Finger Lakes history · regional story
When a college welcome did not feel welcoming
A Wells librarian found a 1959 letter in which first-year students challenged parts of Customing. The six-week introduction to college had rules of its own.
A welcome can feel different to the people being welcomed. In a 2020 article, Wells librarian Tiffany Raymond described a 1959 letter from first-year students protesting parts of Customing. According to her account, they found the tradition alienating and infantilizing, rather than the introduction to college life it was meant to be. The Customing Tradition.
Raymond also described a 1954 Customing Code. Its six weeks stretched from the start of the academic year to Odd/Even. First-years wore identifying signs, red-and-white beanies and skirts. Rules restricted their use of Main’s front door and the grass. The Customing Tradition.
One objection was quite practical: the letter asked for spontaneous sings to happen no more than once a week. It gives the protest a specific scale. These students were challenging demands on their days, not merely supplying a later historian with an opinion about tradition. The Customing Tradition.
The original letter and code remain to be inspected. We do not yet know all the signers, how other students responded or what changed because of the complaint. The librarian’s account preserves a disagreement; it should not be turned into a claim that everyone experienced Customing in the same way.
Sources & research notes
Review status: Developing history. Human editorial review is pending.
Written and source-checked with AI assistance under an owner-authorized editorial process. This is not a personal review by Riley or an independent historian. Sources and unresolved questions are listed below; corrections are welcome.
- What the records establish
- The named librarian’s archival account describes a 1954 code and a 1959 first-year protest, including a specific request to reduce spontaneous sings.
- What remains uncertain
- Original documents, signatures and any administrative response remain uninspected. Neither the outcome of the protest nor an end date for the tradition is established. Later personal recollections and current college operation are outside this account.
- What we are researching next
- Locate the 1954 code, the complete 1959 letter and any response. Compare contemporaneous student records without identifying private living individuals or treating a catalog listing as access to the papers.
Sources
- The Customing Tradition — Tiffany Raymond, ’10, Reference, Outreach, and Special Collections Librarian; July 28, 2020. Locator: Complete article, narrative paragraphs 1–6 before the paragraph beginning The Customing Code makes very clear: 1959 first-year protest; 1954 six-week code; signs, beanies and skirts, Pants Day; front-door/grass rules, memorization, reciprocal bed-turn-downs and complaint about spontaneous sings. Byline and college-archives attribution follow. Accessed October 22, 2026.