They are rodents, and they exalt in that fact. They are nerds, and ditto. They are the Chamberlin rats, Beloit College science students who, over the 40-year history of Chamberlin Hall, have infested the crannies, corners, and student offices of our science building.
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Opened to great fanfare in 1968 as a replacement for Pearsons Hall of Science, Chamberlin will be recycled after the new Center for the Sciences opens this fall. But even in a new venue, the rats are determined to endure.
So as students and professors prepare for their move, it is fitting to remember and celebrate the offbeat, honorable tradition of the Chamberlin rat—a sleep-deprived, nocturnal, and sociable mammal whose traits include hard work, camaraderie, and enthusiasm.
“When I think of a Chamberlin rat, I think of somebody who obviously is dedicated to the sciences,” says Larissa Thomas’06, a double major in biochemistry and dance. “They are there in the building and in the lab all the time, working, studying, and sometimes relieving stress. You can be a science major without being a rat, but you can’t be a rat without being a science major.”
The cheerleader, historian, and ex officio mix-master of the rat parade is Professor of Chemistry Brock Spencer, who dates the tradition to the 1970s, “when the College decided that in loco parentis was no longer its relationship with students, that it should be a landlord, and the dorms became in many cases uninhabitable, at least for purposes of studying.”
Chamberlin was built oversize, he says, leaving room for student offices, a benefit seldom offered to undergraduates. What happened was perhaps inescapable: Students began to inhabit Chamberlin up until—and sometimes long past—the official 2 a.m. closing time.
With nocturnal animals inhabiting a science building, the name “Chamberlin rats” may have been inevitable. But if nobody is sure how the name was coined, the tradition itself is clearly rooted in the difficulty of science courses. In Professor of Biology John Jungck’s genetics class, for example, breeding fruit flies to study inheritance had the side effect of breeding rats, says Tori McKenna’06, a double major in biology and classics. Fruit flies “come to maturity in four hours, so you have to separate them and breed them before that, otherwise you will not know whether they have already mated. So you might have to call security and say, ‘Let me in to Chamberlin,’ and then explain that you need to breed some fruit flies.”
Skeptical eyebrows were raised, but doors were unlocked, she adds. “There were always a lot of genetics students in Chamberlin, with that bleary-eyed look that tells you, ‘I have been counting fruit flies forever.’ You start to live in Chamberlin. It was such a harrowing experience. You never forget it.”
A second rat-factory is the senior thesis, required of many science majors and perhaps most legendary in the geology department. Geology students often built the thesis around samples retrieved during summer field studies, says Professor of Geology Carl Mendelson. “There is a lot of hands-on kind of stuff. Not every student has a diamond saw in the dorm, so they would be here, cutting rocks into the wee hours of the morning.”
Spending hours together under difficult circumstances promoted rat-to-rat bonding, Mendelson adds. “There is a lot of camaraderie that develops because they are all in same boat. It’s training for the real world.”
The intense experience of being a rat built lasting friendships, says McKenna. “I’m in touch with fellow rats. We talk on the phone. We would get a crossover; I still have friends from the chemistry and geology floors.”
Rats were also a source of academic assistance. According to Brian Maunze’10, a biochemistry major from Zimbabwe, “Most professors, when they give an assignment or a lab, try not to give you all the information that they think you need. They want you to think outside the box, see how you can approach it.” At that point, rats “are the people who stick together, figure out how to think this through, because no one person has the solution.”
In a University of Wisconsin-Madison Ph.D. thesis on the “women of Chamberlin,” Professor of Education and Youth Studies Kathy Greene focused on that kind of community while explaining Beloit’s high rate of success at educating women scientists. “There were a number of peer groups, both male and female, that contributed to the welcoming atmosphere.” Greene also pointed to a “critical mass of women and a faculty that had unusual influence in terms of teaching outside the classroom.”
Greene also discovered an informal “club Chamberlin,” which had privileges of membership, what she called “rodent pride.”
