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  • Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-Time College to the Modern Mega-University by Simon J. Bronner
  • John A. Gutowski
Campus Traditions: Folklore from the Old-Time College to the Modern Mega-University. By Simon J. Bronner. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Pp. xx + 475, 43 black-and-white photographs, references, index.)

Campus Traditions is a successor to Simon Bronner’s two previously published surveys of college folklore: Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Campus Life (August House, 1990) and Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life (August House, 1995). These two previous virtually identical works have one main difference, a 15-page “Afterword” in the 1995 revision that adds updated material on the folklore of AIDS, administrators, buildings, exams, and computers. So one wonders if a third revision might be necessary or desirable? The answer is an unqualified affirmative. While Campus Traditions retains most of the material of the first two editions, it is a major reworking that involves significant data expansion and reorganization as well as a broadened historical and interpretative frame of reference that justifies the change of title.

The book begins with an eight-page conceptual prologue that expands the acknowledgments sections of the first two editions. This theoretical introduction elaborates Bronner’s concept of tradition in relation to the theme of continuity and change in the old-time college and the modern mega-university. Bronner argues for considerable continuity between the old and new institutions when considered from a folkloristic perspective. Following van Gennep and Turner, Bronner locates campus traditions in the liminality of the collegiate experience, which ordinarily produces ambiguity, conflict, change, and paradox. He views campus traditions as framing devices that bring resolution, identification, community, and empowerment into the lives of college students both past and present. This socio-cultural framework inspired by Goffman, Abrahams, and Bateson, enhanced with intermittent psychological analysis influenced by Dundes, enriches his book.

Campus Traditions offers 10 chapters, where the Piled Higher editions used but five. Chapter 1 provides a context for the traditions with a concise but thorough student-oriented history of American higher educational institutions, along with a history of pertinent folklore scholarship. The next nine chapters allow Bronner to organize and highlight material that was condensed into four primary chapters in the earlier editions.

Chapters 2 and 3, titled “The Stress of Grades: Tests and Papers” and “Professors, Coaches, Jocks, Geeks, and Other Strange Characters” initiate Bronner’s historically oriented anthology of campus traditions by concentrating on praxis in academia and the dramatis personae of campus traditions. The opening academic chapter covers folk belief, folk speech, customs, rituals, charms, jokes legends, anecdotes, wisecracks about courses, quizzes, blue books, term papers, final exams, grading, cheating, and succeeding through cleverness. The following chapter reorganizes legends, anecdotes, and personal experience stories about the major players who had appeared in scattered places in the previous editions. Bronner provides special focus on the professors’ larger- and smaller-than-life characteristics. Notable additions in this regard are stories about Einstein and the author’s personal experience narrative about Indiana University professor Oinas’s photographic memory.

The next thee chapters explore events and activities with special attention to custom and ritual. Chapter 4, “Rushes, Pranks, and Dinks: The Rough-and-Tumble Campus,” is notable for its detailed consideration of “rush” traditions. Here, Bronner devotes more than half of the chapter to elaborating the evolution of this [End Page 472] initiatory ritual of class competition and aggression, not to be confused with recruitment activities of fraternities and sororities. Dismissing American administrators’ claims for a classical origin, Bronner locates rush origins in the Medieval European university. Its American transformation occurs at Harvard and Yale in the late eighteenth century. Under various names such a scrap, cane rush, flag rush, pushball, tank rush, and grease rush, this frame for combat between the freshman and sophomore classes persisted into the twentieth century. Its decline in the 1950s coincides with the growth of the mega-university as corporate concerns, injuries, fatalities, and anti-hazing legislation doomed the rush in the 1960s. According to Bronner’s deft analysis, the rituals have been transformed into the institutional spectator sport of intercollegiate football. Chapter...

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