Weirdest College Rituals

On Ditch Day at the California Institute of Technology—Caltech, all the seniors disappear, leaving puzzles for the rest of the undergrads to solve. Classes are canceled, and students work in teams to solve the seniors' riddles. The LA Times details one puzzle: "Assemble a 3-D version of a popular board game and figure out the message it contained."

Virginia Tech began as a Reserve Officer Training Corp school. Today, the Blacksburg, Va. university takes all comers, but the ROTC heritage lives on in the annual Cadet vs. Civilian Snowball Fight. A fire alarm sounds during the first big snowfall of the year—a signal for the student body to launch an all-campus snowball fight on the Drill Field. The annual battle has the look of medieval combat, snowball style—check out this video.

Nitrogen is the seventh element on the periodic table, and the honoree for Reed College’s Seventh Annual Nitrogen Day. The Portland, Ore. college's tradition is always the Seventh Annual because … well, think about it for a moment. In honor of nitrogen, Reed students enjoy free food, a band, and people reciting haikus on the student union porch. Nitrogen is also feted with an open mike, into which Reedies can muse on the critical importance of the element.

And the record holder for the largest scavenger hunt is… the University of Chicago. For a four-day stretch every spring, U of C students embark on a quest known as Scav. Scav lists can have as many as 300 items, and teams can consist of hundreds of students. Some lists launch participants on road trips as far away as New Orleans, Wyoming and even the Canadian wilderness.

At Carleton, Vassar, Cornell, Drake and Dartmouth, to name just a few, students lay down their books at an appointed nighttime hour—generally just before finals—and vent. “You hear this enormous scream across campus, where students are yelling at the top of their lungs,” says Carleton student Marquita Davis. On the creepy side is Georgetown University’s Healy Howl—at midnight, on Halloween, in a cemetery, after watching a showing of The Exorcist, which was partly filmed on campus.

The winter day starts with a busload of students leaving Pomona College, east of Los Angeles, Calif., and heading north for a morning of skiing at Mountain High resort. Of course, there are lots of places where students can ski in the morning. How many of them, though, can surf that same afternoon? That’s right—the skiers pile back on the bus for a ride to the Orange County coast and an afternoon cavorting in the sand and surf.

Every April 21st, Texas A&M students, staff, faculty and alumni gather for the Aggie Muster. There are gatherings around the world, but the largest is on campus. The day begins with campus activities and a lunchtime barbecue. After dark there's a keynote speaker, some poems read and then a roll call of Aggies who died in the previous year. As each name is called, a friend or family member calls out “Here,” and a candle is lit.

Tuft's Naked Quad Run was banned last year after regularly resulting in sprains, broken bones and hospitalizations. Anyone attempting to participate was suspended for a semester. Then-president Lawrence Bacow said the problem was not just freezing temperatures and nudity. Some students, he noted, were hospitalized with near-fatal blood alcohol levels. Last December, the students replaced the Naked Quad Run with the Excessively Overdressed Quad Stroll.

One weekend a year, students at the University of Montana, in Missoula, turn a gymnasium into a Wild West logging town for the Forester’s Ball. In September, volunteers begin hauling in nearly 20 trailer loads of logs. By February, everything’s in place. Students spend a week building the town, including a jail, a chapel, a chow hall and a general store, a weekend enjoying it for the dance and another day taking it down.

This no longer goes on, but it was such a juicy, elitist ritual we just couldn’t leave it out. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the Ivy Leagues and the Seven Sisters compelled incoming freshmen to line up in the gym for a nude photograph. Well, not completely nude: the photographers taped metal pins to their backs, ostensibly to assess their posture. The photos, most of which have since been burned, would have included such luminaries as President George W. Bush, newscaster Diane Sawyer and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.