1913
Foster Sanford, Rutgers' first "real" football coach and a member of the National Football Hall of Fame, takes the Rutgers team in hand. He was famed for his innovations, including the "hurdle play," in which a lightweight member of the track team, suited up in pants with leather loops, carried the ball while being hurled over the line by two halfbacks.

1918
The New Jersey College for Women--now Douglass College--opens. Two curricula are offered: liberal arts and home economics. The college's entire library consists of about a dozen books stacked on the registrar's desk.

With anti-foreign sentiment rampant during World War I, a group of students--goaded by a speech instructor--tar and feather a foreign-born student and parade him down George Street as a punishment for declining to buy a war bond.

1919
Paul Robeson, the only black in his class and the third in Rutgers' history, gives the valedictorian address at commencement. Hailed as perhaps the greatest college football player of his time, he had been hazed so unmercifully his freshman year that he lost several fingernails because his own teammates purposely stomped his hands during pileups.

Lacking the funds to construct a proper building, Dean Mabel Smith Douglass of the College for Women has a gymnasium built from packing boxes that were originally intended to ship airplane engines to Europe during World War I.