Another Use for the Ceremonial Mace

Sunday March 06, 2005 Category: Fun Permanent Link

Here is a bit of Cornell history that I had never read. It comes from the very interesting Time Capsule Letter written by Andrea Strongwater for the Class of 1970. She describes how during their commencement ceremony:

…Dave Burack grabbed the speaker’s podium in Barton Hall and began spouting some anti-war, anti-establishment something. The campus police rushed up to the stage to take him away but Dave, a small guy, held on to the podium. The Campus Police ended up carrying Dave and the podium off the stage until Morris Bishop, bearer of the Cornell mace, disconnected Dave from the podium by whacking him over the head with the club we all thought purely ceremonial.

I’m not sure why the mace was not in the hands of then-president Dale Corson. Morris Bishop was a professor of Romance Literature and the University Historian. He is the author of the definitive, “A History of Cornell” published by Cornell University Press in 1962. The university library holds a collection of Bishop’s papers.