Yea, drinking is allowed in the dorms at my school
Aside: OP, is your last name really the last name indicated in your user name?
My school disallowed open alcohol in the hallways, but that didn’t stop parties from happening. I can also recall once (key word: once) someone hired a live band. That did not go over well with the staff.
Parties tended to happen more in the bays* than in Alex Hall** so it didn’t quite look like the movies. Still, it wasn’t sedate and I don’t think the tendency of some staff members to join in helped keep things down. Fridays and Mondays could be counted on to not be particularly quiet.
*Boys’ dorms, three floors of four rooms each–basically a stairwell for a hallway.
**Girls’ dorm
Went to UofI in 78 and lived in dorms for 2 years. At the time I believe the drinking age was 18 in Urbana, and 19 in Champaign (it was changed shortly thereafter).
I cannot recall any limits on drinking in the dorms. On weekends floors would host huge parties/dances down in the cafeteria and in the common rooms in the basement with kegs and/or Everclear punch. It kinda amazes me to this day that they allowed them, as folks would be puking and passing out all over the place.
They also showed movies in the common rooms, and we regularly brought booze down to drink during the film, making no effort to be discrete. I remember (the beginning of) one day when they were showing Kelly’s Heroes and we brought down jugs of screwdrivers which we drank everytime someone got killed on screen…
People also would host parties in their rooms with either kegs or punch. Common were Friday afternoon parties starting around 3 p.m., or Friday/Saturday evening parties - usually early evening before folks hit the bars and then the late-night parties. The rooms would be packed elbow-to-asshole, with people spilling into the halls.
We also had parties with open drinking and pot smoking in the floor lounge. Of course, I believe our RA was less active than many/most.
Oh yeah - there were no limits on cigarette smoking in the dorms, and we made absolutely no attempt to hide our daily pot smoking.
My kids are in college now, and I am frequently struck by how different times were…
I was there from 88-94, in the dorms my freshman & sophomore years. The rules at that time were that if you were 21+ you could drink in your room but no drinking in the common areas and no underage drinkers. They didn’t do room checks or anything but if you flouted the rules you’d get busted and chewed out. I remember one set of jackasses who lived right around the corner from me who thought they could do whatever they wanted at the age of 19 and got in a lot of trouble for it. Aside from that the general rule was “24 hour courtesy hours” meaning if you were being really loud and someone asked you to turn it down to a dull roar you were supposed to do so, and “quiet hours” late at night (shut up, people are trying to sleep). During finals it was 24 hour quiet hours, they didn’t kid around.
The one thing I remember that would get you into worse trouble than providing beer to your 20 year old roomie was pulling the fire alarms. That was a serious safety issue and people would get thrown out of school and turned over to the cops.
Drinking age was 21 however the bar age was still 19, you just couldn’t drink (nudge nudge wink wink). For those who have never been to Champaign-Urbana there are approximately 10 million bars within 6 blocks in the downtown area (Green Street by campus) and it’s a sizeable school (40,000 students when I was there). I think they looked at the situation reasonably, said “There is going to be a lot of drinking, we can either make sure it stays downtown where we can keep an eye on it and nobody needs to drive, or we can enforce 21 as the drinking/bar age and that will ensure that people go driving to offcampus parties and we’ll have much worse problems”.
I went to a few parties there, and sometimes campus security or an RA would show up and confiscate the extremely obvious booze, but anything even slightly hidden we’d keep, and we’d just be quiet the rest of the night. But I think we mostly just wandered off onto the knoll nearby and drink there.
You are all on double-secret probation! 
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Funny how things change over the course of a decade. I’ve got some friends who went there in the late 60s, and have a hard time believing their stories about a strong National Guard presence …
My kid goes to UofI now. I don’t think he keeps booze/beer in his dorm room, and he’s not a huge drinker. But he is 19 which gets him into the bars, and he seems to be able to pretty much drink whatever he wants whenever he wants.
I was at EIU and they allowed drinking in the dorms if you were over 21. My roommate even brought a keg in (against regulations) once which I missed because I was out for the weekend. At the end of our freshman year, the RA on our floor basically admitted to us that he knew about it but didn’t do anything because he was cool with us. My roommate and I were both over 21 and both right out of the military so we were smart about our behavior.
Most of the dorms at my school were “freshman only” so there typically wouldn’t be anyone old enough to buy alchohol in the dorms. Not that it would stop people, but it was very easy to enforce and made sure you couldn’t have those big Back To School dorm blowouts. That said, sometimes we would have little “parties” which were basically just a dozen or so guys from the hall drinking beer and playing Asshole or Three-Man. Maybe you drank a few beers while watching TV or studying.
The big blowout party scene was at the fraternities. There were 35 fraternities each with their own house that roomed up to about 40 guys. There were different architectural styles ranging from big columned mansions like you see in Animal House and other films to more dorm-like brick and concrete structures that looked like a Motel-6.
Fraternity houses typically had a number of large multifunctional “common areas”. Typically there is a “party room” which is simply a large room with a permenant bar and a concrete floor with a drain. They are ususally set up with a DJ booth and sound system and maybe some crazy crap on the walls - busted pieces of goalposts, stolen street signs, and other various trophies and fraternity memorbilia (securly fastened to the wall so it could not become some other fraternities memorbillia).
