entirely impractical because they were unique and different. A tradition that was dictated was simply a rule. This topic of failing traditions was actually discussed quite a bit during the early 1930s after many of them had already fizzled out. Student journalists write that traditions that were written in the “I” books were doomed because they were “not true traditions, for the very word tradition…implies that it is something that is handed down from one class to the next.” [4] And those students might have been onto something, but we will never truly know the exact reason why certain practical customs failed to stick around. We can only wonder and speculate.
[1] Daily Illini, May 4, 1933, page 4.
[2] Student Handbook 1925-26, page 64.
