Where Traditions Begin

Three years ago, our geoscientists installed a seismometer at Rice-Eccles Stadium—not to monitor the Wasatch Fault, but to measure the MUSS. When thousands of students jump on third downs, the stadium shakes. The readings are called UteQuakes.

What the seismometer can’t measure is how something like the MUSS comes to exist. Twenty-five years ago, it was a nearly empty block of bleachers—until nine students took on the job of talking their classmates into showing up.

This issue is full of milestones, and no two of them started alike. The Hinckley Institute of Politics started 60 years ago because Robert Hinckley, a farm kid from Fillmore, Utah, believed politics was an honorable profession and built an institute to prove it. Swoop turns 30, as do the Edible Campus Gardens, which were planted by students in 1996, with nearly all the harvest still going to the Feed U Pantry today. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts marks 25 years in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building; its collection first hung in a few rooms of the Park Building in 1914.

Traditions gather around places, too. The Block U has long been a place where students and visitors stop for photographs. Its new companion, an interlocking U north of the Park Building, takes its shape from the U’s past. 

Fort Douglas, the oldest section of campus, marked a milestone this August, when its last 50 acres passed from the Army to the university. Now, much of the fort’s 164 years of history is in our care. 

Whether they began with the military or just a few students and an idea, these institutions needed the U community’s support to help them thrive. A tradition lasts because people keep deciding it’s worth their time—a Saturday afternoon, a shovel, a semester at the Capitol. And the anniversaries in these pages are only the ones we had room for; somewhere on campus right now, a club or a lab or a choir is quietly marking a milestone of its own. 

The class that moved in this fall inherits all of it—the gardens, the forums, the third-down noise. To our newest students: the next tradition is yours to begin. I look forward to celebrating the anniversary.

Go Utah!