If you thought English Zero was deflating wait until you see this, also from 1935:
Sent home to your parents too! (That would probably be a FERPA violation today.) As I said yesterday, they were not fooling around. Rice students had not yet become paying customers and so there was no reason to relax either disciplinary or academic standards to keep them around. Screw up or even start looking like you might screw up and we will make sure your parents know about it. Continue and you’ll wind up on probation–every semester saw long lists posted in front of Lovett Hall of the current crop of endangered students. If you didn’t fix it, out you went.
Today’s a travel day for me, be back on campus tomorrow.
Is it a postcard with a place for an address and stamp on the back?
I wonder where I would have had to transfer to…
Posting a list of names would be a FERPA violation, too. Privacy is important, but fear of public humiliation can be very motivating. There must be a happy medium between where we were then and where we are now.
Maybe that “happy medium” was in the 50’s. I don’t recall those warning cards or public lists, but the idea was still, for some faculty members, to flunk as many students as you could get away with. At that time, if you went on scho. pro. three times, you were out.
Yes, that dreaded blue card was a post card if I recall it correctly. My father received one in the spring of 1952 from Dr. Joseph Davies, and I was immediately put on notice that I WOULD bring my grade back up to a 1 or a 2 which I did manage to do. I had always made top grades and continued to do so at Rice; but the spring of my Freshman year, I missed a Biology Lab and made a bad score on a test as a result of missing class and the lab to run around the county trying to locate and capture the Sophomore Class President and Vice-President. That custom occurred the week before the Freshman Class Dance. In fact, we emptied the Chemistry Lecture Hall when the word was shouted to the Biology 100 class that the officers, Ann Acker and Kneel Ball, had been sighted on campus. I jumped in my small Plymouth with my commuting classmate, Pam Riley Smith, and two upper classmen crammed in my car as well, Don Rhoden and Cecil Treadway, two of Rice’s biggest and toughest linemen. Pam and I were very apprehensive about our riders as to whether their allegiance was to our Freshman Class or to the Sophomores. After tearing around the campus, we were told to drive to Chocolate Bayou where the two officers were rumored to be hidden in someone’s bay house. I had just moved to Houston the summer before and did not know the area very well. We never did find them that day. The object of capturing the Sophomore Class Officers was to dress them up in ridiculous outfits and bring them into the Rice Hotel Freshman Class Dance to humiliate them as pay-back for the Freshman hazing we had experienced the previous fall. The next year, Harvey Jewett and I were the Sophomore Class Officers and spent a week, dodging the freshmen. We managed not to get caught. Nancy Moore Eubank ’55
In the late ’60’s, 3rd scho-pro was known as “death-pro”
In those days you were not considered legally “emancipated” from your parents until you turned 21, so it’s just like sending the parents report cards for elementary and high school.