Before the Ivy

In January 1873, ten students at Harvard College started a newspaper. The Dean advised strongly against it. Five student papers on that campus had already been born and buried. Their first office was a room in Stoughton Hall. Their entire statement of purpose was a single line:

That paper became The Harvard Crimson. It has published continuously for more than a century and a half, surviving wars, economic crises, and generations of student editors.

Here is the part worth sitting with: none of that was visible in 1873.

In 1873 it was ten students, a doubtful dean, and a borrowed room. Harvard itself was already two centuries old and still decades away from meaning what it means today. The ivy came later. It always comes later.

At the beginning, there are only ever a few people who decide something should exist, and then go about the stubborn, unglamorous business of making it exist.

This is a note from inside one of those beginnings.

A session ago, GDG on Campus Babcock was a good chapter with good people and a familiar rhythm. Workshops. Study Jams. Monthly Meetups. Solid, respectable, and, we believed, capable of far more.

Some of what happened next sounds invented, so I’ll simply report it.

A student walked up to me in a hallway one afternoon and asked how he could get involved. He became the heartbeat of this community, put his own money into it more times than anyone knows, and spent nights on my floor during event planning, working through strategy until we fell asleep.

My roommate, quiet enough to disappear into a crowd and talented enough to build nearly everything you can click today, built almost every platform this chapter now runs from the corner of our room.

A team of students, some as young as eighteen, convinced Moniepoint to headline a student-run summit. They brought speakers from Google and Mastercard to Ilishan-Remo, moved more than five hundred people through a conference and over a thousand through a career fair, and took busloads of students into the offices of Paystack and Nithub so they could see with their own eyes that the industry is real and within reach.

We ran departmental elections on software we built ourselves because student democracy deserved better than paper and suspicion. We transformed a newsletter into the publication you’re reading now. We launched Babcock 100, an annual recognition platform that is, as you read this, assembling its Founding Class: one hundred students from every school and college whose work at this university will be documented and remembered instead of quietly walking out of the gate at graduation.

Today, those ideas live at:

A session ago, most of those addresses pointed at nothing.

There were weeks when sponsorships fell through, registrations slowed, timelines slipped, and we genuinely wondered whether some of it would happen at all. We kept building anyway.

I could never have done this alone. Anyone who was in the room will confirm the arithmetic.

Sophia Odiase, Co-Organizer, who brought the perspective of an entire other campus into ours.

Sharon Lawal, Operations Lead, whose reliability I never once had to question.

Olatilewa Braimah, Operations Lead, whose fire never dimmed, even when the room pushed back.

Habeeb Muhammed, Community Manager, the student from the hallway.

Victor Ibironke, Technical Lead, the quiet builder behind nearly everything you can click.

Favour Oluwatunmibi, Technical Lead, whose unconventional thinking helped us find sponsors and whose leadership kept rooms running when I couldn’t be in them.

Osedebame Itamah, who led RADAR’s editorial work.

Adedayo Timilehin, whose mentorship shaped more members than any single event we ran.

Tomilola Arogundade, quietly excellent on Infrastructure and Security.

Reuben Alabi, the reserved builder every team needs.

Osisanya Dayomisi, who led Design and Management.

Uchenna Akubuiro, Rex, who photographed everything and made it look like it mattered because he understood that it did.

Efegherimoni Oghenetejiri, our very own Queen Tey Tey, who somehow managed the work of three people during a semester she wasn’t even on campus.

Around them was a wider circle this chapter quietly depended on: Bassey, Xavier, Alli, Deola, Tamilore, Tomisin, Bolanle, and every designer, writer, photographer, volunteer, and member who took a brief and returned something better than what was asked.

Every one of them chose to spend their time building something bigger than themselves, with no guarantee it would amount to anything. That choice is the entire culture we tried to build. Everything else is detail.

Babcock University produces remarkable students every single session. We watched them build software with real users, run businesses from hostel rooms, publish research, lead communities, and fill stages.

Then we watched nearly all of it disappear at graduation, undocumented, carried out of the gate in the memories of a few friends.

That bothered us more than anything else.

So if you look closely at everything we built, you’ll notice the same idea repeated everywhere.

A publication that documents.

A voting platform that records.

A recognition archive that refuses to forget.

Institutions, in the end, are simply communities that learned how to remember.

Maybe you’re a new member in 2027 wondering what this chapter actually is.

Maybe you’re on the core team of a tenure we’ll never meet, awake at 2 a.m., digging through the archive the way we once dug through The Crimson’s.

Maybe you never joined anything at Babcock and simply wandered here by accident.

This article was written for you, and it has two things to tell you.

The first is that everything described above was done by students. Every platform. Every event. Every standard.

Students with exams, deadlines, and empty accounts who decided the work should exist and then built it.

Whatever doubt you carry about your own capacity to build, the page you’re reading is evidence against it.

The second is that this is a beginning, and beginnings are invitations.

We were not the first team in this chapter’s history, and we stand gladly on the work of every tenure before ours.

But I believe we set a particular motion in progress, and motion compounds.

I believe there will be a day when the name Babcock University carries weight in rooms none of us have entered yet. On applications. In boardrooms. In the places where the names of old universities open doors before their graduates say a word.

Those schools were not born with that reputation.

It was built for them, session after session, by people who mostly went unnamed, in rooms that were mostly uninspiring, through work that mostly felt ordinary while it was happening.

That work is now yours.

The ten students in Stoughton Hall said it best more than a century and a half ago:

We feel the same way.

Everything we truly have to say is already live.

Go and see it.

Then come and build the rest.