By Yeji ShimContributing Writer
Today’s students might call Northwestern a lot of things, but Elmer Sims, a long-ago NU graduate, reminds the university community of its roots: “This is a ‘Methodist hole,’ as some of the boys call it.”
He belonged to the Class of 1875, but even as the Class of 2010 started this year at NU, his words live on through handwritten letters to home.
Sims’ letters are part of an exhibit on the main floor of the Northwestern University Library called “Student Life and Culture: Authority, Opposition and the Creation of New Traditions.”
Photographs, scrapbooks and even an old football helmet help chronicle NU’s history of student rebellion and how such social action brought about change. The exhibit is free and open to the public now until Dec. 7.
“The exhibit is about the evolution and creation of student traditions and organizations in Northwestern’s first several decades,” said Kevin Leonard, associate archivist at the University Library and the exhibit curator. “Many aspects of college life are owed to students.”
During NU’s early years, students pushed for an athletic program, even building their own gym when Northwestern declined to provide them with one.
“The students identified their own needs and interests,” Leonard said. “The athletic tradition was first established by students outside faculty. They raised money, put up the structure and equipped it.”
Theater, now a major part of the Northwestern curriculum, dates back to around 1877 and to the ritual burning of trigonometry textbooks at the end of classes. Students performed a mock funeral for the mathematical subject, and the ritual eventually grew.
The legacy of this dramatic ceremony is the Waa-Mu Show, which still performs today.
The exhibit is a fascinating comparison to modern college life, Medill sophomore Meredith Laitos said.
“It’s fun to see what Northwestern used to look like,” she said.
Laitos, a member of Alpha Phi, was particularly interested in the evolution of NU’s Greek scene.
“I think in general when I talk to my grandparents, all Greek, I envision properness, like sitting down and eating together,” she said. “And now, it’s so much more a place where we live with friends, a social outlet.”
The exhibit also helps solidify Wildcat pride, said Weinberg freshman Sandy Shang.
“All these things should be preserved and left for people in the future, especially Northwestern students and community,” Shang said. “We should work harder to make Northwestern more famous so (NU) students in the future can feel proud of us, the students of the past.”
Despite the more obvious differences, Leonard emphasized that NU students then and now are all remarkably similar.
“If you look past epidermal differences, sit down with letters or a diary from the 19th century, you see a lot of yourself,” he said.
“A lot of the concerns and anxieties are the same as what people face today: 100 to 150 years are only a blink of an eye.”
Reach Yeji Shim at [email protected].
