In the dark morning hours of a surprise day in Spring, a fox is called out to spark an annual tradition at Rollins. He’s hidden away until the perfect time, a day deemed too nice for class, where students swap class or study sessions for a day at the beach or games on Mills Lawn. Tars might even start the day off by staking out Tars Plaza for a glimpse of the well-renowned fox statue as opposed to preparing for an 8 a.m. class. Even prior to the fox statue being revealed, students start investing in “Fox Day Roulette,” banking on the luck of the fox to save them from homework and exam preparation.
President Hugh McKean said it best: “Rollins itself has a long tradition of doing things its own way”. He began this school-wide holiday 69 years ago when he inherited the artifact from President Hamilton Holt. It came as a pair with itself and a cat, but she, unfortunately, was smashed to pieces in a prank. When complaints rolled in claiming there was nothing the college did together, McKean brought the fox out from his hiding hole to unify the school.
During the Vietnam War, Fox Day took a pause. The atmosphere was simply too grim for much festivity. Before becoming Rollins 12th President, Thaddeus Seymour tried to introduce a similar day-off event at his previous institution, Dartmouth. He longed for such “a day to celebrate nature and being a human.” Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. In a 1988 interview with The Spokesman (archived by Google), Seymour said, “The students were serious about Vietnam… It seemed too frivolous.”
In another interview in 2015, he said, “Vietnam became a factor and a point of awareness because of the draft and the change in the mission of people who were drafted. On the campus, I think because of that, inescapably every student was touched by these options and possibilities, and awareness of the war was just more and more a fact of life.”
After moving onto other positions, Seymour finally came to Rollins College and realized there had been the existence of that holiday he wished for just a decade earlier. Though it had taken a pause due to the anxieties with the recent war, he eventually reinstated the holiday in 1978.
“Selecting Fox Day is the one decision I make by myself. No committee, no faculty votes. I hold my finger to the breeze. I know if it’s right. If I’m ready for it, I’ve got to feel it in my bones,” Seymour said in 1988. He also said that if students wanted their beloved fox to come again the following year, they all needed to gather in Knowles Memorial Chapel at 10 a.m. “as a family” to certify his return. Though the unique tradition didn’t quite catch on at Seymour’s other colleges, Fox Day continues to bring the Rollins community together to this day.
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