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Hip Hobart Then/Now/Forever
THEN
HIP HOBART200 FOREVER
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“There is little similarity between the Hobart of today and the rude frontier institution from which it has emerged. Dramatic changes have occurred in enrollment, plant and curriculum. Yet the College we know today is in a real sense an ever-growing memorial to its past: a tribute inscribed physically in ivy-covered buildings, spiritually in cherished ideals and traditions.”
This photo essay is informed by the work of Tricia McEldowney and Brandon Moblo of the Hobart and William Smith Archives; John Marks, Becky Chapin and Historic Geneva; Ken DeBolt, Alex Kerai ’19, Doug Lippincott, Mary Warner ’21, Andrew Wickenden ’09 and Catherine Williams. Photos by Kevin Colton and Adam Farid ’20, or sourced from the HWS Archives, except where noted.
These observations ring as true today as they likely did when the late Anthony Bridwell ’49, L.H.D. ’82 recorded them in Twenty Generations of Hobart, a brief history of the institution published in 1954. The following pages revisit some of those dramatic changes and cherished traditions, the points of progress and continuity, and the remarkable eras and enduring principles that have shaped Hobart College these past 200 years.
NOW
The Quad
THE HEART OF CAMPUS. Matriculations, graduations, reunions. Military training, protests, classes in the spring sunshine. Past and future presidents, Nobel winners, varsity football games. Flour Scraps, Folk Fest, slip-n-slides. Tears of frustration, tears of joy, handshakes, hugs, hallelujahs…the Quad has seen it all. (FYI, the Flour Scrap was an almost-food fight waged between early Hobart College freshmen and sophomores, who flung flour at one another on the Quad until an upperclassman referee declared a winner.)
▼ POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE.
Members of the Hobart and William Smith community gather around the “Commencement Elm” during the Hobart College Centennial celebrations in 1922. That northwest corner near Williams Hall is where today’s Commencement processionals enter the Quad.
—The Echo, 1872
▲ BLANK CANVAS. The iconic Hobart Quadrangle wouldn’t really take shape until Coxe Hall was completed in 1900. Photographed from the roof of Geneva Hall ca. 1870–80, this westward view of Pulteney Street — and the plot that would later become the Quad — shows the limited campus development during the College’s hardscrabble first 50 years. Blackwell House and McCormick House can be seen on the hill in the distance.
▶
NEITHER SNOW, NOR WIND…
Students brave the winter cold for Quad fun during Winter Fest, ca. 1980–81.
Roots & Anchors
▶ GENESIS. By the late 18th century, Geneva was a thriving community of 1,700 residents established just a mile from the original Seneca settlement Kanadesaga. The bustling village of Geneva was home to an academy, founded in 1796, that would one day become Hobart College. Thousands of graduates later, the city and the Colleges are connected in countless ways, through community-based coursework and Honors projects, service and internships, and in the lives of faculty, staff, students and alums who, in one way or another, consider it home.
▲ O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? Early campus social life was shaped by literary clubs like the Euglossian Society, founded by students in 1821. But those groups, which collected libraries and conducted debates, were “doomed by the rapid rise of the Greek letter fraternities,” as Warren Hunting Smith wrote in his history of the Colleges. Sigma Phi and Alpha Delta Phi began at Geneva in 1840, followed by Kappa Alpha (1844), Theta Delta Phi (1857) and Chi Phi (1860); by the early 1900s nearly all students were pledged. Novelist, historian and Theta Delta Chi brother Bellamy Partridge, 1900, noted in his reminiscence of his college years, Salad Days (1951): “The college fraternity is no oneway street. It gives a man brotherhood, friends, close companionship, and numerous intangibles, but in return it makes definite demands such as good behavior, respect, loyalty, and an appreciable amount of scholarship.” Today, roughly 20 percent of the student body participates in the eight fraternities and one sorority now active: Kappa Alpha, Chi Phi, Kappa Sigma, Delta Chi, Phi Sigma Kappa, Sigma Chi, Theta Delta Chi, Alpha Phi Alpha and Theta Phi Alpha.
