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Illustrations 11 and 12. Hill Auditorium Original Specifications

Building Campus Spirit

With greater numbers of the middle class attending colleges and universities in the US by 1910, emphasis grew on enhancing the status of attending schools of higher learning. Universities began to recruit actively, competing to attract the best students. One way to attract students was to build extraordinary facilities. Hill Auditorium, at its construction, was one of the biggest university auditoriums in the United States. For visitors, the auditorium could not help but impress, especially on those traditional occasions when it was filled to capacity, such as graduation and the annual May Music Festival. At this time, the need for the creation of traditions and ceremonies was great at academic institutions. American universities were nearing modest birthdays (many were 50-75 years old in 1910), and the age and "old school" traditions associated with college life took on added meaning. Students emphasized affiliation with their alma maters through ceremonies, festivities that were intended to reinforce school spirit and to separate elite leadership groups. Records of annual parades, yearly pageants, campus balls, fraternity and sorority rituals, and informal departmental gatherings mark this period. Students at the School of Architecture, for example, wore smocks of different colors to indicate their status, creating a pecking order and hierarchy within the school. Decorations created for the annual Architectural Ball were similarly important for student designers, and were a crucial means for students to distinguish themselves amongst their peers.

The creation of "old school" traditions was very important to college students of the era, for they made the university seem more venerable and established than it was, magnifying the student's sense that s/he was part of a long, honorable continuum. Construction of a grand auditorium, larger and more effective than any other comparable college facility of the time, helped to enrich the ceremonies held within it, to reinforce the prestige of the university, and to bolster student esprit de corps.

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