OAK.  In the English universities, the outer door of a student’s room.

No man has a right to attack the rooms of one with whom he is not in the habit of intimacy.  From ignorance of this axiom I had near got a horse-whipping, and was kicked down stairs for going to a wrong oak, whose tenant was not in the habit of taking jokes of this kind.—­The Etonian, Vol.  II. p. 287.

A pecker, I must explain, is a heavy pointed hammer for splitting large coals; an instrument often put into requisition to force open an oak (an outer door), when the key of the spring latch happens to be left inside, and the scout has gone away.—­The Collegian’s Guide, p. 119.

Every set of rooms is provided with an oak or outer door, with a spring lock, of which the master has one latch-key, and the servant another.—­Ibid., p. 141.

“To sport oak, or a door,” says the Gradus ad Cantabrigiam, “is, in the modern phrase, to exclude duns, or other unpleasant intruders.”  It generally signifies, however, nothing more than locking or fastening one’s door for safety or convenience.

I always “sported my oak” whenever I went out; and if ever I found any article removed from its usual place, I inquired for it; and thus showed I knew where everything was last placed.—­Collegian’s Guide, p. 141.

If you persist, and say you cannot join them, you must sport your oak, and shut yourself into your room, and all intruders out.—­Ibid., p. 340.

Used also in some American colleges.

And little did they dream who knocked hard and often at his oak in vain, &c.—­Yale Lit.  Mag., Vol.  X. p. 47.

OATHS.  At Yale College, those who were engaged in the government were formerly required to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration appointed by the Parliament of England.  In his Discourse before the Graduates of Yale College, President Woolsey gives the following account of this obligation:—­

“The charter of 1745 imposed another test in the form of a political oath upon all governing officers in the College.  They were required before they undertook the execution of their trusts, or within three months after, ’publicly in the College hall [to] take the oaths, and subscribe the declaration, appointed by an act of Parliament made in the first year of George the First, entitled, An Act for the further security of his Majesty’s person and government, and the succession of the Crown in the heirs of the late Princess Sophia, being Protestants, and for extinguishing the hopes of the pretended Prince of Wales, and his open and secret abettors.’  We cannot find the motive for prescribing this oath of allegiance and abjuration in the Protestant zeal which was enkindled by the second Pretender’s movements in England,—­for, although belonging to this same year 1745, these movements were subsequent to the charter,—­but rather in the desire