University of Minnesota
Beanies at the University of Minnesota occupy a hazy place in its institutional history, between the administration’s plans for official events like Freshman Week and Welcome Week and the student body’s lore about what really happened during incoming students’ first weeks on campus.
Freshman Week began in the fall of 1926 after a Special Committee charged by President Lotus Delta Coffman reported to the University Senate on plans for a “more systematic direction of the freshmen during the week preceding the beginning of classes” that were developed after “having canvassed with some care the conditions arising out of our local situation (the two campuses, the large number of freshmen, the urban location of the university).” The Week’s activities included registration, physical examinations, psychological tests, lectures on “how to study” and “what is a library,” tours of the Minneapolis (main) and St. Paul (farm) campuses, “evening entertainments and vocational guidance,” and “special exercises as desired by each college.”
Events held in the early years were successful and described in the University parent newsletter Minnesota Chats in 1928 as being “a hearty, but chiefly a useful, greeting to the freshmen when they arrive on the campus.”
Freshman Week continued for several decades, changing its name to Welcome Week and even adding events called Freshman Camps. Welcome Week continues today under the leadership of Orientation and First-Year Programs in the Office of Undergraduate Education. But the particulars of how, when, and why beanies were introduced to and then faded from the incoming students’ early days on campus are difficult to confirm.
In the 1950s, beanies held a prominent place in the Gopher yearbook sections highlighting Welcome Week and appeared on the cover of the 1950 Welcome Week program schedule. Gopher yearbook photos featured couples wearing their beanies to Welcome Week dances and beanie-wearing students listening to presentations and visiting “academic exhibits.” When O. Meredith Wilson began his University presidency in 1960, he was presented with a beanie during Welcome Week activities that fall on the St. Paul campus.
A maroon beanie with a gold “M” and gold bill (circa 1950) in the University Archives collections adds mystery to the possible role of beanies at Minnesota. The donor explained that the beanie was one that “was required headgear for appearance as a member of the original Gopher Rooter Club (student cheering section) somewhere in the confines of Memorial Stadium during autumn Saturdays coincidental to home football games.”
By the early 1960s, beanies were not mentioned in Welcome Week sections in the Gopher yearbook or in the Week’s program schedules.
-Erin George and Erik Moore
