Anniversaries

After lunch today, I was reading some of the news outlets for higher education and I ran across a piece noting that Duke University was celebrating its centennial this year. The centennial part caught me by surprise. After all, the university traces its roots back to the Brown School which was founded in 1838. Indeed, Duke's seal carries the 1838 date. That would mean, of course, that Duke is 186 years old, not one hundred. As I read the piece, I realized the centennial commemorates the massive donation by James B. Duke on December 11, 1924 which transformed it from the small quiet school known as Trinity College to the powerhouse research university it is today. Every year is an anniversary of some sort, of course, and when I thought about it, I could come up with twelve colleges and universities which are celebrating their centennial this year. The first one that came to mind was High Point University, since it is just a little over an hour's drive from Duke.

I think its great when colleges and universities take the time to celebrate important milestones. If you have read this blog, you know that I have academic memorabilia of all kinds, and although it is not a huge percentage of my collection, I do have a number of items related to anniversaries. I completed my master's degree at the University of Tennessee in 1994, the bicentennial year of the university. I picked up a number of items for the anniversary back then. One of them is the first item you see below, a short photobook on the bicentennial. As it happens, everyone who graduated that year has a memento of the event as all of our diplomas not only carry the anniversary date but the official bicentennial logo as well. You can see it on my diploma in the second photo. Its odd to think it, but since it is 2024 it has been thirty years since that all of that happened. As I noted in early posts this year, I visited the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill this spring. While there, I stayed at the university's on-campus hotel, the Carolina Inn. It is a lovely hotel and the people there were great during both of my stays. As it happens, the Inn is celebrating its centennial this year, a fact noted by my room's key card as seen in the third and fourth photos. Last year, my doctoral alma mater Texas Tech celebrated its centennial. I have a number of items from that celebration including the book you see in the fifth photo. Last year was also an anniversary year for the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL). UMSL is a young institution, and it was celebrating its sixtieth anniversary last year. I was on campus and snagged the sticker with the official anniversary logo on it you see in the sixth photo. Texas Tech, of course, is the flagship institution in the Texas Tech University System. Another of the five universities in that system had its fiftieth anniversary, or its semicentennial, in 2019. The Texas Tech Health Sciences Center Lubbock was fifty that year, and I picked up the t-shirt marking the anniversary you see in the seventh and eighth photos during a visit. I have a number of other things associated with numerous college and university anniversaries, far too many to take the time to photograph for a quick post. Many of them are lapel pins, something I have a lot of for colleges and universities in general and not merely for their anniversaries. A good example would be the last photo in this set, an anniversary lapel pin for Mount Union College (now the University of Mount Union) which was celebrating its ​sesquicentennial in 1996.

Anyway, the Duke story started my thinking on these things. Happy anniversary to Duke and the many other colleges having an important milestone year in 2024!