Curse you, Union! //violently shakes fist//
GAAh, the ‘tute’ does suck. Heck we even lost both hockey games to Union this year:mad: Not sure what the overall football totals are for the 110 meetings but it can’t be good based on Dutchman’s Shoes Trophy results (Union up 47-19) since 1950. At least it’s been competitive the last decade at 5-5.
On the other hand, how many times has Union College won the NCAA hockey tournament? (Zero, compared to two for Rensselaer. Admittedly, these wins were three decades apart, in 1954 and 1985, but it’s two more than Union can claim.)
Union didn’t even play division 1 hockey until 1992, so in that time frame, they’re even.
When I was a freshman, their football team was on a 11 game streak against RPI.
But actually, RPI wasn’t scheduled for the first football game. Union always played WPI, who overall have been 32-8 against Union.
RPI freshman 1968 here - yep we had them too, but ditched them after about 3 days.
Freshman band members still wear them during marching (aka football) season. I still have my RAT cap in my closet.
Strainger
BAE 1993
To my immature and juvenile (or maybe nasciently senile) mind, a “beanie” will always and only refer to that children’s headgear, a skullcap with a little propeller sticking up on top.
And to be sure, I only posted this childish reply here as a pretext to link to that picture.
I am seeing several posters here talking about “requirements for freshmen” to wear the beanie as a mild form of hazing. Was this then strictly for pledges to fraternities? What if a freshman was not a pledge to any particular frat house? Would the college administration still want the incoming freshmen to wear the beanies and if so why?
Again, at RPI 1968 all freshman were expected to wear their beanines at least through orientation week. The people running orientation told us it was a ‘team buillding’ thing, but it felt more like humiliation.
I don’t recall fraternities requiring pledges to wear their beanies (I didn’t pledge) but it might have been.
RPI had a 33% drop-out rate. At our first orientation meeting they told us “Look to you right. Now your left. One of you won’t make it.”
Makes you feel right at home…
The mathematics of this cannot be right. I can’t formalize it though.
At that time one in three members of any entering class would not eventually graduate from RPI - they would either drop out, transfer out, or something else. Mathematically formal or not the speaker conveyed the correct impression.
Chances that this thread has now been derailed into a doper whack-a-thon approaching 100%…
At the Catholic high school I attended, freshman hazing included making the frosh buy a plastic Easter Bunny mask, and wear it throughout Homecoming Week (including to the football game). We burned the masks in a bonfire after the game. 
Flounder wore one as a freshman in Animal House, set in Fall 1962, and was clearly portrayed as a dweeb for doing so: https://images.nonexiste.net/img/irc/2011/04/05/Flounder-Animal-House.jpg
I was on the committee back in 1989. We had such a long list of rules of what people might find “too offensive” that I think it was the last year…
Oh and also at my freshman orientation at RPI, they did the look to the right, look to the left thing, one of you won’t make it. I guess it was true, because I didn’t make it…:smack:
Loyola U, Chicago, around 1970. We did get freshman caps. IIRC the only time you had to wear them was to get into freshman-only events.
point of order: what institute of higher education is “RPI”?
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, the oldest degree granting engineering school in America.
Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) ordered a propeller beanie one time so he could fly, when it didn’t allow him to fly he ditched it.
