Wacky and bizarre graduation traditions at colleges and universities

Some college graduation traditions resemble circus acts more than the activities of venerable college graduates.

What will you remember best about college graduation? A sea of black caps and gowns, droning speakers, long receptions, teary-eyed parents? At some schools, it’s more likely to be soaking wet art students, flying wristwatches or piles of green apples.

More than 1400 college commencement ceremonies — most nearly indistinguishable from one another — will take place in the next month. But some colleges have managed to inject wacky and bizarre traditions into the time-honored ritual.

At NYU, hundreds of students jump into a Washington Square Park fountain as their degrees are conferred. At Yale, the university gives every senior a clay pipe and a packet of tobacco. At Wellesley, the graduating class holds a big hooprolling race.

Many commencement traditions started in the days when foppish WASPs dominated the nation’s universities. Yale’s pipe and tobacco tradition, for instance, comes from the 1860s. As recorded by Lymon Boggs, class of 1869, the graduating men would form a ring, smoke their pipes, then do a “stag dance” and crush the pipes under their feet “as a sign that the pleasures of college life were ended.”

Although some students still smoke these “churchwarden’s pipes” during commencement weekend, the stag dance has been lost in the modern translation. Today’s Yalies are more likely to protest the school’s tobacco stockholdings than smoke pipes. “I couldn’t really partake because every time I try to inhale cigarettes or anything, I can’t do it,” said Eileen Yam a recent graduate.

Wellesley women, in another quaint tradition, have been holding a hooprolling race in their caps and gowns since the turn of the century. Whoever is first to cross the line with her big wooden hoop gets thrown into Lake Waban.

The race hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years, but its meaning has. When it began, the winner was supposed to be the first one to get married. After protests in the seventies, students decided that the winner would be the first woman to become a CEO. A few years later the interests of poets and biologists won out; now the winner will simply be the first success story of her class.

Williams College seniors since 1916 have been trying for a bit of communal luck. At the end of Class Day ceremonies, the president and vice president of the class drop a watch 80 feet from the top of the school’s chapel spire. If it breaks, time symbolically stops for a moment, and the class will have good luck.

Catherine Bagley, Class of 1999 President, says that she’ll try to ensure luck by buying a very cheap watch. “Last year they used a Mickey Mouse pocket watch,” she said. “I think the rule of thumb is that if it doesn’t break the first time, another senior class officer strategically stomps on it.”

Smith College has its own way of drawing a graduating class together. According to their tradition, each Smith woman receives a diploma — but not her own. After the graduation ceremony, the 600 seniors form a huge circle and begin passing the diplomas around the circle. As each owner finds her diploma, the circle grows smaller and smaller, until finally everyone is dispersed.

At Amherst College, seniors don’t try to emulate their venerable forbears. But the diplomas themselves are stuck in the past: they are actually still made of sheepskin. Director of Public Affairs Stacey Schmeidel said that “students can request a vegetarian option” (also known as paper) if they object to the meatier version.

Hamilton College, however, is veggie all the way: each graduating senior presents the college president with a green apple. The apples recognize Hamilton’s merger with nearby Kirkland College, whose symbol was a green apple, in 1978.

Not all graduates are nineteenth-century wannabes or full of superstition.

The NYU fountain-hoppers are just out for wet and wild celebration with no real symbolism. Commencement exercises are held in Washington Square Park, which has a large fountain as its centerpiece. Despite the fact that a New York City public fountain is probably not the cleanest place, hundreds of students, led by art students from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, leap in as their degrees are called.

“It’s not something that the university officially sanctions,” what with all the slippery surfaces, cautions Director of Public Affairs John Beckman. But even for nervous administrators it “presents a picture of real unalloyed joy,” he says. “And I’m not sure it’s possible to stop them.” He reports that no one has ever complained about the water quality.

And at least one school is trying to get out of the tradition business entirely.

Antioch College’s commencement is more of an anti-commencement.

No one, including faculty, wears caps and gowns, and creative dress is encouraged. There is no valedictorian, but any student who wants to can get up and make a speech. After they receive diplomas, seniors walk across a big dirt mound to symbolize their graduation; last year, someone rode her bicycle across. Rumor has it that a few students over the years shunned not only caps and gowns, but clothing altogether.

But Karen Kovach, Director of Public Relations, said that although she has seen huge clown shoes and funny headgear, as far as she knows “no one has disrobed or gone across the mound nude.”

That may be the one graduation ritual still waiting to be born.

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