Traditions can be curious things. How something becomes a tradition, especially
at a place like Wofford, is even more curious. If something happens twice, it’s a tradition, and if it happens a third
time, it’s as sacred as if it had been happening since 1854, and woe be unto
the person who messes with it.
When we started having the Commencement exercises on the
front lawn of Main Building in 1999, seniors (and some younger alumni on the
college staff) wondered how the class was going to march through the front
gates. From the late 1960s until 1998,
Wofford commencement had taken place in Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium, next
door to the campus. Students and faculty
members lined up on campus and marched through the gates, out into the world,
and into the auditorium to receive their degrees. Freshmen were told that it was bad luck to walk
through the gate before graduation day, and some of us purposefully walked
around the gate for a while – until we realized how dumb we looked.
Nevertheless, some people on campus didn’t realize that the
symbolic march through the gates had become a sacred tradition. “It’s just the way we go to the auditorium,”
one person insisted. Others on campus
warned the Commencement Committee that the members of the Class of 1999 were
going to go walk through those gates no matter what anybody else said. And some students do still head that way, but
a new tradition was created that year. Students march through a double line of faculty members, who applaud,
high-five, or otherwise congratulate the new graduates. This May will be my tenth Wofford
commencement as the college archivist, and with ten years of students marching
through the applauding faculty, I’d say that’s a pretty firmly entrenched
tradition. Unless it rains.
Other traditions surrounding Commencement have been around a
lot longer than the faculty gauntlet or marching through the front gates. Along with their diploma, the college
presents each student with a Bible. But,
perhaps from the very first commencement, and certainly not long after, the
faculty began to sign the Bibles. In the
archives, we have about a dozen of these Commencement Bibles, as I like to call
them, that alumni or their children have given back to the college over the
years. We have examples from the 1870s,
where only 5 or 6 professors signed, to examples in the modern era with dozens,
if not over 100 signatures. The Bible
has always been a King James translation. At various points, some faculty members have called for a shift to a
contemporary translation. In the 1950s,
one religion professor suggested a move to the Revised Standard translation, as
he knew many of the scholars who had worked on it 
and thought it to be more
appropriate for scholarly use. Traditionalists on the faculty objected, some suggesting that each time
a new translation came out that people would want to adopt it. Others made the argument that the King James
translation represented something beyond simply being a religious text, that it
was a work of literature as much as anything. Many faculty and staff members still spend an hour or so each spring
signing Bibles – I did it last week and it took me about an hour and fifteen
minutes to sign 383 Bibles. I’m glad I
have a fairly short name.
While the Commencement ceremony itself has evolved somewhat
– most notably, by dropping the senior speeches – some parts of that ceremony
have remained constant. I can point to
the traditional Wofford Commencement hymn, “From All That Dwell below the
Skies,” which appears in the printed 1858 Commencement program, the oldest in
the collection. It might not be a
selection we’d choose today, but faculty members, trustees, and graduates have
been singing it for 154 years.
Commencement season is a lot shorter than it was in the 19th
or early 20th century. Perhaps we’ll save a lengthy discussion of the mixture of
commencement-related events in years past for another blog entry.