Written by Anna Trammell
For over four decades, students have spent the day before classes begin on the quad. Today, Quad Day serves as an information fair where student groups, academic departments, and community organizations promote their services and introduce themselves to students at the beginning of the year. There are over 1,400 registered student organizations on campus and a wide variety of these groups will be recruiting new members this Sunday on the quad. [1]
But Quad Day didn’t originate to promote student groups. The first Quad Day occurred in the fall of 1971 as a way of encouraging a sense of community when protests and unrest permeated college campuses. “The war kept getting worse. Tensions escalated…So the lack of people getting together as a community to have a sense of community was a problem. I mean it was just a bunch of people who were angry either at the situation or at each other,” Class of 1972 alumnus Willard Broom said in an oral history from 2010, “But this is a learning community and we should all be learning together.”[2] Continue reading “The First Quad Day”