College Class Pipes: America's University Class Pipes

College class pipes are the product of a student tradition that lived on American campuses from the late 19th century to the mid-20th. Under a single name, two separate customs actually merge: a ceremonial pipe smoked communally and then broken at graduation, and a personal pipe a student carried for years, engraved on the bowl with their school's initial and class year.

The Pipe Smoked and Broken at the Ceremony

At the East Coast's storied universities, the close of the academic year was marked by a ceremony in which graduating seniors formed a circle and passed around a single bowlful of tobacco in turn. At Yale, this ceremony is known as Class Day; the university's own account describes the tradition as more than a century and a half old, with records putting its start in 1859. The act that closed the ceremony varied from school to school: at Yale the pipes were smashed on the ground, while at Princeton they were thrown at the cannon that has stood half-buried since 1840 at Cannon Green, south of Nassau Hall. The pipes used in these ceremonies are reported to have been long-stemmed clay pipes; this long stem is also the defining feature of the shape known as the churchwarden. Breaking the pipe symbolized the closing of one's student days.

At some schools the pipe concerned not graduation but rivalry between classes. At Washington & Jefferson College in the 1870s and 1880s, a "Pipe of Peace" was smoked at the opening ceremony of the annual athletic contests held between the freshman and sophomore classes. The name was borrowed from the era's popular image of Native Americans; the English idiomization of the term peace pipe falls in these same years as well.