Rustication (academia)

Rustication is a term used at

• John Lyly (c. 1553–1606), author of Euphues. Rusticated from Magdalen College, Oxford, for unknown reasons.^{[citation needed]}
• John Milton (1609–1674), rusticated from Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1626 for quarreling with his tutor.^[4]
• John Dryden (1631–1700), rusticated from Trinity College, Cambridge, for having exchanged insults with his college vice-master.^[5]
• Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), rusticated from Trinity College, Oxford, in 1794. Landor had fired a gun at the window of a fellow student whose late night revelry had disturbed him and for whom he had an aversion. Landor chose not to return.^[6]
• sent down (permanently expelled), but upon a supplication from his father to the University was given a chance to deny authorship and return. Shelley refused to deny authorship and was therefore sent down.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), rusticated from Trinity College, Oxford, in 1842 for challenging a fellow student to a duel, the latter having mocked the shape of Burton's moustache. ^{[citation needed]}
• Napoleon III by Orsini.^{[7][unreliable source}
  ]
• Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), rusticated from Magdalen College, Oxford, after having returned to his college some three weeks after a new term had begun.^[8]
• John Betjeman (1906–1984), rusticated from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1928.^{[citation needed]}
• Mark Boxer (1931–1988), rusticated in the 1950s from King's College, Cambridge, as editor of Granta, the student magazine, when it published a poem deemed by the authorities to be blasphemous.^{[citation needed]}
• Philosophy, Politics and Economics prelim exams. Waugh chose not to return.^{[citation needed}
  ]

The term was widely used in the United States in the 19th century, and on occasion, later. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, in The Gilded Age, have a character explain the term:

"Philip used to come to Fallkill often while he was in college. He was once rusticated here for a term."

"Rusticated?"

"Suspended for some College scrape."^[9]

In a story in the August 1858

Kevin Starr writes of Richard Henry Dana Jr. that:^[11]

"Harvard's rigid rules and narrow curriculum had proved equally repressive. Rusticated for taking part in a student rebellion, Dana had spent six months in quiet rural study in Andover under a kindly clerical tutor."

A biographer refers to one of James Russell Lowell's college letters as "written while he was at Concord because rusticated".^[12]

In a 1932 letter to Time, the publisher William Randolph Hearst denied he had been expelled from Harvard College, saying he had instead been "rusticated in [1886] for an excess of political enthusiasm" and had simply never returned.^[13]

The term is still used occasionally in the United States. For example:

"The penalty for plagiarism at Harvard Extension is a failing grade in the course and rustication from the university for at least one calendar year."^[14]

At Rice University, rustication is a punishment separate from suspension. Students who have been rusticated are banned from social activities on campus and are only allowed on campus to attend class.^[15]

See also

• Expulsion (education)
• Suspension (punishment)

References