The other recent thread about how college life stacks up to that portrayed in fiction (particularly I Am Charlotte Simmons) got me wondering about partying in the dorms.
I’ve seen many movies and TV shows that portray the students throwing big keggers in the dorms. But where I went to school in the early 2000s drinking was strictly prohibted in the residence halls. And it’s not like we were a bunch of prudes. The place I went was actually pretty well known for being a party school, and indeed we did have some kick ass parties off campus. But in the dorms, having alcohol would automatically get you kicked out. That’s not to say that drinking didn’t happen, but when it did it was usually pretty discrete, like a couple of guys drinking beer in their room with the door closed or at most somebody walking over to their next door neighbor with a cup in hand.
Personally I can’t imagine many colleges allowing, or even winking at, heavy alcohol fueled revelry in the dorms, especially in this lawsuit-happy age when one drunk person falling down the stairs could potentially cost the school millions of dollars.
So do the scenes of drunken dorm revelry in the movies bear any resemblence to where you went to school. Was it ever like that in the residence halls? And if so, do any schools still allow people to bring kegs in and get trashed in the hallways.
At our school we had dorms and apartments. In the dorms, drinking was allowed as long as you were 21. But even then the RA’s could be pretty heavy handed if it get remotley out of control. The apartments were sort of set up like townhouses. Each apartment was big enough for 7 people, and there were full out drinking party/keggers over there. Not as big as the off campus parties, but it wasn’t a big deal to walk into an apartment to find 50 people in there. Also, as heavy handed as the RA’s could be, as long as it wasn’t too loud, you were OK.
I’m sure these parties weren’t allowed. Even overlooking the underage drinking and pot smoking going on, I’d be willing to bet kegs probably weren’t allowed, and I’m sure we violated the capacity for the apartments on a regular basis.
Our campus was pretty strict with on-campus drinking. People that were over 21 could drink and could theoretically throw parties. But they could count on their party being visited by campus security and they would get kicked out of the dorms if there was anyone under 21 even present. And you’d get on campus security’s bad list, meaning they’d look extra hard for the slightest slip up so that they could kick you out. The reason, of course, was lawsuits. They didn’t want someone’s dumbass kid to try to drink thirty shots and end up dead on their watch.
It was just too much of a hassle and so people threw their parties off-campus or deep in the woods.
Harvey Mudd College. I don’t have time to go into detail right now, but, in short, there were always huge alcohol fueled parties in the dorms.
Hopefully, another Mudder will be in here to go into more detail.
We could drink at 18 when I went but it was almost exclusively a commuter college so we drank at lunch or on special occasions (days ending in Y). Amazingly, nobody got trashed. Back then the food outlets were home grown. Sigh. Now it’s a campus school. It’s just not the same.
If you’re at least 21 and not living in a substance-free dorm you can have as much booze as you want in your dorm room; the administration figures that it is your home, and they have no right to tell you you can’t drink. Practically speaking, outside of the sub-free dorm, no one cares if the 18-year-old frosh has beer in his fridge.
As for parties, it never happens. This is either because we’re too nerdy to party, or more possibly, my school is too damn small to have a real party. If there is a party (which is technically permitted), and it’s loud, and someone else informs the party that the noise is preventing them from sleeping or studying, then the party has to quiet down. This applies even on Friday and Saturday nights, but is practically never an issue.
I went to a private college starting in 1982. Yup, there was lots of drinking. You could have it in your room and there was a pizza & beer pub right in the middle of campus, and the beer was dirt cheap. Keggers weren’t that uncommon. One fraternity got in trouble when one of its members fell out a window due to alcohol.
My brother was a biology major and had access to pure alcohol from the labs. Boy, did we make some strong-ass fruit punch out of that. I threw mine up. All over.
My college (I’m currently a junior, living off-campus) has a strict “If the door’s closed and you’re being quiet, we don’t care what you’re drinking” policy. They did care what you were smoking, incidentally. I had a quiet drink with my RA in my room at the end of the year, when it was really too late to fire her for it, actually, and that was no big deal. It’s also perfectly OK to walk down the hall completely trashed, actually, as long as you’re not drinking at the time. Most RAs take it a step further- if they see you inordinately drunk, they’ll make sure you get to sleep in your own bed, or even take you over to the health center. This does make for some big parties within the dorms with the drinking itself taking place strictly behind closed doors but people hopping from room to room freely. ResLife usually doesn’t try to stop it until midnight, when they usually bust the party up by invoking the “quiet hours” rules. It helps that we’re a little private school, not a big public one; we have many fewer requirements placed on us by the state.
I really like this system- no college can possibly stop students from experimenting with alcohol underage, so this system helps keep you somewhat safer while you do it. That said, I was two floors and half the building away from the “party section”; my best friend, who lived there, despised it. (The section, not the system.)
In my dorm (honors dorm) alcohol is banned, as it is on all of campus. But the RAs pretty much don’t care about booze in the dorms as long as you keep it plausibly deniable for them and you’re overage. If you’re underage and they find out, they’ll put the fear of God into you to not do it again. But they don’t want to get people in trouble, cause that’s work for them.
No alcohol related parties in the dorm though.
Freshman year at IU, 2004 - lots of drinking and drugs in the dorms, we just did it quietly. A guy on our floor got busted early in the year for weed, with cops and everything, and it put the fear of God in all the rest of us - from that point on, we did all of our drinking and drugs very carefully and quietly. Other dorms were rowdier, from what I’ve heard, supposedly had cops called to them all the time, fire alarms pulled every week, etc…but the hall I lived at was free from this sort of trouble.
