by Hallie Gleeson
The temperature has dropped, the leaves have (mostly) fallen, and the sun is getting slower to rise with each passing day. As for me, it’s harder and harder to leave the warmth of my cozy dorm to trudge across a frozen, icy campus to lecture. This is my second Kentucky winter.
As someone who grew up in an area where I always had a windshield shaper and a thick blanket in the trunk of my car as soon as the first real freeze, I am no stranger to inclement weather. In high school, I had to begin defrosting my car thirty minutes before I needed to leave. When the nightly forecast predicted winter flurries, I couldn’t count on a snow day. The administration of my school district must have been chummy with the same bigwigs that make the calls at Centre—because my school hadn’t had a snow day for more than a decade.
All that’s to say that Centre’s “we can rest when we’re dead” policy isn’t totally foreign to me. What is odd, however, is the severity of the approach. Even my high school gave breaks for federal holidays and two-hour delays if the snow was really piled up.
Centre College, being so highly residential, does produce a set of unusual circumstances. Many of the faculty live nearly as close as the students, meaning that transportation is not halted by misbehaving weather. The ice and bitter cold are typical complaints—especially for outraged first-years discovering the “no-ifs-ands-or-buts” approach their school takes to keeping the doors of learning open.
Misery loves company, and upperclassmen take great delight in cluing in the latest crop of Centre students. The rumor mill gets a-churning, yet surprisingly, most of the claims are true.
I take my position as a Cento journalist somewhat seriously, and so I did some investigating. Just how many times has Centre closed?
Classes at Centre are often held in spite of federal holidays. During Presidents, Labor, Columbus, and Veterans Day, while those with less intellectual proclivity are on the lawn grilling, we’ll be hitting the books.
The real question is, how often is Centre open when it really could just not be?
Not much can stop the Centre Colonels! If you thought a piddly hurricane would do the trick, think again! During the Civil War, Confederate troops took control of Old Centre. What to do? The faculty decided to just lecture at the library instead. For the duration of the entire Civil War, classes were canceled just once, during the Battle of Perryville. For thirteen days, faculty were forced to suspend classes as Old Centre was used as a makeshift hospital for injured soldiers.
Afterwards, Centre seemed determined to play the part of workers who have used up every sick day, and so must persevere regardless of what maladies befall them. I scoured the Cento archives for mentions of any cancellations, and could find nothing, except a short piece of a journalist asking the very same question that now plagues me.
The next cancellation that is recorded is a single-day closure due to the Great Blizzard of 1978. The blizzard was one of the most severe blizzards in US history…so keep that in mind the next time we get a little duster. Local police announced anyone found outside would be questioned and possibly jailed during the state-wide emergency.
Two decades later, snow and ice storms shut down most of the state of Kentucky, but classes at Centre were simply delayed for half a day. (No arrests this time.)
In 2000, classes were canceled for the Vice Presidential Debate. In the spring, campus was evacuated due to a chemical spill at the train tracks. Two cancellations in one year! Wow!
In 2006, classes were shortened to hold a symposium for a retiring dean…who infamously had told students there would be no cancellations for weather-related causes.
Twelve years later, due to weather conditions, classes were canceled on March 13, 2014, the last such cancellation on record.
Almost exactly six years later, on March 15, 2020, then-President Roush announced that classes would be temporarily suspended to implement an early extended two-week Spring Break, followed by online learning for the rest of the term, as a response to growing concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since classes have resumed, to my knowledge, there have been no more cancellations.
Does Centre pride itself more on protecting a statistic than its own students and faculty? Perhaps. Do we at least get our money’s worth for our classes? Maybe…