Prior to moving to its present location on Stanley Street, the school, then known alternately as the "State Normal School" and the "New Britain Normal School," occupied what is now called the Camp School building in downtown New Britain. The graduation ceremony for the first class (numbering five graduates) took place on October 1, 1851, in the old
South Congregational Church. Commencements continued to be held off-campus until 1885. No ceremonies were held in 1868 or 1869, as the school's operations had been suspended by state officials. From about 1873 to 1885, two graduations were held each year: a "first class" in January and a "second class" in June. In 1884 the college moved into the new Camp building. From that time until 1925, an average of about 80 students (nearly all young women) received teaching diplomas each year at a graduation ceremony in the school's assembly hall on a weekday morning in late June.
On-campus commencements at the Stanley Street Campus (1925-1993) From 1925 to 1935, commencement was held in the auditorium of the school's new building on Stanley Street. The first outdoor commencement ceremonies were held in 1936, in the college's amphitheater. The arrangement of an outdoor ceremony—held indoors in case of rain—continued until the 1990s. Over time, the location of the outdoor exercises included the college quadrangle and first of two athletics fields known as "Arute field." By the late 1940s, a building named "Memorial Hall" was used for those commencement exercises moved indoors because of rain, such as the 1955 event. In 1959, the college, which had been renamed "Teachers College of Connecticut" in 1933, became "Central Connecticut State College". When it rained on the day of the 1963 graduation, the ceremonies were moved into the campus' newest structure, Herbert D. Welte Hall. Although Welte Hall was employed from 1989 to 2013 for CCSU's annual graduate commencement, as well as for graduations of
Tunxis Community College,
Charter Oak State College, nursing and police academies and high schools, it was soon too small to serve as an indoor backup facility for CCSU's annual commencement. By 1965, with the number of CCSC graduates having doubled to 684 since 1960, the quadrangle could barely hold the more than 2,000 attendees, and the following year the exercises were moved to another new building, Harrison J. Kaiser Hall, which had been dedicated September 18, 1965—but soon the annual graduation ceremonies threatened to outgrow even Kaiser, which was designed to seat 4,500 spectators (not including those on the gym floor). One newspaper report referred to "3,500 people stacked up to 22 rows high," "stewing" in the June heat at the 1967 event; another article the following year describes "the estimated 5,700 jammed into steaming Kaiser Hall for the program." From 1969 to 1993, undergraduate commencement took place on Arute Field, a football facility in the northeast corner of campus, with the gymnasium in Kaiser Hall used occasionally in the event of rain. As graduating classes continued to get larger (e.g., 322 graduated in 1960, 696 in 1966, 1274 in 1969, and over 2400 in 1975), officials stopped reading the names of individual graduates during the undergraduate exercises. The reading of names was reinstated in 1992. The last on-campus commencement was held on Friday, May 28, 1993.
Antonia C. Novello,
US Surgeon General, was the commencement speaker; she and Andrzej Wiszniewski, the Rector of the
Technical University of Wrocław, were also awarded honorary doctorates at the ceremony.
The move to Hartford (1994-2019) The discussion to relocate CCSU's annual commencement ceremonies to the Hartford Civic Center was explained by Kauffman in the
Hartford Courant: For the first time, Central Connecticut State University in New Britain will hold its graduation exercises off campus. They will be at the Hartford Civic Center May 28 [1994]. The reason: a space squeeze on campus. When the weather is good, commencement is at Arute Field, the school's football stadium. When it rains, ceremonies are moved indoors to Kaiser gymnasium, where graduates are limited to two guest tickets. which was not held. However, December commencements were begun again a few years later. Before Hartford graduations became institutionalized, it was believed by some that they would be temporary—that "whenever CCSU has an adequate place on campus, the ceremonies can be moved back." Indeed, since 1994, the state of Connecticut has funded a number of studies to address the university's lack of space. One, in 2004, explored the possibility of a CCSU sports arena at the present location of the New Brite Plaza Shopping Center, about from the main campus. Two changes took effect in the 2017-2018 academic year. First, graduate and undergraduate commencements were co-located; the last graduate-only commencement was held in May 2017. Second, May ceremonies at the PeoplesBank Arena were divided into two separate sessions to accommodate the growing number of graduates and family members who wished to attend; an on-campus Winter commencement was also added for both undergraduate and graduate students.
Covid-19 and the Return to Campus (2020-present) The 2020 ceremonies were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortly before the traditional commencement date in May, the university secured permission to schedule exercises for Sunday, October 11, at the XL Center.; but due to state COVID guidelines, the event was cancelled in September and replaced with a virtual ceremony which was held on Saturday, October 17. In April 2021, with the loosening of state guidelines governing in-person gatherings, the university announced that commencement exercises would be held on campus for the first time since 1993. To ensure social distancing, a total of four commencements (one for each of the University's four academic schools) were conducted over two days at Arute Field. This was reduced to two ceremonies on one day in 2022. In December of that year, a winter commencement was held in Welte Hall for the first time since 2018. ==Order of Exercises==