Education: Ragtime Hooligans

Last week all undergraduates at England's Cambridge University got a stiff, stern letter from Vice Chancellor Charles E. Raven. It concerned their behavior on Guy Fawkes Day, on the 342nd anniversary of Fawkes's unsuccessful attempt to blow up the House of Lords.

It had begun as an ordinary "rag" (prank)—the sort that Cambridge students have been playing for centuries. Before the night was through, reported the Vice Chancellor, "undergraduates, in disorderly mobs, often several hundred strong, surged about the streets intent upon doing damage ... In Petty Cury they overturned and seriously damaged a car, regardless of the presence of a woman...

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