The first class met in a borrowed room of the Madison Female Academy: 17 young men, and a mathematics professor recruited all the way from Princeton.
The students had arrived by stagecoach, farm wagon and shanks' mare. Board, reported the chancellor, "need not exceed 80¢ per week." They ate mostly bread and milk, an occasional fish from Lake Mendota, and, as a "rare treat," roast potatoes. A room in North Hall, the dormitory "on the hill," cost $5 a term; furniture "new from the store," another $8. Students had to draw and fetch their own water from the university well, chop down campus trees for firewood, and raid nearby farms for straw for their mattresses. Daily chapel was compulsory; so were six hours of daily attendance at lectures and recitations. There were few electives; Latin, Greek and mathematics were the solid meat & potatoes of the classical course, and upperclassmen were also fed on rhetoric and mental and moral philosophy.
Students found time to start a literary society, publish a magazine, and indulge in diversions that met with faculty approval: boating, fishing, wicket and quoits. It was considered "morally wrong" for students to spend much time over a chessboard, and some young wastrels had been known to patronize saloons, gaming houses and even the theater.
Such were the beginnings of the University of Wisconsin, 100 years ago. Last week Wisconsin's Historian Merle Curti concluded that today's students would have found little, to their liking "in the plain living, the simple amusements, the rigid and rigorous disciplines" that their school started with. But many a 19th Century student remembered his campus days as the time of his life. Naturalist John Muir, leaving Madison in 1863, had paused on a high hill to look back "with streaming eyes" at the Wisconsin campus "where I had spent so many hungry and happy and hopeful days."
One day last week, in a Quonset-hut reading room on the lower campus of the University of Wisconsin, every seat was taken. It was exam week. Girls in neat sweaters & skirts (the wartime sloppy-joe style was out), men in open shirts and dungarees were giving the books a last hard look.
Up on Bascom Hill, students emerging from a late class skidded and skated on the icy path, at first accidentally, then for fun. In Slichter Hall, the modern new men's dorm, a bunch of ex-G.I.s played an endless card game called Schafskopf. In the Rathskellar (see cut) of the $2,650,000 Memorial Union, one of the few places on any U.S. campus where 3.2 beer is sold, the jukebox blared Slow Boat to China. A waiter deftly scooped the head off three beers with one flick; a lone engineer, studying in a corner, made a quick calculation on his slide rule; and a tired-looking veteran's wife smacked her squalling youngster smartly on his bottom. Alumnus John Muir wouldn't have recognized the old place.