The beginning of the fall semester brings so many joys, including the arrival of the beloved fall season! Even if you’re missing the long hot days of summer, there’s plenty of goodness to be found in the new season.

Whether it’s the beauty of the campus during the transition, looking forward to the fun of Halloween, or just a trip to grab some pumpkins for your room or porch, bundle up because fall is here.

We hope you all enjoy these photographs of Western New England during the fall season!

The University Archives would like to welcome back all returning students, and welcome for the first time the class of 2026!

The flurry of activity during the first week of classes is always exciting, and can be overwhelming too, especially for those of you new to campus. But at least no one is being dragged into a giant mud puddle! Back in the 1960s, a popular rite of passage for new first year students involved an epic tug of war battle between freshmen and sophomores over a pit filled with water and mud. The beloved rope pull was a mainstay activity for a few decades. Check out some photographs of the event below, and if you’re interested in learning more about what this first week of classes use to be like, check out the Archives online exhibition, The Freshmen Experience!

Although it’s not quite summer yet, the campus is alive with flowers and greenery, and looks as alive as ever! We miss seeing all the students on campus, but the birds, squirrels, and bees are keeping us company for now.

Today we’ll share some photographs that show some fun in the sun on campus for all of you that may be missing it!

It’s the final day of finals! To all the seniors wrapping up their final semester, you did it! You’re following in the footsteps of many great men and women before you who donned their caps and gowns at Western New England University. Congratulations!

National Poetry Month may be over, but as we said, poetry is everywhere, even when you’re not looking for it!

While searching the student newspapers for information about how students handled finals week in the past, we came upon the poem below. So apparently, one way to get through finals was to take a break with a little creativity and write a poem!

Fortunately for this student, the only distraction was the television screen. Wonder how they would have fared with all of the screens and information and distractions we face now!

As a farewell to National Poetry Month, we’d like to share some great firsts in poetry and prose here on the Western New England Campus.

Below you can page through and download the first issue of Intrinsia (Spring 1970), the first literary magazine from Western New England, as well as the first issue of The Review of Arts and Literature (1988), which replaced Intrinsia after it was discontinued in 1984.

Hopefully reading creative works by fellow Western New England students will inspire you to tap into your own creativity, in whatever form it may take.

April is more than half over, which means National Poetry Month is nearing its end. Here are a couple more poems, both from the Westerner, WNE’s student newspaper. And tune in soon for our final post for National Poetry Month where we take a look at the University’s Review of Art and Literature, our literary magazine which features wonderful works of student prose and poetry!

Poems can be a beautiful, meaningful addition to any event or celebration, and today we’re looking at a poem that was read at the graduation ceremony for the WNE class of 1943!

The ceremony, held at the Sheraton in downtown Springfield, consisted of a full schedule. Graduates enjoyed a banquet, along with speeches and recitations by fellow students, as well as Mr. Churchill, the college President at the time.

Among these speeches and recitations was the Class Poem, read by Lloyd Jones. And fortunately for us, the Nor’Easter published not only the schedule of the ceremony, but the poem as well.

And for more complete picture of the day, you can take a look at the commencement program from 1943! You can even see that Lloyd Jones, in addition to being a wonderful poet, also received his degree in accounting.

Keep looking for poetry all around you this month, and we’ll keep posting poems that we find!

Since 1996, the Academy of American Poets has been celebrating National Poetry Month in April of every year. What a wonderful time to celebrate poetry, with the arrival of spring awakening everything around us, including inspiring words and thoughts! Created to encourage publication, reading, and support of poetry and poets, and to highlight all of the extraordinary work done and still being done by poets, National Poetry Month is the perfect time to reflect on the beauty of language and words, and to look for, or create, poetry in our every day lives.

Throughout this month, we’ll share poems created here on the Western New England campus over the years. To start the month off, here is a poem that begins, very appropriately, with thoughts on how to write poetry. This very meta poem, titled “Poem on Poetry”, appeared in The Westerner in April of 1950.

If you would like more poetry in your life this month, consider signing up for Poem-A-Day, and receive a new poem in your in box every day this month. You can sign up on the Academy of American Poet’s website, where you can also view the daily poem. And be sure to check back for more poems written by the campus community!

Ah, Valentine’s Day. The day certainly brings out a variety of feelings! Whether you love love, hate love, or just want to stick with a mild version of like, Valentine’s Day has always been the time to express those feelings, whatever they may be.

A fun way to see how students on campus felt about Valentine’s Day is through the personal ads in The Westerner. Published specifically on the holiday, these short messages were placed by students, usually anonymously, to other students (partners, friends, crushes, etc.) Some are sweet, some are sappy, and some are not quite as kind! But they are all entertaining to read!

If you’d like to get in the Valentine’s mood, take a look through these Valentine’s personal ads from 1980. And as always, if you’d like to read more, check out the University Archives Digital Collections!