“The Chamberlin rats feel they are like the Marines; they are the few, the proud,” she says. “They study harder, they work harder, they belong to Chamberlin.”
Surviving difficult classes will be an asset if she decides to attend medical school, Thomas says. “It helped me to detect—in myself and others—what was the breaking point. You are so exhausted that you can’t put two words together, but you find a ball, bounce it up and down, and five minutes later, you are okay again.”
Rats have no formal initiation—essentially you are a rat if you consider yourself a rat—but the ultimate rite of rat-dom is to spend the night at Chamberlin. Naturally, it could backfire: Thomas recalls a friend who hid under a desk to finish a project and then fell asleep.
The social benefits alone were substantial enough to justify the rat tradition, but there were also pedagogical reasons to promote rodenthood, says Spencer. “Science is a culture that involves groups of people working together on something. We think of the lone scientist at a bench, but in fact the culture of doing science involves groups of people who share space and equipment. If you look at scientific articles, they are almost invariably multi-authored. The culture is of a group activity, and we need to model that.”
Spencer also contends that the best cognitive learning involves “constructing knowledge, rather than acquiring or receiving it. The only way you can effectively understand and use something is by building your own understanding of it, which usually involves both practicing and arguing about it, discussing, working through it. When you explain what you think you know to another person, you find out what you don’t know, and build a stronger understanding.”
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But Spencer admits that mixing creative, driven students with the toys native to science labs leads to some, ahem, non-educational activities: “Over the years, a variety of things have happened in Chamberlin after the faculty have disappeared that we might rather not know about. Alums have asked me, ‘Did you know about the pitched battles between physics and chemistry majors, bottle rockets versus CO2 fire extinguishers?’”
Spencer expressed absolutely no surprise at my own memory, from Chamberlin’s first years, of being chased across middle campus late one night by a brilliant red dot. “Ah, yes, the red laser …”
The weird décor of Chamberlin was certainly conducive to off-beat self-expression. “Chamberlin had a certain character to it. There were a lot of taxidermied animals hanging on the walls, pictures of wildlife…” says McKenna.
The walls became an informal gallery for zany artwork. Thomas, for example, recalls a genetics student who “would unwind by drawing massive rats for posters. As the semester went on, the rats became more and more demented—until they were looking like terminators.”
In 1991, the abundance of student enthusiasm at Chamberlin became the foundation for Girls and Women in Science, an outreach project started by professor John Jungck and Kathy Greene, then Beloit’s science education coordinator. The program brings 30 to 40 sixth-grade girls—along with their parents and teachers—to campus for a weekend of fun and hands-on science education. “The program is coordinated by students, and students run the workshop sessions,” says Professor of Biology Marion Field Fass. “The project embodies rat culture.”
Although retired rats speak wistfully of the experience (“The biology offices were fun … you could get away with having a small pet there, so you could have your animal therapy,” says McKenna), the true significance of rat-hood may depend on your viewpoint. “Most of my friends are not science people, and to them, ‘Chamberlin rat’ is almost a curse word,” says Shanna Dell’10, a biochemistry major from Madison, Wis. “But in Chamberlin, it’s kind of like something you don’t want to be, but something you aspire to at the same time. Because we are all nerdy, and we have fun with it.”
Ensuring the survival of the rat’s enthusiasm (if not necessarily their nocturnal behavior) was a key to planning for the new science center, Spencer says. “We told the architects there had to be a home for the Chamberlin rats. They found this interesting and unusual and said this is not what usually happens.” They made accommodations in the form of student offices and places to mingle and hang out.
And so the Chamberlin rat tradition, if not the name, will survive. And we trust that meets the approval of rats past, present, and future. Now, if somebody would throw some crackers on the couch, we could get some rats out of the cage for a photo…
David Tenenbaum’71 majored in
philosophy at Beloit. He is the staff writer at The Why Files (whyfiles.org).
