Remember that time Auburn students really, really resented media coverage of their response to a sickness sweeping schools across the nation?
No, no, no… not last weekend — 68 years ago. No, no, no… not COVID-19 — Spring Fever, a disease all but eradicated on the American campus, but one that still lingers in the higher education imagination thanks to the lacy legacy of its signature symptom: The Panty Raid.
Here’s a brief (!) Auburn history on the night of Tuesday, May 20, 1952, when 25 API student leaders may have kinda sorta mobbed Montgomery Advertiser reporter Bill Bates, and most definitely stole the film from freelance photographer Paul Robertson’s camera, in order to quarantine the Loveliest Village against the scoop-happy superspreaders of the 20th century’s most progressively problematic college prank — for, in their minds, good reason.