Attendance at commencement wasn’t always such a hot ticket. During our early days on campus, the thought of having to limit tickets to the ceremony, as we began doing this year, would have seemed far-fetched. Back in the early days on the new campus, administrators took great pains to organize events designed to keep students around until the ceremony. Among those efforts were alumni dinners, student dances, athletic competitions among fraternities, a commencement play (usually Shakespeare), and a water pageant on the lake.
“The Commencement means so very much to the reputation of the College that it is essential that a large crowd of students stay to take part,” wrote The Collegian’s editorial board in April 1916. “Let every man make some sacrifice, and stay on the job, as he should.”
The graduating class usually gets even with the faculty for four years' hard labor by making them sit and listen to three hours of class oration, poem history, and other similar atrocities.
One opinion columnist from The Collegian also wryly comments that the end-of-year rites offered an opportunity for payback: “The graduating class usually gets even with the faculty for four years’ hard labor by making them sit and listen to three hours of class oration, poem history, and other similar atrocities, while fond relatives in the audience are firmly of the opinion that Daniel Webster, Solomon, Gibbons and Shakespeare were rank amateurs batting around .215.”
Attendance grew over time as evidenced by the many locations the ceremony moved. People had packed into the Millhiser Gymnasium, but attendance eventually outgrew the intimate setting of the gym’s basketball court.
In October 1929, the Jenkins Greek Theatre came online during a week of festivities that also included the dedication of Cannon Memorial Chapel. The next year, the University held graduation in the Greek Theatre.
A schematic from the 1940s (inset) shows that organizers had enough concerns about space to calculate the amphitheater’s capacity both with and without aisle seats.
From 1930 until well into the mid-1970s, the ritual remained an outdoor affair. David Burhans, chaplain emeritus, arrived at UR in 1974 and remembers it moving from the Greek Theatre to the Robins Center shortly after.
“I remember one year the pollen from the pine trees was so thick that we all started coughing,” Burhans said. “We had to move it out of the Greek Theatre, which was a good thing because the weather can be unreliable.”
