Chartist Friend from Pittsburgh: My Old School

From Wikipedia: Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865 as the result of a New York State Senate bill that named the university as the state's land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment.

Dragon Day is an annual event at Cornell University. It occurs on the Friday before the university's Spring Break, in mid-March. The center of the event is the procession of a dragon, created by first-year architecture students at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, past the College of Engineering and into the Arts Quad. There it customarily was burned amidst shouts and dancing.

During the second half of the 1980s, several incidents of violence between engineering and architecture students were associated with Dragon Day. Beginning in 1986, several attempts were made to channel engineers' frustrations into more creative outlets. In 1986, in the middle of the cold war, a group of civil engineering students prepared a mock ICBM which they carried in an effort to ram the dragon as it passed by the engineering quad. They were immediately stopped short by architects protecting their creation ;-)

DRAGON DAY