◀ PRAYERS AND PRANKS. Hobart’s Episcopal origins structured student life for more than a century. Besides the College’s theological school, which operated from 1850 to 1920, the academic year was divided into three terms during those early years: Trinity, Epiphany and Easter. Mandatory chapel service began at 5:30 a.m. The hour would change, but attendance remained a graduation requirement until 1964, regardless of students’ spiritual affiliations. Eventually, The H Book notes, students could comply by attending services in Geneva or by passing two semesters of religion and philosophy. (Those who fell behind found themselves in the pews daily to graduate on time.) But it wasn’t all staid religious study; sophomores sold seats to unsuspecting new arrivals, and livestock was found inside the chapel, presumably let in by some Hobart jokesters. ▶ MEAL PLANNING. Synonymous with campus dining since the 1950s, the main student commissary was officially named the Great Hall of Saga in 1997, when the Alumni Association presented the Hobart Medal of Excellence to the Saga Corporation’s founders, William F. Scandling ’49, LL.D. ’67, W. Price Laughlin ’49, LL.D. ’67 and Harry W. “Hunk” Anderson ’49, LL.D. ’67. The World War II vets had started managing campus dining operations during their junior year, marking the beginning of Saga, which would revolutionize food service nationwide, and a momentous era in HWS history. As the company expanded, Scandling managed operations from Geneva for more than a decade, growing closer to HWS, leading to his long tenure as a Trustee, including 10 years as Board Chair; as the years passed, he became the Colleges’ largest benefactor, supporting campus building projects, the endowment and scholarships.
The Classroom & Beyond
▲ Participants in the NYC Behind the Scenes program, near Times Square, ca. 2019.
▲ VISIONARY EDUCATION. Teaching and learning at HWS have adapted to the needs of the era and the campus community. In many cases, the curriculum has augured the future of higher ed, with some of the nation’s earliest programs in women’s studies, gender and sexuality, Africana studies and Asian languages and cultures. The Colleges remain at the leading edge of global education (ranked consistently among the nation’s best), experiential learning (from “Two Cities” and the semester in D.C., to today’s guaranteed internship program), and research grounded in the local environment (see the work of the Finger Lakes Institute, or just about any science course). During that 200-year evolution, however, the purpose has remained constant. As former Dean Clarence Butler L.H.D. ’06 once said: “The role of the College is…not to implant in each of its students a vision, but to challenge, cultivate, stimulate what is already there, but perhaps not yet seen or felt.” ▶ GENIUS AND EXPERIENCE. Early communiques and course schedules hint at the liberal arts and sciences of the future HWS. The “English Course” curriculum, as described in an 1824 pamphlet, was intended to educate students in “the practical business of life, by which the Agriculturist, the Merchant, and the Mechanic may receive a practical knowledge of what genius and experience have discovered.” This well-rounded approach endures today, as the pursuit of knowledge takes students, alongside faculty mentors, across campus and beyond — to Geneva, neighboring communities and around the world.
◀ TEACHING STUDENTS “TO LIVE, NOT MERELY
TO MAKE A LIVING. That is the aim of the Hobart curriculum” (The Echo, ca. 1950). Until the early 1970s, the Western Civilization courses were the academic centerpiece of that aim. Western Civ was designed, as the 1947 yearbook put it, “to develop in the student an intelligent and urgent sense of his responsibility for the moral and civic welfare of the community…[as well as] to furnish him with a breadth of basic education which will enable him to choose his future career wisely and… follow his chosen career with success.”
▲ Students (and possibly professors) in the reading room of the old library in the Middle Building, which once stood between Geneva and Trinity halls, ca. 1875–80.
▲ A Western Civ lecture in Coxe Auditorium, ca. 1949–50.
◀ Associate Professor of Art and Architecture Jeffrey Blankenship and students discussing a class project based in downtown Geneva, ca. 2016.
