Dickinson College

Upon the start of their first semester, freshmen are welcomed to the school at a convocation ceremony, wherein the college president speaks about the incoming freshman class. After the ceremony, freshmen are lined up in front of Old West, the oldest and most ceremonial building on campus. Each student walks up the stone steps into the lobby and officially “signs in” to the college by signing their name in a large book. They then exit through the side doors of the building, because at graduation, students walk down the front steps of Old West to receive their diplomas. The rumor goes that if you walk down the front steps before you graduate, you won’t make it through school! Hence, students avoid exiting Old West by the front steps like the plague!

The school motto, “Religion and learning, the bulwark of liberty,” is found on the school seal, along with a liberty cap, one of the hats worn by the Sons of Liberty. The seal was designed by John Dickinson and Benjamin Rush in 1783.

The college logo is a newer, more modern symbol of the school. It began with President Bill Durden in ’71 and looks much like a compass rose.

Mermaids certainly have no place in Pennsylvania, but there is a mermaid on top of West College. When Benjamin Latrobe was designing the bell tower for the building, he wanted to model it after the ancient Greeks and decided to have the Greek god Triton atop the tower as a weathervane. Unfamiliar with the myth of Triton, and misinterpreting the description he received, the coppersmith made a mermaid by mistake, but the figure still spins on top of West College today.