Alumni Day
Alumni Day probably had no formal beginning at Union. From the earliest years, graduates commonly returned for Commencement and the events preceding it, and by at least the mid-nineteenth century (but probably much sooner), they held meetings on the day before the commencement ceremony. By 1861, the College usually prepared a banquet for them. In that year Jonathan Pearson confided to his diary his explanation for the occasion’s limited success:
Alumni met today in larger numbers than were expected. The usual collation was omitted on account of the anticipated small number and to save the expense. Un. Coll. suffers beyond measure in the want of interest felt by her graduates in her welfare. This has been induced for 50 yrs. by the management of Dr. Nott who has studiously discountenanced all demonstrations at Commencement time, by making as little show as possible and hurrying off the students on every possible pretext. The consequence has been that we have nothing to call our graduates back and they get to look upon Alma Mater as a grum old Mother-in-law.
Pearson first uses the phrase "Alumni Day" in 1863.
In those years the College could easily accommodate the relatively small numbers of returning alumni, but by 1871 classes were especially encouraged to return each ten years after graduation. By 1912, the most prominent place at the reunion was given to classes which had been graduated for any multiple of five years.
From 1916 through 1922, the experiment was tried of inviting groups of four successive classes to the reunion. The "contemporaneous class reunion" was intended to maximize the number of attendees who had known each other as undergraduates, but in 1923 the Graduate Council reverted to the "every fifth year" system which has been used since then.
Following establishment of the Graduate Council in 1910, Alumni Day became busier. The first alumni parade was held in 1911, and in 1912 the Waldron Cup was established to honor the class with the largest percentage of members present on Alumni Day. Presented by Mrs. Cornelius A. Waldron in memory of her late husband, a member of the Class of 1848 who had attended sixty-one commencements out of a possible sixty-three, the cup was retired in 1939 when its surface became filled with inscriptions. The Council then replaced it with the McClellan Cup, named for Samuel Paris McClellan ’81, who as a member of the Graduate Council had campaigned persistently for a commencement program that would keep the alumni interested.
The John Van Voast Cup was established in 1941 for the class with the best costumes in the alumni parade.
In more recent years, the Alumni Council established many prizes linked to participation in the Annual Fund. "Minerva’s Footrace," however, began as a symbolic "race" for greatest participation in the Annual Fund, and was replaced in 1980 with Minerva’s Race, an actual alumni race over a three-mile (later, five kilometer) course through the campus.
In the early 1990s, Alumni Day (renamed "ReUnion Weekend") was moved away from Commencement, to reduce the competition for space and for the attention of college officers, and is now usually held in late May.
Condensed from Wayne Somers, compiler and editor, Encyclopedia of Union College History (Schenectady: Union College Press, 2003), page 30.
Image courtesy of Union College, Schaffer Library Special Collections and Archives, Photograph Collection