I went to Kent State my freshman year. Students over 21, in certain dorm buildings were allowed alcohol. Nowhere else was it permitted. However, as long as no one complained, they didn’t really care what happened. There were always at least 10 or so empry cases of beer in the trash cans in the laundry room on Monday morning (and I lived in a no alcohol dorm). I really think that Kent was pretty much “as long as no one complains…we don’t care” for most things. I remember several times seeing kids smoking pot in the courtyard outside my dorm, and no one really cared.
I got to the University of Maryland right after Len Bias died. They attempted to crack (no pun intended) down on the partying in the dorms. I didn’t live in the dorms for long but there certainly were policies against drinking. They were all ignored. I never heard of anyone who got kicked out of the dorms for drinking. My RA at the time was pledging a black frat*. He was not there a lot. We would keep the keg in the shower. No one ever got in trouble.
*I specifically mention it was a black fraternity because where I was they were a lot more strict then the other frats. If you were a pledge in a black frat most of your free time was taken up by doing stuff like marching around campus in formation. YMMV
Okay, well, I went to university in Ontario, (where the legal age for drinking is only 19,) and lived for the first year in a suite-style dorm, basically six assigned students sharing on-campus apartments with lounge and kitchenette.
I’m pretty sure that alcohol was not actually prohibited in the suites. There was probably a routine speech from the resident advisors that freshman who were still 18 shouldn’t be indulging, but no spot-checks on that or anything. They DID make a big deal that there should never be any open alcohol in the stairways that connected different suites together, which I guess was a measure to keep entire residence houses from turning into giant booze parties with people drifting back and forth between suites.
And from what I remember, there was more serious drinking and partying going on in the officially licensed college pubs, and the nightclub under the student union, (all of which did check for IDs and birthdates some of the time.)
I went to school in the early 90s. The rules stated that no booze at all was allowed in the dorms regardless of what age you were. In practice, though, it was only enforced if you were making a lot of noise, and even then you got told to keep it down a couple of times.
It was like the rule was just there as a catch all, in case they wanted to bust you for something but couldn’t find a serious violation.
I was an RA at a party school during the 2004-2005 school year. The official policy was that alcohol could not be consumed in a resident hall* room if there were people under 21 present and could not be present in a resident hall room if no one of age lived there. If alcohol was being carried into or out of the building, it had to be done by someone of age and had to be concealed.
In practice, the rules were, so long as the RA’s neither see the alcohol nor are made aware of it in any other obvious way, nobody got in trouble. Most of the alcohol charges I wrote were from freshman who would leave alcohol bottles on their dresser or out in the open during breaks. I told them that room checks would be done, but that we didn’t go through dressers or closets, but they would still leave things in the open. I had one eighteen year old leave an entire six pack of beer on her dresser and she was shocked to return to school only to have a charge form waiting for her. :rolleyes:
Eventually, my residents figured out that if they didn’t drink in the resident halls, they wouldn’t get in trouble. If they did drink in the resident halls and they were noisy about it, they would get busted almost immediately. As such, there were very few parties in resident halls.
*To quote res-life training, “Dorm is derived from the French word for sleeping. We do more than sleep in resident halls, we live, learn, and grow as a community.”
That’s the way it was at my school. People would come in trashed all the time, but as long as you didn’t have a drink in hand, nobody cared and in fact the RAs, on a few occasions, helped me back to my room. They were pretty cool when it came to stuff like that, and yes I’m sure a few looked the other way if they happened to catch someone hiding a bottle of Crown Royal under the bed. As long as you weren’t walking around with, say, a beer to your lips, or otherwise making an ass out of yourself, you were all right. But if you insisted on openly flaunting the rules, your ass was out.
I was at the University of Iowa in 1984 - in Burge hall. There MAY have been some residents who were not trashed on Friday and Saturday night. But the drinking age was 19 and the majority of the students old enough to drink.
I was also an RA and I had a similar experience. My policy was that if you got caught, it was your own fault because while I adhered to the rules pretty strictly, I also didn’t go looking for reasons to bust people. At the same time, I think that I established a level of trust high enough that my kids could come to me if things got out of hand. I’ve spent more than my fair share of nights in the ER with way-past-drunk residents. The kids, not the docs 
Dorm rooms were generally too small to throw parties. We drank a lot in them before going to a real party though. One room was a converted lounge and we had a beer pong tournament there, I suppose that counts.
I attended CSU at Fort Collins for a while. I live in Ellis hall back in 1988 so my contribution is dated. We were a hard partying bunch. Drinking age for beer was 18 yrs old. Everyone was 18 or older.
Not weekly but certainly monthly floor parties with kegs. My roommate and I kept a used keg as a telephone stand. We were in charge of collecting money and trading the keg and pump back in for new.
During College Days a 4 day party thrown by the University there was no such thing as an open container law on campus. The dorm had an out door party with food on the grill, the students supplied the beer. Everyone got trashed on the grass just outside the cafeteria. The party went on till dawn. CSU has since ended College days… to much drunken destruction.
Ellis hall was the Ag. Sciences dorm. Lots of cowboys. After several beers the cowboys and girls would often head down to common area and practice lassoing chairs often being dragged around by one of the more drunken members of the posse. They weren’t above lassoing the unwary passerby.