Class Day
The day before Commencement, the seniors walk in procession to the Bema, a natural amphitheater in College Park. After a humorous history of the class and other speeches, the class walks up the hill to the stump of the Old Pine, where they hold a farewell ceremony. Students began conducting such ceremonies at the Old Pine in the 1830s, according to alumni of that period. For more than 140 years, the ceremony included the smoking of what were designated "peace pipes"; the offensiveness of the practice of smashing the pipes on the pine, introduced in the 1880s, caused the seniors to omit the smoking element in the early 1990s.
Read more about this topic: Dartmouth College Traditions
Famous quotes containing the words class and/or day:
“We of the sinking middle class ... may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The years of imprisonment hardened me.... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life, I no longer have the emotion of fear. ... there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.”
—Winnie Mandela (b. 1936)