The Great 'Lacum Duckum' Campus Cold War
After Whitman College students staged a 'ducking' of classmates for skipping a reception, a retaliatory social boycott by the women of Reynolds Hall has divided the campus.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Social relations with the co-eds are one huge jangle as a result of the ducking scrap last Friday night. The girls at Reynolds Hall are pretty sore over the boys cutting their reception and are determined to be revenged on account of their injured dignity. The young men who attended the reception in spite of the fiat of the mass meeting and received a ducking therefore are big heroes among the girls, while the fellows who administered the justice decided on by the boys' court are too contemptible to be spoken to in the girls' eyes. All day Saturday and yesterday the boys at Billings were cut dead by most of the girls. Now an edict has been passed ostracizing half a dozen boys who are supposed to have been the leaders of the fracas of Friday night. This edict was passed at a meeting of the girls of Reynolds Hall yesterday. It was also decided that any girl who should be found speaking to any one of the boys under the ban should be forthwith and summarily bathed in 'Lacum Ducum.' Under fear of this threat the girls do not see the boys as they pass upon the campus and at the table confine communication to monosyllables or less. Some of the girls claim that these actions do not voice the general sentiment of the girls but that the edict was the dictum of a small ring of girls who feel themselves especially injured by the action of the boys. The majority of the fifty boys concerned in the affair have been received back into the good graces of the fair ones at Reynolds, and only an unfortunate five languish in hopeless despair beyond the range of the girls' sweet smiles.
“Any girl who should be found speaking to any one of the boys under the ban should be forthwith and summarily bathed in 'Lacum Ducum.'”
Campus politics in 1903 look remarkably like today's digital call-out culture, where social shunning is used as a weapon to enforce internal norms. While the archaic 'ducking' is long gone, the tension between fraternity-style 'mass meetings' and student resistance is a recurring feature of college life.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.