Southern Discomfort

Most students during the Institute's early years were New Englanders, with a smattering from other parts of the country and from overseas. Early documentation reveals the prevailing attitudes on campus against Southerners--white an black--and even against Northerners whose families originally hailed from the South. An article in the student newspaper The Tech (20 October 1887) refers to a region of southern Ohio as "the lazy belt," so named because of "certain characteristics of its inhabitants" who "in past time have wandered westward from the 'Old Dominion'".