The college that turned itself Scottish

The teams at Alma College used to be the Fighting Presbyterians. That is a real thing a coach once had to yell. In 1931 the school ran a contest to pick something better, and the winner was the Scots — a nod to the Presbyterian Church’s roots in Scotland — and the place has leaned into the bagpipes ever since.

The college itself goes back to 1887. The Presbyterian Synod of Michigan had been hunting for a spot to build a college, and a lumber baron named Ammi Wright offered thirty acres in Alma plus two buildings, with a $50,000 gift from a Bay City man named Alexander Folsom on top. Classes started that September with 95 students and nine teachers. The town was already a Scottish-flavored place — the local doctor had named it for a battle in the Crimean War — so a Scottish college fit right in.

Today the Scottish thing is not a costume the school puts on once a year. Pipers play at every formal ceremony from the fall welcome through spring graduation, so students walk in and out of their college careers to the drone of bagpipes. In 1999 Alma registered its own tartan — a specific plaid pattern, filed and official, that belongs to the college and nobody else. You will see it on sashes and scarves around campus.

The college also lit the fuse on the town’s biggest weekend. In 1968 a piper-minded alum and the school’s development director talked the Chamber of Commerce into staging Highland games, and the Alma Highland Festival was born. More than half a century later it still fills the town every Memorial Day weekend with kilts, caber-tossing, and a massed pipe band loud enough to rattle the windows on Superior Street.