Busy day on campus and in the office, today. I’ve been making some adjustments to the new website we rolled out this week. It is starting to look pretty nice. Now to teach the quirks to others. That will mean meetings after the first of the year and, until then, a lot of detailed emails to people who would probably wish I’d find another hobby. Anyway, you can check it out at samfordcrimson.com.
I also watched the volleyball team, which has two of our majors, play in the first round of the NCAA tournament. They took an early exit today, but they’ve nevertheless had a great season. Southern Conference champs! And we heard about the coaching search for a new head football coach taking shape. And also there was plenty of things to grade as things wind down.
The key, as ever, is to put yourself ahead of the curve by standing as close to it as you can, because you are always behind.
What’s fun, though, is to look at where your students are now in their writing compared to where they were at the beginning of the term. Some make great strides. Others have made strong refinements. There’s a lot of pride in that sort of evolution. Good for them.
Tonight was the Hanging of the Green and the Lighting of the Way, a late season highlight and a lovely way to spend part of your evening. The Hanging of the Green in Reid Chapel has been marking the Advent at Samford since 1980. The program is based off the traditional Lessons and Carols Service in Cambridge at King’s College. The Lighting of the Way has been taking place on campus since 2001, it usually features a bit of singing or a concert and some impromptu messages and, always, the Christmas story. Dr. Jeanna Westmoreland read the message tonight:
A few hundred students piled out of Reid Chapel, in the background, to the middle of the quad to hear the story and countdown the lights and then hear a show.
The first song started “The weather outside is frightful … ” except it was sunny and 74 here today.
This is the administration building, and I thought the light treated it pretty well this evening:
You remember the movie Footloose, the tale of a young man who taught a rural town how to love and laugh and dance. That movie came out in 1984. I’m going to assume I saw that on cable a year or two later and I remember thinking, as a child, that the premise was a little flimsy.
Can’t dance? In this day in age?
Well. Let me show you what I’ve found in this Crimson drawer I’ve been slowly working through. Note the date, 1988:
Seems the Greeks got a mandate about dancing and guests in their houses and so they pulled out of the big spring show and that caused quite the stir. The story continues:
He got something of a sidebar in the same issue, which traced the contentious issue of dancing on campus back to the 19th century:
Two weeks later, the same reporter is back with an update, the president of the university, the late Thomas Corts, had signaled a formal sea change on the issue:
This was a long time ago. Right? Well, 28 years is ancient to some, and just around the corner for others. Nevertheless, history was made in early February of 1988 at Samford, everybody cut footloose:
In that same issue the Crimson published the results of a phone survey they ran on campus, where they learned that 82 percent of students were in favor of dancing.
I wonder if we’d do a text or an Instagram survey these days.
