Traditions at Concordia

Traditions at Concordia

Schoberg, G.L.

A reading of a "Concordially Yours" radio broadcast, written and originally broadcasted on October 9, 1943 by G.L. Schoberg. This broadcast recounts the concept of traditions at Concordia, how they are established, and how they effect the college.

Schoberg, G.L.

Concordia College Archives
RG 21.1.1 FF11 Box 2
P13003 GPF Commencement 1920s-1950s - Concordia Class of 1941, walking near the Old Main Fountain
P6789 GPF Christmas Party - 1939 Christmas Party
P16464 GPF Homecoming: Parade (1900-1949) - 1946 Homecoming Parade featuring the Mu Sigma Phi float
P6997 GPF Basketball (Men’s, 1940s) - Concordia’s 1948-49 Men’s Basketball Team playing Hamline University

Concordia College Archives

1943-10-09

Collins, Jenna; audio recorder
Burrell, Corinne; video editor
Cole, Layne; researcher

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Video, .mov

English

Moving image

Good Morning, Cobber Family:
Facetious-minded men about the Concordia campus used to twinkle words to the effect that, if a thing were done twice at the college, it had become established as a tradition. Maybe so. Mayhap it’s a good thing to have traditions. May it not be that the Cobbers were seeking to make permanent in college life, some of the things which in life in the outside world after campus days must be transient. Looked at it in one way, college days are an escape from the coldness of the world outside. There are many who would say that the ebullient exhibitionism of college activities are an evidence of interest in the momentary.
But I wonder if that is true. The hilarity of the football game, the murky flamboyance of the torch-light parade, the omnipresent picnic, the constant decorating of some building for Christmas or Commencement – may they not be rather the unconscious desire to attach oneself and one’s living firmly to traditions, just because those traditions are a permanence within college living, an escape almost out of the flux and flow of confusion of the world outside? After all, a college still partakes of something of the cloistered retreat of olden days.
One still feels somehow that once within the ivy walls, there must be bespectacled recluses there who live apart from the maddening crowds, ignoble strife, and that contact with them must give serenity or some sort of a detached viewpoint toward the hectic outside. Maybe that is why everything about college life becomes traditional – the attempt, almost by force, to keep alive every activity, every custom that represents the changeless. Every tradition that is maintained – the Christmas party, the carol singing, the Thanksgiving basketball game – serves to drop another anchor into the too often undefined desire to have non-changing traditions in life and to fix stable points.
We are training ourselves for life, and unconsciously we confess by our often maudlin effort to maintain the dear old hallowed traditions of college that such are the fixed conditions we would want in the world in days to come – conditions, which we know with sad foreboding, cannot be in the bedlam without.

1 minute, 39 seconds

Corinne Burrell, editor
Jenna Collins, audio recording
Layne Cole, photos/research