Scientific Methods
▶ MEDICAL HISTORY. Dr. Peter Wilson, 1844, was the first Indigenous graduate of Geneva Medical College and likely the first Native American to earn a medical degree. A member of the Cayuga Nation, Wilson grew up and was educated at a Quaker school on the Buffalo Creek Reservation in Erie, N.Y. When he arrived at Geneva’s fledgling medical school in 1842, he was already a “skilled politician like his uncle Red Jacket,” writes Mary Hess, who taught at HWS from 2005 to 2011 and later at SUNY Oswego. “Wilson was a powerful, passionate orator and also a translator for the U.S. government; just as significant, and his calling card in the white world, was his astonishing scientific versatility: physician, dentist, surgeon, as well as a lawyer and diplomat.”
Wilson was a signatory to the Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838, which, as part of the U.S. government’s Indian removal policies, led to the migration of Seneca and Cayuga residents of Buffalo Creek to Oklahoma. Amid concerns over federal fraud, Wilson soon after began a 20-year lobbying effort to reverse and rectify the treaty, restore Native residents to the Cattaraugus and Allegheny reservations, and ensure they were compensated for the Buffalo and Tonawanda reservations.
As a physician and surgeon, Wilson practiced at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and on the battlefield during the Civil War. He eventually returned to the Cattaraugus reservation, where his last years “were likely difficult” due to a stroke, as Hess explains in the spring 2020 issue of The James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal. Despite Wilson’s renown as an orator, his death in 1872 “was briefly remarked upon in a Buffalo newspaper as the passing of an old chief.” Though he endured the “personal strain” of “negotiating two worlds” — including the “fraught endeavor” of the 1838 treaty — Hess concludes that Wilson’s life was one “of service, both to his patients and to his Cayuga and Seneca people.” ▼ FIELDNOTES. For well over a century, scientific inquiry has taken students and faculty from campus classrooms into the surrounding environment — and sometimes farther afield. Studying invasive species, Professor of Biology Meghan Brown (center) has traveled to Italy, Guatemala, Australia and New Zealand, and back to Seneca Lake, bringing new data, techniques and perspectives on troublesome non-native plants and animals. In 2016, she led a team of interdisciplinary researchers in Cuba to investigate why the island nation has fewer invasive plant species compared to its Caribbean neighbors. Brown returns in December 2022 with Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies May Farnsworth to guide alums as they explore Cuba’s ecology.
▶ THE EYE OF THE STORM. Documenting severe weather on the horizon near Anton, Colo., during a 2017 geoscience field course with Professors Neil Laird and Nick Metz. The core faculty of the atmospheric sciences program, Laird and Metz regularly lead students on the hunt for supercell thunderstorms and tornados — that is, when they’re not compiling an unprecedented lake-effect snow database. Or mentoring students through the Northeast Partnership for Atmospheric & Related Sciences, which attracts undergrads from across the country to research weather and climate phenomena with HWS students and faculty. Over the past 20 years, these developments have distinguished the Colleges as a hub for atmospheric research and education. (Notable: Albert J. Myer, 1847, who organized and commanded the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Civil War, is considered the father of the U.S. Weather Bureau, a precursor to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)
▲ The National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center at the Smithsonian Institution holds a daguerreotype depicting Wilson, ca. 1852–55.
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN ARCHIVES CENTER, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (NMAI.AC.405). PHOTO BY NMAI PHOTO SERVICES.
▲ OBSERVE AND REPORT.
The first astronomy observatory on campus, built between 1869 and 1870, was located roughly where Gulick Hall now stands. Today, students and faculty explore the cosmos at the Richard S. Perkin Observatory near Houghton House.
