A Tip of the Cap: The Rookie Auburn Tiger (R.A.T.) Program

The Auburn University Marching Band has this thing called the R.A.T. Program.

“It’s to help integrate freshmen and smooth the transition from high school to college,” said junior Acelynn Arballo, a R.A.T. program leader for the ’23-’24 school year. “It’s just a great opportunity to help them out.”

There are parties. Cookouts. Even a R.A.T. prom.

“R.A.T. stands for Rookie Auburn Tigers,” Arballo says. “We kind of know the tale. It was like the freshmen got off the train and you could hear them scurrying around campus and so they just called them rats. I think that’s where it came from. We’ve definitely heard the story.”

But probably not the whole story.

In name, if not exactly spirit, the R.A.T. Program is the last vestige of an unofficial institution that left an impression—often literally—on generations of Auburn students. “Rats”—that’s what freshmen used to be called at Auburn. And most everywhere else.

The Dictionary of American Slang cites 1850 as the first use of “rat” to mean “a student, especially a freshman or new student.” So, it wasn’t one of those uniquely Auburn traditions.

But Auburn got in on the act early. And with gusto. Paddling. Head shaving. Forced midnight runs. Whatever inglorious rite of passage an upperclassman could conceive, a rat had to quietly endure with little more than a wink in the Glomerata.

“We were all just rats,” wrote 1916 freshman class historian Armstrong Cory in the Glomerata, “and most of us felt it.”

Early on, the harsh treatment of freshmen was usually contextualized not as the random abuse it frequently was but punishment for violations of the gradually codified rat regulations, most of which centered on the custom’s defining expression: the rat cap.

References to Auburn “rats” date to the 1890s. But the Auburn rat cap—orange, short blue brim, blue “A” on the front—first appears in an address to freshmen in the 1917-1918 Auburn Student Handbook.

“Rat caps must be worn at all times during the weekdays except when in military uniform,” reads the handbook.

By 1923, the degree to which rat rules defined Auburn culture was making headlines across the South. An AP article written that November—“Auburn Freshmen Must Don Rat Caps and Observe Code”—informed readers that, among other things, freshmen couldn’t pass through the main campus gate and had to provide matches to seniors upon request.

The article insisted the checklist didn’t constitute hazing, which administrators had done their best to eliminate. It was merely an organized effort to reinforce the natural campus pecking order in a way even professors could get behind.

“Members of the upper classes as well as members of the faculty decided that there should be a sharp line of distinction drawn between the freshmen and the upperclassmen,” proclaimed the article.

Regardless of assurances that consequences for getting caught without your rat cap would no longer be physical in nature, male freshmen at Auburn and across the country knew better. Which is why the gameday practice of snatching rat caps from the skulls of rival rooters had been its own Saturday spectacle for decades.

In 2011, an Auburn graduate sought to return the cap he’d swiped from a Bama freshman in the late 1940s and apologize. The thought of the torture the poor cap-less Capstoner surely suffered, he said, had wracked him with guilt for years. If he had snatched the hat about ten years later, though, it probably wouldn’t have been an issue.

Throughout the 1940s, the tradition slowly began to temper. That women were, all in good fun, now also expected to abide by the accessory slowly softened rat life into more spectacle than duty, more pageantry than punishment. Yearbook photos of shorn men on the receiving end of a paddle began to be replaced with group photos of smiling coeds in cute caps à la the early Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers.

By the late 1950s, Auburn student handbooks carried merely hopeful suggestions that freshmen continue to follow rat rules as best they could. The 1960s were more of the same.

By the 1970s, rat cap sightings were rare, and the rats all but extinct.

A 1978 Opelika-Auburn News nostalgia piece offered theories on the demise—changing times, changing fashions. Dean of Students James Foy blamed the bouffant. It was kind of cruel, he said, to force a rat cap atop a beehive.

“Today,” the article read, “the Auburn Band is the only group that honors the time-honored tradition.”

But at some point, even the band stopped—with the caps, at least. Only the name remains, albeit with rewired connotations. Where once the term was explicitly pejorative, now it’s sweet.

Where now describing the welcome rats receive as a “warm reception” is completely sincere, it once dripped with irony. And probably some tears.

“…a long three months’ vacation will be sufficient for us to get into good trim to receive the incoming ‘Rats,’” read the freshmen class history in the 1898 Glomerata. “Shall we be kind to them? That is a useless question. We all firmly believe in the old maxim: ‘Do unto others as they have done unto you,’ and as we were accorded such a warm reception upon our entrance, the duty of making it interesting for all new men consequently devolves upon us and we shall endeavor to be equal to the occasion by dint of much muscular exercise during the summer.”

By Jeremy Henderson ’04