Rustication (academia) - Use in The United States

Use in The United States

"The penalty for plagiarism at Harvard Extension is a failing grade in the course and rustication from the university for at least one calendar year…" Sue Weaver Schopf noted on her course syllabus in 2009.

The term also was used in the United States in the 19th century, and on occasion, later. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, in The Gilded Age, have a character explain the term:

"Philip used to come to Fallkill often while he was in college. He was once rusticated here for a term."

"Rusticated?"

"Suspended for some College scrape."

In a story in the August 1858 Atlantic Monthly, a character reminisces:

"It was long before you were born, my dear, that, for some college peccadilloes,—it is so long ago that I have almost forgotten now what they were,—I was suspended (rusticated we called it) for a term, and advised by the grave and dignified president to spend my time in repenting and in keeping up with my class. I had no mind to come home; I had no wish, by my presence, to keep the memory of my misdemeanors before my father's mind for six months; so I asked and gained leave to spend the summer in a little town in Western Massachusetts, where, as I said, I should have nothing to tempt me from my studies."

Kevin Starr writes of Richard Henry Dana, Jr. that:

"Harvard's rigid rules and narrow curriculum had proved equally repressive. Rusticated for taking part in a student rebellion, Dana had spent six months in quiet rural study in Andover under a kindly clerical tutor."

A biographer refers to one of James Russell Lowell's college letters as "written while he was at Concord because rusticated."

In a 1932 letter to TIME Magazine, publisher William Randolph Hearst denied he had been expelled from Harvard College, but had instead been "rusticated in for an excess of political enthusiasm" and had simply never returned.

At Rice University, rustication refers to a punishment separate from suspension. Students who have been rusticated are banned from social activities on campus and are only allowed on campus to attend class.

In the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots the Headmaster of the Imperial College of Engineering said to 3 students, "You've been rusticated," after he discovered they stole a copy of the final exam .

George Clooney refers to his "rusticated friend" in the film O Brother Where Art Thou.