Emory is not a school known for its school spirit. I guess when your star sport is soccer, it is hard to get motivated. But even beyond athletics, Emory has a reputation for a lack of interest in school pride. If there is one thing that binds the student community together, it is a deep-seated and and self-perpetuating apathy regarding anything resembling school spirit.
All this makes it even more amusing that we have not one but two mascots. Swoop the Eagle is the one on all the athletic jerseys, the one recruiters mention in their pitches and the one in the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Our other mascot, however, is the one who matters. He has an entourage. He has a chant. In a few years, construction will be complete on a statue in his likeness placed in the center of campus. A whole wing of Special Collections in the library is devoted to him. He hugs President Jimmy Carter every year, and this past year the Dalai Lama paid his respects to him. He has 2849 friends on Facebook, and when he accepts my friend request he will have 2850. And who is this mascot who is so powerful, so familiar, so beloved that even the President of the University falls silent when he appears? Not a fuzzy bear, or a scary timberwolf, or even a friendly banana slug. No, he is a skeleton.
When people ask me my favorite thing about Emory, many different answers pop into my head. The great community, the amazing professors, the lack of athletics (I was REALLY bad at PE), the low-key but fun dorm life and the lovely campus, and so on. Inevitably though, what comes out of my mouth is one name: Dooley.
According to Gary Hauk, Vice-President of Emory University and my alma mater's unofficial but enthusiastic historian, Dooley first appeared in the October 1899 issue of Emory's then-magazine The Phoenix in an article called "Reflections of the Skeleton." Claiming to be a skeleton in one of the science classrooms, the essay bitched and moaned about how obnoxious the students returning from summer break were. The skeleton did not name himself, but went on to contemplate his role at Emory, pensively wondering if he would ever do any good when he was incapable of bringing any "love to his life or work."
Ten years later he popped up once again, also in the October issue of the 1909 Phoenix. Calling himself Mr. Dooley he explained his background as the son of a wealthy Virginia planter who eventually drank himself to death and was used as a specimen in a science classroom at Emory. At the end of his second letter Dooley promised to try to write more frequently then he had in the past, and finished his missive off with the following words: "Presidents may come and presidents may go; Professors may come and professors may go; Students may come and students may go; But Dooley lives on forever."
And so Dooley was born. For the first thirty years or so he served as a low-key contributer to the community by writing little commentary pieces for the paper, but in the 1940s, when the school trustees finally lifted the ban on dancing (
Footloose University, I guess) he became known as "Lord of Misrule" and his name was attached to a yearly week-long party, then called Dooley's Frolics and today known as Dooley's Week.
Dooley is an unmistakable presence on campus and in the community at Emory. He has been known to appear at random times, and in bizarre ways: he once landed on the Quad from a helicopter, and his freshly dug-up coffin appears at random spots on campus during Dooley's Week. In fact, here is a picture of it from this past Dooley's Week, dug up right in front of the Dobbs University Center:
During Dooley's Week Dooley roams around the campus, his entourage surrounding him (more on them later), accepting the adulation of the students as his due. For those seven days he can walk into any classroom on campus and set the students free. Professors who refuse to release their prey (they are few, but determined) are sprayed with a Supersoaker. The week culminates with a no-holds-barred masquerade party on campus that, when you include pre- and after-parties, can go on for hours. For the entire week the school is covered in the garb of Dooley. Here is a picture of one of the thousands of skeletons tied to trees and lampposts during Dooley's Week:
Sorry about the layout - I did everything I could to get it to load vertically instead of horizontally, but it kept on uploading this way. The whim of Lord Dooley, I suppose.
Dooley doesn't need the excuse of having a week devoted to him to make an appearance, though. He'll show up at random events, large and small. Every year when Jimmy Carter comes to campus for his Town Hall meeting with the students, Dooley wanders in at some point, interrupting the proceedings to shake Carter's hand or slap him on the back, completely ignoring the Secret Service who are never very pleased to see him. And like I said, when the Dalai Lama came to Emory this past year to accept a weird celebrity teaching position, he and Dooley totally became BFF. It was awesome.
So here, finally, is what makes Dooley so great. First of all, he is over 100 years old, and he's still going strong. That is permanence, y'all. More importantly, though, he's a very organic, dynamic tradition. He is permanent but constantly evolving. He changes in different ways every year, and what makes him so central to the Emory experience is that those changes connect him deeper and deeper to the student body. Case in point: as with all mascots, when Dooley makes an appearance, he does so in the form of a person wearing a skeleton suit and top hat. That person is a student, a senior to be exact, who has been chosen by a secret society to play Dooley for the year because of his (or her!) involvement in the Emory community. Also, a troupe of six to ten other seniors are picked to be Dooley's Guards and play the role of his entourage, protectors, and voice pieces. Dooley, you see, can't talk, but instead writes his words and has a guard speak them for him.
And that is how Dooley has stayed so central to life at Emory. Not only is he a constant on campus, not only are streets and campus cafes and even whole weeks named after him, but every freshman who enters Emory can dream of one day becoming Dooley. Maybe if they work hard enough, play on enough intramural teams, do enough volunteer activities, get shit-faced at enough frat parties (who knows on what merits Dooleys are picked, after all), maybe in four years they will get to be the idiot parachuting out of a helicopter in a skeleton suit. In a way, it is sort of like being back in first grade and thinking, "I'm going to be the president one day." In this way Dooley simultaneously embodies Emory's institutional past and the potential of each Emory student, all while walking with a dapper cane and wearing a super cool top hat.
Of course, at the end of the day, when I say I love Dooley, all that stuff I wrote above isn't what I'm thinking about. What I'm thinking is this: MY MASCOT IS A SKELETON. That is freaking awesome. As a school, Emory can sometimes feel too safe. There is nothing particularly edgy or exciting about Emory, nothing that jumps out at you and says "hey, this place is crazy and insane and awesome, so look at us." We aren't the smartest, or the craziest partiers, or the best at sports. We don't have any famous traditions known 'round the country. Even our school rivalries are half-hearted and mostly concocted by the student government to get more involvement in campus life. For goodness sake, people confuse us with Wash U. all the time. But we have a skeleton as a mascot. That is creepy and weird and so interesting, so full of character and tradition, that I can't help but love it. Dooley gives Emory color and he gives it a little bit of excitement and edge.
Dooley sometimes weirds out prospective students. "What do you mean, your mascot is a skeleton? Thats kind of strange." And yes, it is kind of strange. If you can't deal with Dooley, you can't deal with Emory. He's our school's dealbreaker, and he's how we figure out what type of kids we want on this campus. They have to be okay with the fact that we aren't crazy-good at sports, that we don't have a lot of school spirit, that we're mostly just smart kids looking to get a good education and make good friends in a low-key environment. And they have to be willing to rally around, get excited about, and sometimes devote themselves to a person dressed up in a skeleton costume. Dooley is Emory's heart, and the students who recognize that and embrace it are the ones who do best there.
During commencement weekend, there were many opportunities to sing the Emory alma mater. By the end of the official events I could stumble through it, but it was amazing how many people just didn't know the words. But the moment Dooley appeared at any event, students snapped to attention and were able to rattle off his chant at a moments notice. As one, we opened our mouths and said: "Presidents may come and Presidents may go; Professors may come and professors may go; Students may come and students may go; But Dooley lives on forever." As far as I'm concerned, that is the real Emory fight song. Its the one I know best, and the one I'll be able to recite forty years from now. I've graduated now, but for four years my mascot was a skeleton. How freaking awesome is that?
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