2005’s Slope Day featured artist Snoop Dogg, with The Game and The Starting Line as openers. Students woke up at 9 a.m. to start drinking, and the entire day was a booze- and debauchery-filled celebration of the last day of classes for students, with 13,000 of their closest friends on Libe Slope.  But Slope Day in its current incarnation is a relatively recent tradition in the scope of Cornell history.

It was a day when the Arts Quad played host to fire-eaters, snake-charmers, cowboys, Indians and sailors.  A tradition originating in May, 1901, Spring Day was deemed one of Cornell’s first excuses to cancel class in the name of mass debauchery.

A Cornell tradition more than one hundred years in the making, the event now known as Dragon Day originated in 1901 when a prankster by the name of Willard Straight 1901 instituted a College of Architecture Day to foster unity and pride within the college.