Halls of Ivy: Unusual University Facts

The worst college campus riot prior to this century erupted at Oxford in 1914.  It grew out of a tavern fight and the violence lasted three days.  Known as the “town and gown battle”, it involved dozens of townspeople and students and resulted in numerous deaths and injuries.

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Gene Tunney is best known as the heavy weight boxing champion of the world from 1926 though 1928.  What was not known was the fact that he used to lecture on Shakespeare at Yale University.

Elihu Yale, after whom Yale University was named, never set foot in the U.S. after he was three years old and moved with his parents to England.  Yale, then the retired governor to the East India Company, donated some religious books, a protrait of King George I, and two hundred pounds to the fledgling Conecticut institution.   A subsequent shipment of goods sent by Yale raised over five hundred pounds for the college.  It was orignally named the Collegiate School of Connecticut.

Harvard president Edward Everett strongly defended the rights of black students.  He declared that if the white students chose to withdraw because Harvard had accepted a black student, “all the income of the college will be devoted to his education.”  Unfortunately the student died in 1847 before he could enroll.

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The University of Alaska stretches across four time zones  It spans a distance starting from a  community college in Kitchikan (near  Alaska’s southeastern border) to a tiny “learning center” on the remote island of Adak in the Aleutian Islands.  Those two points are about as far from each other as London and Moscow.

Oxford University was founded because a king quarreled with a saint.  King Henry II was feuding with Archbishop Thomas Becket.  He was so enraged by the fact that French King Phillip II defended Becket that he signed a decree ordering all English students home from the University of Paris.  Most of the students settled at Oxford and started a university of their own.  It didn’t seem to phase the University of Paris.  At the close of the fifteenth century, the University of Paris boasted fifty colleges and had a student body of twenty thousand.

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Ellen Swallow Richards was the first woman to graduate from a scientific institute in the United States.  She received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institue of Technology.  Richards was also the first woman to be elected to the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers.  A leading figure in the study of nutrition and hygiene, she also became the first president of the American Home Economics Association in 1908.

In Japan, it is customary for a student application to be accompanied by a “voluntary gift” equaling one hundred thousand dollars or even more.  These voluntary presents are given to the faculty members on the admissions committee.  Bribery in Japan is unheard of, however, this type of gift giving has been part of Japanese culture since time immortal.