Fraternities are (or were, it’s been a long time) required to register Friday and Saturday night parties with the school by providing a “guest list”. At the time, the brothers (or pledges if it was pledging season) would perform all the duties such as security, id checking, bartending, bouncing, general hosting duties and “cop watch”. Cop watch and guarding side doors, etc sucked. Bartendering and the front door greeting, ID checking and bouncing duties were the best. Typically we rotate through 1 hours shifts so everyone gets to enjoy the party. Typically extra guys (or girls we grab out of the crowd or our girlfriends) will help our on bar duty because it’s a lot of fun. Extra guys will also help out on door if the crowd gets too large and unruly or if they are just bored. Sometimes just having a bunch of people out in front of the house makes the people who have to wait feel less excluded from the party.
Parties are basically run like a bar or nightclub with no cover and no charge for booze. Admission is at the brothers discretion, however unless there is a compelling reason not to let you in (like you are being a jerk, they are generally open to all, limited only by the capacity of the fraternity. The advantage, of course, to being in a fraternity or being a close friend of the fraternity is that your friend can take you around a side door or you can hang out in little side parties elsewhere in the house while the common folk are stuffed in the main room. Basically a similar model to a VIP section in a night club.
Typically campus security would come by every now and then to inspect and make their presence known. First the “cop watch” would flick a switch from his lonely pearch on the balcony turning on a light in the party room. The ligth tells everyone to put their beer down if you aren’t stamped 21 (and there are brothers to help you if you forget…it’s free beer so what do you care?). A pair of house officers then go to great the campus cops and walk them through the party. If all is well, they depart and everything resumes.
Oh yeah. The guest list is mostly bullshit anyway. It’s just a hoop we had to jump through for the school. Most of the names on it were made up anyway.
And that’s basically that. There might be about 5-6 big parties on a given week. You could easily get so many people that there would be a line to the street waiting to get in.
The movies make it look like throwing one of these parties is just a matter of having Van Wilder or Frank the Tank scream ‘Toga!!’ and 500 people just show up and kegs just magically appear. In reality, there actually is a bit of planning and organizing promoting and clean up, all at the cost and labor of the fraternity in order to make sure people have a relatively safe and fun time, we don’t get our house trashed (because we live in it) and we stay on good terms with the neighbors and the school.
The dorms at my school were largely used by freshmen, but being in Nova Scotia (drinking age of 19) this still resulted in an increasing number of people who could legally drink through the school year–this was especially true up until my freshman year (when Ontario dropped their Grade 13 program) because a significant portion of incoming students would already be 19 in September.
My experience was basically the same msmith’s. There was some upperclass housing, but most of that was apartments that weren’t really monitored (there were “RA” type people, but they weren’t that involved).
I only lived on-campus my freshman year, but our rooms were TINY. My RA basically had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it came to drinking & pot - ie, if she couldn’t smell it and you weren’t acting drunk, she wasn’t going to ask about it. So roaming the halls in a drunk, loud group wouldn’t have worked well.
Yes, sometimes we had groups drinking or whatnot in the rooms, but anything big mostly went on at houses (not necessarily of the frat variety). Usually a friend of a friend had a rented house, that kind of thing. I went to school in Boston, which helped too - “campus” wasn’t isolated from the city, so there was plenty going on outside of school.
Like Magiver, legal age for alcohol was 18 when I was in college, but I’m pretty sure it was prohibited in the dorms, even if you were of age. I got written up once for having a bottle of wine in my room, and I was 18 (just).
UCSD, late 1970s.
The drinking age might just as well have been 17, and pot might as well have been legal too. The RAs were likely to be with us doing it, and almost never laid any authority trip on us man, dig? (Hah! a little joke. We didn’t talk that way any more.) On the other hand, they were strict about possibly dangerous or damaging horseplay such as water balloon fights and fire-hydrant hijinks. Once my floor mounted a retaliatory balloon attack against the neighboring dorm. Our RA caught us at it and pronounced the same punishment for each of us, “You’re fined $5,and you’re fined $5, and you’re…”. It’s strange to think of it now, but 5 was actually a decent chunk of spending money if you were living on campus with the board plan and only needed to carry money for incidental expenses. During happy hour at the Bratskellar you could get draft beer for just .25 a glass. A small glass, and it was Coors…but I digress! At any rate, what happened then was that all the fine money eventually went to pay for a dorm kegger, in which the RA jovially joined.
On edit:
I recall from visits to the UC Irvine German Club that the RAs there were a lot more strict. Pot smokers needed to block the space under the door to prevent the escape of tell-tale smoke; and booze was kept out of sight.
UCLA has been the outstanding exception in the UC system for not having a pub. The story is that a particular professor succeeded in keeping the campus dry, arguing that with Westwood Village offering plenty of places to drink, there was no need for a bar on campus. One of the oldest restaurants on campus is called The Cooperage, evidently that was supposed to be the pub.
