Grads: Return the Olaf O

For May I'm doing graduates and gradians. Today I'm bugging St. Olaf College to bring back these lovely circles. Like this one from graduation 1919:

I wrote about this before, but I made mistakes so I'm upgrading. St. Olaf should photograph each class in their first and last week, and they should do so in this circle in the heart of the campus. The O was not just in hands and photos but the landscape itself, as you can see in this 1937 aerial photo:

And it's not just bringing back but moving forward. We can now complete the notion digitally, with each class in a seamless 360° band. I have never seen such a photo. And these circles are not just symbolic but practical, like skyscrapers; stacking people back shrinks their heads to little invisible dots, so you arrange them sideways:

These panos are example of humans preferring hard over easy. Cirkut cameras were an amazing feat; my digital camera on a tripod was easy-peasy. But when things become easy they become low status, and humans operate by norms and status not pros and cons.

St. Olaf College is currently composed of 2020s Americans, and the odds were never great that those folks will act. But you never know!

Another example is college yearbooks being canceled just as the layout and distribution costs became trivial. The 2023 stereocard is a rare thing: the 3-D is a little underdone. Usually it's Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes. Thanks again to the St. Olaf College Archives for preserving these wonderful photos. Aerial photo WK-4-317, 1937-09-23, MHAPO. Shrunken heads: 19.206.60, St. Olaf College Archives. Robert Wellman Campbell, "Grads: Return the Olaf O," RSS Longa, 14 May 2026, public domain via CC0 1.0.