Rustication (academia)

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Rustication is a term used at British universities, particularly Oxford University and Cambridge University, for a disciplinary action consisting of a temporary expulsion from the university. A student who has been rusticated may not enter any of the university's buildings or facilities, or even travel to within a certain distance of them. The term was also used in the United States during the 1800s, but has been superseded by the term "suspension."

To be rusticated is not the same as being "sent down," which means that the student was expelled from his or her course and may not return. To be rusticated is to have one's movements restricted. It means literally to "banish to the country." [link]

Notable Britons who were rusticated during their time at University include John Milton [link], Richard Francis Burton, Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Auberon Waugh and Jon Snow.

At Cambridge, according to George Gilfallan [link], John Dryden "was noted for regularity and diligence [but] was rusticated for a fortnight on account of some disobedience to the vice-master."

Walter Savage Landor "had been got rid of at Rugby as unmanageable. After two years at Oxford, he was rusticated; thereupon he gave up his chambers, and refused to return." [link]

The term also was used in the United States in the 19th century. 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." [link]

In a story in the August 1858 Atlantic Monthly [link], a character reminisces:

"It was long before you were born, my dear, that, for some college peccadilloes,—it is so long ago that I have almost forgotten now what they were,—I was suspended (rusticated we called it) for a term, and advised by the grave and dignified president to spend my time in repenting and in keeping up with my class. I had no mind to come home; I had no wish, by my presence, to keep the memory of my misdemeanors before my father's mind for six months; so I asked and gained leave to spend the summer in a little town in Western Massachusetts, where, as I said, I should have nothing to tempt me from my studies."

Kevin Starr [link] writes of Richard Henry Dana that:

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

References

[Guardian story about being rusticated]
Kevin Starr, 1973: Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915, Oxford University Press. 1986 reprint: ISBN 0195042336

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