Chatham Student Handbooks

Working in the library gives you a glimpse at the inner workings of Chatham University. You get to recommend content and materials to people, see students and faculty come and go between classes, and most importantly connect people with the endless resources available in the JKM. 

You get to know Chatham in an up close and personal way that I never thought I would get to experience. This became even more apparent when I took on a special project for Molly Tighe, the University archivist. I became very acquainted with Chatham and the many, many personality changes the campus went through from the 1920s till now. 

Anyone who’s gone to college remembers orientation week. You are given a million forms to fill out, a million rules about what you can and can’t do, (even though you thought this was the freeing part of your adolescence) and you’re tired all the time from administration trying to keep you busy from sun up to the dead of night. Usually, there is some all encompassing packet or book to accompany all of these events and meetings you are to attend. The same can be said for students dating all the way back to the 1920s. But instead of being a published schedule online, they were handed out in solid copy form and known as a Student Handbook.

There is one thin line that ties all of the student handbooks together, that even in the most forward and boring documents makes space for the personality of the generation and campus to shine through. That is the small cartoon images that randomly disappear and reappear in the handbooks. You might think this is a bit of a dramatic statement, but as we go through the years and characters that randomly pop out, some of them can be a little jarring considering this is meant to be a handbook to get to know the ins and outs of a college campus. 

We all know that Chatham is chalk full of history and tales of the rich who used to vacation here to the women who’s very footsteps today's students follow. It’s easy for the smaller points of history to get lost in the cracks. These cartoons were never meant to be studied but they display the playful personality that we as a campus have always embodied. Instead of clowns and Pennsy, we have Carson the Cougar to beacon us through our early years at Chatham and show us the traditions that will live on years after we graduate.