The Ceremony

The presence of the mace signifies that the convocation is in session, during which public acts of the College, such as the installation of a president or the granting of degrees, may take place. At Lafayette the mace is carried by the faculty member who has longest held the rank of professor.

The mace used in today’s ceremony was designed by Frederick K. Detwiller ’04, artist in residence at Lafayette 1948-53, and it was presented to the College in 1954 as a gift from the class of 1904. The intricate ornamentation was executed in silver by Tiffany and Company. The head of the mace forms a loving cup engraved on one side with the coat-of-arms of the Marquis de Lafayette and on the other with the college seal. On the seal is a portrait of the young Lafayette and the College motto Veritas liberabit (“The truth shall make you free”).

The academic procession, today including honored delegates from many academic institutions, continues one of the College’s oldest and most enduring traditions: from Lafayette’s earliest days the faculty and students processed on important occasions. To these processions academic regalia was added as recently as the 1890s, though President Cattell wore a gown earlier, while he was president. In adopting caps and gowns for academic ceremonies, Lafayette was—like many other American colleges about the same time—affirming its connection with the great academic traditions of Europe and with the cultural importance across centuries of teaching and learning. As a consequence of this American affirmation, guidelines for academic dress were agreed upon on the Intercollegiate Code of 1895. By stipulating design and color variations in the gown and hood, the Code provides a system to distinguish the wearer’s degree, institution, and field of study. Doctors and trustees wear a gown with velvet front facings and three velvet bars on large bell-shaped sleeves. Masters wear long, closed sleeves with arm slits; bachelors wear a plain gown with pointed sleeves. Gowns are traditionally black, but at some institutions earning a doctorate carries with it the privilege of wearing a gown in the institutional color.

Doctors wear a long, full hood, masters a shorter, narrower hood, and bachelors a very short hood or no hood. The hood’s velvet facing identifies the field of study in which the wearer’s degree has been coffered: white for the arts, letters, and humanities; gold for science; dark blue for philosophy (including all Ph.D.s); light blue for education; purple for law; orange for engineering; brown for fine arts; light brown for business; pink for music; scarlet for theology; and green for medicine.

The hood’s satin lining denotes the college or university by which the degree was conferred. A Lafayette hood is lined with maroon and white. A sampling of other institutional colors: Brown University, brown; Chicago, maroon; Columbia, blue and white; Cornell, carnelian and white; Dartmouth, green and white; Harvard, crimson; Pennsylvania, red and blue; Pennsylvania State, dark blue and white; Princeton, orange and black; Rutgers, scarlet; Lehigh, brown and white; and Yale, blue.

The marshals’ batons are made from the stair rail of the house long occupied by Professor Francis A. March. The batons were first carried in the inauguration of President MacCracken in 1915.

Lafayette College

As for a name, someone—probably Porter—mentioned the recent visit to Philadelphia of General Lafayette. A delegation of Easton militia had marched down the Delaware Valley to participate in the welcoming festivities for the aged hero and had felt a surge of renewed patriotism stimulated by the democratic ideals he embodies. Why not name the college for Lafayette?

The meeting then turned to questions of governance. A board of thirty-nine members—thirty-five citizens, plus four state officers ex officio—was elected. Along with the name, the number of trustees proved to be the most durable result of the meeting. In approving the charter the Senate struck the state officials from the list, fearful (perhaps with good reason) that their inclusion presaged a raid on the Commonwealth’s coffers. The resulting complement of thirty-five members has remained the official number ever since.

With a name and Board of Trustees, the college next needed an educational plan. To create it the meeting named Porter and two other local lawyers, Jacob Wagener and Joel Jones. A Yale graduate and one of the few college-educated men in the community, Jones became the principal author of the resulting petition for a charter.

