Centenary Students Found Streaking
Photo by Haley Bordelon
According to the Shreveport Journal, a group of about thirty Centenary College students streaked across campus at 11:30 p.m. one night in the spring semester of 1974. The article makes it seem that streaking was some sort of trend, even calling it “America’s newest favorite pastime.”And for Centenary, it was a trend, but that is not the case for many other universities.
Primal Scream
For instance, look at Primal Scream at Harvard. The Harvard tradition originally started as a form of therapy that just involved participants screaming. “Each semester when the clock struck midnight on the first day of final exams, students would open their dorm windows around the Yard and release their mounting stress by screaming like maniacs.” It’s unclear when streaking got added to the tradition, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was around the 1970s when streaking was trending in America.
In case you’re wondering, Primal Scream is still going strong at the Ivy League, and the biannual event occurred just last semester after a small break due to Covid.
The Naked Donut Run
At Brown, the Naked Donut Run is a bit more secretive than other streaking traditions. This particular streaking event was not made for big crowds of spectators. One organizer said, “the organizers randomized the time of the run. Very few students were privy to the time and location before the event.” The actual run is more of a walk where naked participants hand out donuts to those studying in the library. It is also unclear when this tradition started, but according to one newspaper article, it had to have begun between 1986 and 1993.
Centenary, Centenary, Wherefore Art Thou Clothed?
Primal Scream and the Naked Donut Run are just two of the many, many collegiate streaking traditions. At UCLA, there’s the UCLA Undie Run which takes place on the Wednesday of finals week at midnight. At the University of Vermont, there’s the Naked Bike Ride. At Dartmouth, there’s the Ledyard Challenge. The list keeps going; some colleges even have multiple streaking traditions. So, it is not unreasonable to wonder why Centenary’s streaking incident didn’t become an annual or biannual tradition. How come there is only one incident of streaking reported in the college’s almost two-hundred-year-old history? If many of these collegiate streaking traditions started around the 1970s and 80s and still occur today, then why did ours get left in the past?
The answer probably has something to do with money. According to a Conglomerate article written in October of 1974, the Centenary administration felt that “when the locals view Centenary as a haven for long haired streaking freaks” local monetary support is threatened. This is also probably why administration was saying, “that at the time in question, students were either in the library or in their dormitories studying.”
Ending Thoughts
As other colleges return both to their campuses and their streaking traditions, who knows what will happen for Centenary. After all, someone did start planning a screaming event in the Shell at the end of the 2020 Fall semester.