I went to CSM from 01-06 but only lived in the dorms for one year. We only had one kegger on my floor and that was at the end of the year while the RA was out studying for finals and unfortunately he got invited to our party by a friend of a friend of a friend. Luckily we only had a half keg which was tapped by the time he showed up.
As for drinking in general only freshmen and sophomores were allowed in the dorms and the policy was no alcohol under 21 but that just meant that we had to not be obvious. I had 4 fingers of Jim Beam in a cup once while standing in the hallway talking to a bunch of people and a RA came by for floor checks. He asked me what was in th cup and I told him it was coke after which he walked off. The next day my RA came up to me and told me if I was going to drink straight whiskey I needed to do it in my room so the smell didn’t permeate the whole hallway.
The only guy who got busted for alcohol left a case of beer on a chair in the middle of his room with the door open when he went to class. he had to take the floor’s garbage out for a week. Other floors got more creative and during spring break an empty room was broken into and a kiddy pool was set up with sand around the outside and a lifeguard stand they went through 4 kegs that week.
So ya college in the dorms was a drunken as the movies you just couldn’t be quite as obvious.
UCLA, 1985-1987 Rieber and Sproul Halls: The rule was any and all drinking had to be behind closed doors. As long as the door was closed, no hassle, whether underage or not. For pot, roll up a towel and stick it at the base of the door so the smell won’t go out in the hall. Plausible deniability seemed to be the goal. Public drunkenness, as long as you weren’t being an asshole or holding a drink, was tolerated.
Pretty much every floor hosted a party each quarter, so there was at least one party, usually two or more, every weekend. The setup was drinks in a student’s room, DJ dancing in the floor lounge, drunken making out in the stairwells (or if you were lucky enough that your roommate went home for the weekend, in your room)
I’m graduating this year from the University of Alabama. The bigger dorms are very thorough and extremely strict. Girls entering the large girl’s dorm aren’t even allowed to bring in or leave with unidentified plastic cups, lest they contain a bit of alcohol. Room raids are common, and they will take your alcohol, regardless of age. The Saudi kids are kind of mad that RA’s keep stealing their hookahs, which are used outside and only for tobacco, but there you have it.
I, however, lived in a bizarro dorm. We had no RA’s and made our own rules. Parties were essentially continuous, and the one party that got us kicked out of the building was the annual “Spring Orgy”, where we would make one of the halls into a gigantic slip’n’slide. No one smoked anything in public areas because there was a seriously badass fire alarm, but generally you could get away with whatever in the privacy of your own room. We painted walls, built lofts, installed security cameras outside our dorm doors, and one fellow even replaced his door lock with an electronic one that could only be opened through an SSH tunnel via his cell phone.
There were no major incidents, but it was a fucking blast.
I still have a hard time believing that on one occasion some guys posted a sign in a dorm elevator saying that they wanted to buy some pot. “A friend” took care of them and there were no repercussions for anyone.
I can confirm that story. I worked at the Cooperage while we were trying to get it going (1984-1987). We had everything in place: a couple big screen TVs, a stage and sound system for live entertainment, a kick-ass pizza kitchen, an open-air patio that was fenced off from the rest of the student union building. All we were missing was a liquor license from the state. That one professor threw up every bureaucratic roadblock he could to hold up our permit. We used the bar area as a soft serve ice cream stand to prevent the real estate from going to waste. Sometime after I graduated the school eventually gave up. Last time I visited campus, I saw the whole bar area had been torn out and replaced with a salad bar, and the awesome hearty deep dish pizza had gone yuppie-style frou-frou pizza.
Funny this should be posted…
I went on a campus tour of Dartmouth (yes, THE Dartmouth) and on the tour the tour guide said in front of parents and students to be… “There is drinking on campus, and in the dorms, and in our frats/sororities, we don’t see it to be a problem here at Dartmouth, the only time campus security gets involved is when someone is getting hurt, or there is potential for someone to get hurt, very few times are the police involved”
I currently attend a different institute, the campus I am on is considered a “Dry Campus”… people of age are allowed to drink and the only amount of alcohol they are allowed to have on them is the max that one person can consume in one night, so as to stop parties from happening.
However, I also know for a fact, and have been involved in partying at my school. If we are partying in the dorms, its nothing huge, we have a few, maybe 10 people in our room, and we drink quietly-ish. Most of my partying is done off campus, as my boyfriend, and my friends are in their senior year of college and have the almighty beach houses!
Most campus’ so far as I know are dry campus’… Some more lax than others.
Was the “free beer” a common thing? Because I was under the impression it wasn’t. Normally other places I went you had to pay anywhere from 5$-20$ to get in the party.
My GF at the time was in a sorority at another nearby school. Unlike my school, their sororities could throw parties and they could charge money for them because their sorority house wasn’t a campus building. It was just some big house about ten of them lived in right off campus. Their social budget was only a couple hundred bucks and they expected that the parties should be able to finance themselves. Her sisters were sort of shocked when I told them our budget was probably about $10,000 a semester ($300 “social dues” x 35 brothers = $10500) just for booze for parties (mixers and cups and stuff could be passed through our food budget which came out of a different fund).