◀ WILLIAM SMITH TO THE
RESCUE. Dogged by financial challenges through the late 1800s and early 1900s, Hobart College may not have survived without William Smith’s gift to create a “coordinate” institution for women. Anna Botsford Comstock L.H.D. ’30 — an accomplished author, educator and the Colleges’ first woman Trustee — argued for the coordinate model over a coeducational one on the basis that a sudden, full-fledged merger with a new women’s college would disturb Hobart’s identity and “alienate the alumni body.”
◀ Students celebrate their graduation from the HEOP summer institute, ca. 2013. HWS became one of the first institutions in the nation to establish an academic access program when the Colleges signed on to New York State’s Higher Education Opportunity Program in 1969.
◀ TRAVEL IN EXCELLENT COMPANY. At critical moments in institutional and national history, students, faculty, alums and friends have charted new paths to strengthen the campus’ intellectual outlook and cultural fabric. The galvanizing voices of the HWS community broaden and deepen the Colleges’ character — from admissions practices to the curriculum — ensuring that students can explore, collaborate and find their fullest sense of purpose and belonging.
▲ French class, ca. 1942
▲ MODERNIZING. The first joint commencement coincided with Hobart’s Centennial in 1922, and the two Colleges became more closely linked over the following decades. Hastened along by the fiscal redundancy of teaching Hobart students and William Smith students separately, all classes were coed by 1938. On Commencement Day for many years, diplomas were issued by one College, then the other, but since 2016 seniors have voted to receive theirs in alphabetical order; each graduate chooses whether their diploma says Hobart College, William Smith College or Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
▶ Students and faculty gather on the deCordova Hall terrace outside the LGBTQ+ Resource Center, which opened in 2017 and seeks to affirm and support the identities of all LGBTQIA+ students, faculty and staff. The Resource Center develops and coordinates programming to promote education, social opportunities, wellness and support for all students at HWS, while fostering allies who engage the community at large with compassion and empathy.
In Service
▼ TRAINING GROUNDS. From World War I through Vietnam, military training was a typical Hobart experience. In the spring of 1917, with students and faculty joining the war effort, the Student Army Training Corps was instituted, attracting nearly 200 enlistees who performed military drills two hours a day, five days a week. During World War II, to offset dropping enrollment and produce officers, the first group of Navy V-12 trainees arrived on campus July 1, 1943. From 1951 to 1964, the Air Force ROTC program was mandatory for all incoming students; amid growing faculty and student discontent, the program was shuttered in September of 1970, but as former director of alumni relations Ret. Lt. Col. John Norvell ’66, P’99, P’02 notes on his blog, Tales from Hobart and William Smith, the ROTC, like the V-12 program, “provided a valuable source of revenue to the cash-strapped Colleges.”
▲ Navy V-12 trainees in formation on the Quad, ca. 1944–45.
▲ A LETTER HOME. Brig. General Edward Stuyvesant Bragg, 1844, for whom Ft. Bragg is named, was among at least 75 Hobart alums, students and non-graduates to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War. (At least five students and/or alums fought for the Confederacy.) Another Civil War veteran, Sgt. Major Edward H.C. Taylor, 1861, who served with the Union Army’s 4th Regiment Michigan Infantry, documented his wartime experience in a collection of correspondence held by the HWS Archives. Taylor’s letter, dated Dec. 13, 1862, reads: “My dear Mother: I have but a word to write. A battle is going on and our Div. is just going in. Our troops are in Fredericksburg [Va.] and are fighting in the streets. This is the third day of the battle. How the scales will turn can hardly be told as yet. We have lost heavily and have a horrid position to gain. We hope for the best. I never felt less like a fight than now. I expect the Div. will take it tomorrow. Love to all. Edward.”
▶ Anti-war demonstration, ca. 1968–69.
CALL OF DUTY. Approaching its Centennial, Hobart revised the curriculum to provide, as the 1920–21 catalog noted, a “thoroughly modern education in the arts and sciences, both as the needed introduction to professional or technical training and as an important preparation for civic life and duty.” Evident in the College’s earliest graduates, that dual sense of purpose extends through the Citizenship Course of the 1930s to today’s students and young alums, who carry forward the mantle of public duty — whether through elected office or military commissions, grassroots organizing or the annual Days of Service.
