Remembering UB’s Ivy Day — on Ivy Day

Editor's note: This story is part of "UB Then," an occasional feature highlighting people, events and other interesting elements of UB history pulled from the University Archives. 

Today is what’s known as “Ivy Day” in higher education circles, the day — usually in late March — when all eight Ivy League Schools release their regular-decision admissions.

But Ivy Day used to mean something much different at UB, where each spring representatives from the senior class would plant a sprig of ivy at the base of Hayes Hall in remembrance of the year’s graduating cohort.

The tradition — long established at other colleges across the Northeast — was adopted by UB as its own in 1923, symbolizing a living bond between the senior class and the university.

Ivy Day became an important part of UB’s year-end celebrations during what was known as Senior Week. The graduating seniors assembled at either Foster, Crosby or Norton halls before being led in a procession through campus by faculty and administrators dressed in their academic regalia.

“Attired in cap and gown the seniors marched across the campus and halted in front of Edmund Hayes Hall where the presidents of the classes planted the sprigs,” the student newspaper, The Bee, reported on Ivy Day in 1934.

Each year, the annual ivy planting would include use of the same spade to turn the soil, and a senior would be selected to give the “Ivy Day Oration.”

“We assemble here to observe the ceremony of the planting of the ivy, symbolic of our love for and devotion to the university,” said Joseph Abeles, Ivy Day orator back in 1931. “May the knowledge acquired from our studies take root in our lives as the roots of the ivy take hold in the soil.”

Elmer Tropman’s Ivy Day oration in 1932 took a more critical analysis of society in the early half of the 20th century.

“It is concerned with how to increase wealth, not how to distribute it more equitably, with inventions that will reduce the cost of production, not with inventions that will reduce misery and suffering,” Tropman said, as reported in The Bee.

After the Ivy Day address, the university chancellor usually said a few words. Following the ceremony, participants gathered for refreshments.

Ivy Day continued at UB for at least three decades, as evidenced by the thick vines that once adorned Hayes Hall.

But by 1952, the announcement of Ivy Day festivities had disappeared from campus newspapers. In fact, it was 1973 when the state paid to remove the ivy along Hayes and Foster halls.

The ivy had begun to adhere to the buildings by clinging to fissures in the stones and mortar, according to a story in The Spectrum. The vines had caused enough deterioration of the building to warrant repairs and prompt their removal, the story said.

And so it was that UB’s Ivy Day faded into history. Although it has not been completely forgotten.

University Archives still keeps the spade that was used each spring to plant the ivy.