The petition outlined an institution most unusual for the times. Recognizing the limitations of local secondary education, it proposed a preparatory department fully articulated with the college. The curriculum would emphasize the practical and applicable rather than the theoretical, with such studies as civil engineering, mechanics, military science, and English and German as well as Latin and Greek. In describing the program in mathematics the petitioners expressed the broader principle embodied in the plan: “Such branches will be selected and so pursued as will not only discipline the mind, and induce patient habits of investigation, but also directly subserve the purposes of life.” That sentence remains a succinct statement of Lafayette’s enduring educational philosophy.

The legislature approved the charter and on March 9, 1926, Governor J. Andrew Shulze’s signature brought Lafayette College into legal existence. With a charter added to its assets, the young academy needed only a few other items before taking up its lofty mission—a faculty and students, a physical plant, and some money. All proved elusive.

Not until 1832, after a deal struck with the Rev. George Junkin and his faltering “Manual Labor Academy” in Germantown, did Lafayette offer its first instruction. It began with forty-three students in a rented farm house on the south bank of the Lehigh—a modest start, but a start nonetheless. Two years later it moved across town to a brand new (and unpaid-for) “College Edifice” on seven and a half rocky acres atop a steep hill overlooking Easton. It now had thee faculty members and sixty students, but the times remained hard.

Several ingenious financing schemes having failed, the struggling institution sought help which was soon forthcoming from the Presbytery of Philadelphia. In 1854 the College became officially allied with the Presbyterian Church, a relationship that continues to this day.

The resulting security opened the way for an era of innovation. In 1855 Francis A. March introduced the study of English as the core of the curriculum; by his agency Lafayette became the first college in America to list study of Shakespeare in its catalogue, Engineering soon followed, thanks to the college’s first great benefactor, Hazleton coal magnate Ario Pardee. His gift created the Pardee Scientific Department, offering a general Bachelor of Science as well as B.S. degrees in civil engineering and mining engineering. To this day Lafayette remains one of the very few small colleges with engineering programs that match its strengths in the traditional liberal arts. Philadelphia industrialist Barton H. Jenks soon followed with funding for Jenks Hall and a Bachelor of Science program in chemistry.

Pennsylvania’s role as a center of the American industrial revolution and Lafayette’s connections with regional industry finally began to produce the prosperity so long sought. In 1869, for virtually the first time in its history, the College raised the salaries of its faculty, professors advancing from $1,000 to $1,600 per year, with extra pay for the administrative duties they had long performed gratis. Other signs of affluence followed, including the construction of old McKeen, the first building specifically designed exclusively as a student residence, in 1872. That fall, only Harvard and Yale admitted freshman classes larger than Lafayette’s. A year later Pardee Hall, a palatial new structure dedicated entirely to instruction and administration, opened its doors.

By the turn of the century enrollment at Lafayette approached five hundred, on a campus now expanded to sixty-five acres. Lafayette’s growth has continued. The addition of Fisher Field in 1924 brought the main campus to its present dimension of slightly over one hundred acres. Supplemented in 1962 by a 212-acre athletic area neighboring Forks Township.

The college’s finances have shown similar improvement. Its first capital campaign in 1857 yielded a meager $26,000 endowment after debts and expenses were paid. Today an endowment of more than $600 million places Lafayette in the top 2 percent of all colleges and universities in endowment per student.

In 1970 Lafayette abandoned its all-male character and increased total enrollment to about two thousand three hundred, of whom 52 percent are men and 48 percent women. The six hundred freshmen admitted each year are chosen from nearly six thousand applicants. The 23,000 alumni are scattered through all fifty states and more than sixty countries on six continents.

Lafayette’s curriculum continues to evolve as the needs of society change. A major reform took effect with the Class of 1997, which became the first to fulfill a universal requirement for participation in specially designed First-Year Seminars. Innovative programs define and shape the unique Lafayette experience such as Value in Science and Technology (VAST) courses, an expansive interim session which includes significant study abroad opportunities, and an impressive community outreach program, to name but a few.

Today’s Lafayette Experience allows students to take advantage of unique opportunities to prepare for a rewarding future in one of the nation’s most academically challenging environments. It is an experience that starts here and lasts a lifetime.