▼ As part of a 2019 Day of Service, students package meals in Bristol Field House in partnership with the international relief organization Rise Against Hunger. ◀ Students signing up for Big Brothers, Big Sisters, ca. 1996–97. ▲ HWS and the Geneva community at the April 1968 march in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
▲ STICKS IN THE MUD. The Hobart lacrosse team, ca. 1908. The intercollegiate sport began at Hobart 10 years prior, and early games were rough in every sense. The 1898 Echo recounts the inaugural competition: “The 12 Hobart men, indistinguishable from the Cornell team because of the mud, handled their sticks, with several exceptions, like shovels…All that afternoon, despite the driving rain and slippery mud, the first Hobart College lacrosse team ever to take the field held a powerful and more experienced Cornell team in check. Finally the game ended with Hobart the victor by a 2 to 1 score.”
Go ’Bart!
▲ BACK-TO-BACK-TO-BACK… Hobart laxers celebrating in the midst of the legendary run of 10 consecutive NCAA Division III Championships under the tutelage of Coach Dave Urick. The Statesmen still hold the record for the most D-III national lacrosse championships, with 13 titles between 1980 and 1993.
▲ UNDEFEATED. In 1954, the Statesmen were the only undefeated football team in the state, finishing the season 8–0. The Echo predicted they would “be looked upon in future years as one of the finest ever to display the Purple and Orange.” Nearly 70 years on, the ’54 squad is still the only Hobart football team to go unbeaten, though teams in the early ’70s and 2010s came close, reviving that high-scoring, steamrolling momentum.
▲ EXTRA INNINGS. Intercollegiate baseball was played at Hobart beginning in 1860, making it the College’s first athletics program. After a nearly 30-year hiatus, the sport returns to varsity status this fall. The 1992 team — honored as a Team of Distinction in 2013 — posted a 25–12–1 overall record and earned the program’s first NCAA Championship bid. ▲ VICTORY LAP. “Win or lose, the Hobart warriors and the Hobart rooters never said quits,” observed journalist Arch Merrill, 1920. The determination of the Statesmen and their fans has fueled success on the water, the ice, the court and the field. Since 1995, Hobart teams have won more than 40 conference championships, including two each for squash and tennis, three each for basketball and soccer, six for hockey, 11 for football and a staggering 15 consecutive Liberty League championships for rowing.
▲ SMOOTH SAILING. The Hobart Navy, a.k.a. the Boating Club or the Hobart Aquatic Association, was founded in the late 1800s — a precursor to the HWS sailing team, which in 2005 won the ICSA National Championship for both Coed Dinghy and Team Race.
Throughlines
▲ ONWARD AND UPWARD.
A human pyramid on the Quad, ca. 1968–69. At more than 20,000 and growing, today’s community of alums has seen the Colleges into maturity, each class in its own style, each leaving a foundation on which the next classes build. ▶ SCHOOL SPIRIT. Members of the Class of 2019 are welcomed into the Alumni Association at the Hobart Launch. Like the William Smith Toast and the Matriculation ceremony, the Launch is one of many traditions past and present that bind alums, both to one another and to the Colleges. Such bonds reflect what Honorary Trustee Herbert J. Stern ’58, P’03, LL.D. ’74 once called “a spirit that can be felt even though it cannot be touched, a spirit that transcends generations and will abide with us as long as we are faithful to it.”
▲ UNIQUELY HWS. With a nod to the Colleges’ marketing materials of the era, the 1973 yearbook emphasizes that individuality “is the essence of Hobart and William Smith thinking. The Colleges think of you not as a member of a class or group; they think of you as an individual with unique talents and creeds. Hobart and William Smith will demand much of you, for they uphold the highest standards of teaching and learning. They encourage the development and expression of strong personal convictions. These are the attitudes you may expect to find in Hobart and William Smith” — then, now and forever.
