My freshman year at UC San Diego was started in 1982. Massive keggers were a normal weekend occurrence in the dorms. Beer, hard alcohol, pot and magic mushrooms were ubiquitous. The authorities started to get annoyed if white powders started to appear but that was about it. The party scenes from Animal House were a reasonable approximation of what kinds of things went on. It’s a wonder no one died.
There were a lot of people who almost died though. People started to complain and the administration started to clamp down little by little. I was only in the dorms for two years but by the time I finished grad school in 1990 it was like another world. The dorms were totally dry and any parties that got notice got you booted from on campus housing.
My buddy was in a frat, and began a yearly event cleverly called GHMF - which stood for “Get High MF.” I recall ubiquitous hosts making the rounds with a bottle of Jack in one hand, and a tumbler full of joints in the other. For some reason or another my memory of the rest of the night is somewhat hazy …
Corroborated. Class of '04. When did you attend, Holden?
Drinking was common in the dorms at Harvey Mudd. The dorm I lived in for 3 years (North), often had a keg in the fridge in the dorm lounge for the enjoyment of the residents. It would be provided by the dorm for special events, or leftover from a party. We threw 4 or 5 reasonably major parties a year, and that was one out of 7 (at the time) dorms on campus. Most of the other dorms hosted similar events. Most of those parties were free to students.
There only major restriction that I recall was that the first week of school was “Dry Week”. This was to let the freshmen acclimate a bit before being surrounded by drunken revelry. Of course, it culminated in a campus-wide “Wet Season” party. Alcohol was a big part of the culture. On the morning when the freshmen had their first test, people would be standing at the edge of the main walk to academics with bottles, trying to get the frosh to do shots with them. No one cared about underage (<21) drinking, but the one time I do recall there being some substantial attention from the administration was when a pre-frosh (ie, high school senior visiting for a weekend) got really drunk.
You could also have private parties in the dorms. They were supposed to be limited to 10 or so people, but in practice they weren’t really limited as long as people didn’t complain. We had 30 or so people in our suite with no problems.
Yeah, at least if you were cute and female. Unfortunately, I didn’t drink beer in college (still don’t). And as a result of college don’t drink tequila or gin either…but some guy was always willing to give a cute girl a drink.
In the late 70s and early 80s, Macalaster College’s Spring Fling would buy pot for the students. My understanding was that it wasn’t QUITE an open thing - there was no line item on the Spring Fling budget for pot and you had to know someone on the committee to find it. But I’ve been told from several sources that the committee would purchase it out of the student fees budget.
Beer at fraternity parties was free for everyone. By law we couldn’t charge otherwise we would need a liquor license.
The “off campus” scene was pretty big too. You had a lot of GDIs (God Damn Independents) or older Greeks who didn’t want to live in their houses any more. In many ways, I thought those were more fun because you didn’t have hundreds of “randoms” showing up to the parties.
And then later on, there was the off campus bar scene. There was only like one main bar and a couple of minor bars withing walking distance though. About 15 minutes away, a hotel bar by the airport used to have a $10 all you can drink happy hour (from 4pm to 7pm). That was a lot of fun if you could find someone to drive you there and back.
“Cocktails” were also big at my school. Everyone gets dressed up like a bunch of preppy douchebags to party with mixed drinks and jazz music from about 7pm - 9pm.
Tailgates too during football season.
So pretty much a typical weekend went like this:
Thursday:
Hotel party or Beruit at the fraternities or an off campus party
Friday:
Airport hotel bar happy hour
Cocktails
Fraternity party
Mid 70’s mid-west. We had semi-regular get-togethers with the college Profs, no age minimum. As far as pot went, the senior RA for the whole college told everyone to pop popcorn so he wouldn’t smell it and have to bust us. I was the bouncer/bartender at the College pub at the ripe old age of 19.
Anybody out there remember GaS or GaF parties? Sigmachi’s I’m looking at you.
Tulane, late ‘80s. The drinking age was 18 for all intents and purposes. The only enforcement issue I remember in the dorms was not to drink in the hall during Parents’ Weekend. And to be honest I’m not sure it was actually a rule. It was more like, “could ya do us a favor, here.” It was actually possible to use res-life recreation funds to purchase a keg to have with a barbecue, or do a wine tasting, if you jumped through some administrative hoops.
Big state school (U of KY) in the mid-90s. We supposedly had an “alcohol-free campus”–except, of course, for the full bar at the Faculty Club, which still bugs me even though I’m faculty now. On-campus frat houses were also somehow exempt; I think they were declared to not be a part of campus the same way the Vatican isn’t a part of Italy. But booze in the dorms was strictly verboten.
In practice, this only meant that there were no big drunken parties in the actual dorms, and you had to at least put up a pretense of being sneaky when you were bringing booze to your room. The only time they even tried to enforce it was when things started to get out of hand in the freshman boys’ dorm (aka the Correctional Facility). Over in the honors dorm, we were all such dorks that it was mostly academic–who needs booze and sex when you’ve got X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter?–but my RA was always happy to make a run for us underage souls if we wanted anything.
Not true. UC Santa Cruz doesn’t have a pub either - and the campus is set aways from town, so you can’t just stroll off to a bar, either.
Fortunately for people who want to party, the campus is basically a big forest and it’s very easy to hide from prying eyes. I was kind of a prude back when I was there, though, and didn’t really partake.
I went to a private <unnamed-denomination> school from 1985-88, and though some kids were straight-edge, most of us were downright drunks. There were plenty of booze and drugs to go around, and this was small-town America. We would occasionally visit the bigger college towns nearby for bigger, wilder parties, but there was generally a lot of debauchery at our little school.
There’s a tiny little bar built into the back of that restaurant by the bookstore, but I don’t think it’s ever been used. I think you can get a glass of beer there from the counter (no refills) so long as you don’t take it off premises.
But yeah, they don’t call us the university of casual sex and cannabis for nothing. If you’re not being loud and obnoxious, there’s really no risk of anyone getting in your business about it. This is the only university I’ve been to, so I didn’t think much about how it’d be anywhere else. I even did a double-take when I saw the date Argent Towers wrote; where I’m from, cops don’t even have the legal authority to bust someone for weed.
But yeah, drinking is only tolerated behind closed doors. Hosting a kegger for an entire floor like other people said would get a bunch of people kicked off campus without question. Though who would want to party in a smelly old dorm when an armload of firewood, a bag of marshmallows, and a handle of vodka can be transformed into more than the sum of their parts?
Granted, this was in the late 80’s, and things may have changed since then, but at the state university where I spent my first years of college, drinking in the dorms was strictly forbidden. However, the RA would generally look the other way providing nothing got out of hand.
We had dorms for 21 and above students that allowed alcohol in your room - no noticeable parties though. I stayed in the under 21 dorm the whole time. Basically if you reasonably concealed your booze coming into the building and didn’t throw a large party, you were A-okay.
Many times, I would leave - walking past the front desk and security - with an empty duffel bag – only to return fifteen minutes later laden down with a duffel containing a 30 pack. The important thing to know was that they had a right to check your bag, but you also had the right to deny them checking your bag as long as you turned around and left the building.
Some guys were in the habit of bringing in kegs on two-wheeled hand trucks. They’d just throw a mini-fridge box over the keg.
