In 1929, UW President Matthew Lyle Spencer banned kissing on campus
Smooching on the UW campus was outlawed back in 1929 when then-UW President Matthew Lyle Spencer saw the display of affection as an affront to the morals of the time. Photo: J. Willis Sayre, UW Libraries Special Collections, JWS24268.
The columns in Sylvan Grove on the University of Washington campus stand for four ideals: loyalty, industry, faith and efficiency. They can also make a romantic backdrop for a canoodle, but one UW president would have none of that.
On a spring evening in 1929, President Matthew Lyle Spencer happened upon a couple “spooning” in the shadows of the columns, and it was more than his puritan heart could abide. He promptly announced a campuswide ban on kissing.
Matthew Lyle Spencer, the son of a Southern Methodist minister, might have been a bit conservative about public displays of affection.
Spencer “frequently launched crusades to ‘lift the morals’ of the time,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. That put him at odds with the changing social norms of the Roaring Twenties, when women were leaving the home in greater numbers for colleges and workplaces.
Edwardian gowns gave way to shorter skirts, students listened to jazz and danced the Charleston, and “flappers” scandalized society with their bobbed hair, driving of automobiles, and more casual attitudes toward dating.
All of that must have rankled Spencer, the son of a preacher, who once condemned “drinking and petting” in front of 2,500 students in a talk at Meany Hall. Curiously, his kissing ban was either widely ignored or incredibly effective because no one was ever written up.
Spencer came to the UW in 1919, the same year women won the right to vote. He was hired to lead the University’s School of Journalism after a newspaper career that took him from his native Mississippi to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
He succeeded Henry Suzzallo as president in 1927, and his tenure was brief but dramatic. Biographer C.E. Lindgren wrote that Spencer spearheaded efforts to raise standards and stiffen admission requirements, then butted heads with high school teachers who argued that he was leaving out students who possessed “merely average ability.” Spencer was not a fan of athletics and once lamented that some student-athletes enjoyed a “four-year holiday at the expense of the taxpayers,” the Post-Intelligencer reported.
After leaving the UW in 1933, Spencer went on to found Syracuse University’s School of Journalism, where he served as dean from 1934-1955. He had some notable accomplishments at the UW, writing influential books on journalism and laying the groundwork for aeronautics and fisheries studies. But after he died in 1969 at age 87, his ban on kissing was the first line of his obituary.
And if you’re planning a trip to campus with your sweetheart, pucker up. The ban is no longer in effect.