For example, every year on the Friday before homecoming, our town’s law enforcement rides on horseback throughout campus, along with extra security as well throughout campus & the town so they can catch any underages/intoxicated alumni.
However, our campus security only calls the state police or troopers if it gets out of control or if someone starts a fight out in the open, mostly during outdoor events.
To give a little background of our party habits, during the warmer months, we usually gather around a fire pit at any of the off campus apartments & drink, which surprisingly draws a lot of people. Then, we just have regular indoor parties during the colder months.
My school for the most part turned a complete blind eye to underage drinking on campus. At that time we officially banned Greek organizations as well, but that didn’t stop groups like The Knights Eternal and Cygnus* from advertising on huge bedsheet-sized banners in the dining hall that they would be sponsoring parties where (no joke) BEvERages would be served.
There was a crackdown middle of my junior year IIRC, but I didn’t really track the outcome, and by a year later I was off campus anyway.
Sigma Nu, if it was too well-disguised. There were others, like Centaur (ΣAE) but these were the most blatant.
My college told the local police they were not welcome on campus unless they were called. No one on campus cared about drug use or alcohol consumption.
When I got my college ID card, the nice woman asked “how old do you want to be?”
OK, I was in co0llege in the mid-80s, but campus security didn’t care about much of anything. Weed was everywhere, and so was alcohol. In theory, there were rules abut allowable hours for “visitation”–meaning girls in the guys dorm, and vice versa. They would actually enforce the hours at the girls dorm, but not for the guys.
This, exactly. Except it was 10 years earlier. Weed wasn’t nearly as prevalent, but booze was everywhere. And everybody who wasn’t yet 21 knew an upperclassman who could be talked into making a run to the liquor store.
No such thing at state school in late 70s. Huge residence hall parties with kegs and Everclear punch and no monitoring of age. Dorm floor parties with same and open pot smoking. (apparently, some RAs were stricter than others.)
No parties got shut down until Extremely late (after 1 a.m.) if too loud and in residential/off-campus locations. On campus, it would take the rowdiest frat party to get the cops involved. Frat parties controlled access, but not based on age.
I attended two small private Christian colleges. Security more or less didn’t care about enforcing anything, as far as I know of, other than handing out a few parking tickets. They were very laissez-faire. Years of nothing particular ever happening probably lulled them into a sense of security. There was very little drinking or underage stuff as far as I know of.
When I was in college the drinking age ( for beer and wine, at least) in my state was 18. While not every student was 18 on the first day of their freshman year ( we had few 17 year olds with late birthdays and maybe a few kids that had skipped a year ) it was close enough that there was a presumption that everyone could legally drink.
For school events they tried to play by the rules, though would allow everyone to go outside to drink in the parking lot. For things like frat events on campus there was no issue, we did what we wanted.
My college security WAS the sheriffs. They had a substation on campus and would patrol the campus and walk the dorms a few times a night. However, as long as you’re not doing anything stupid, you were fine. They weren’t doing ‘welfare’ checks just to have a reason to look in dorms, but if you were loud enough that they could here you from outside, they’d be knocking on your door and they’d certainly write tickets and/or make arrests if they found something.
A friend of mine, underage at the time, was taking his garbage to the dumpster and someone happened to see empty beer cans in it and called the police. When he opened the door to see who was knocking, he gave the police a good view of not only he multitude of drugs, but counterfeit money…still on his printer. Things didn’t go well for him after that.
A relative of mine is a residence hall director. Her stance has always been to keep the police out of ‘minor’ things like underage drinking or smoking pot. In her opinion, all that does is make life hard for people that don’t have the money to cover the tickets and has no impact on people that can afford them. At her school, they deal with that kind of thing internally. She’ll leave it alone until it becomes a problem and then deal with it with things like community service (ie picking up litter around the campus).
Early-mid 90s, large state school. In general if you lived off campus, your behavior was your own business, so long as nobody got killed or maimed. Big keg parties happened every single weekend all over the place. The cops would sometimes show IF the neighbors complained, but I think that happened once at a party I was at, over five and a half years.
On campus, they pushed an official line that drinking was bad- no alcohol was served at football games, no big banners advertising parties, etc… But if you lived on campus, it was more… flexible. Basically the RAs had the job of trying to police the drinking within the dorms, and the unofficial policy was that if residents kept the booze in their rooms, kept the volume low, and didn’t wander around drunk making a nuisance of themselves, then the RAs weren’t going to do anything about it. If you made a lot of racket, wandered around with booze, or got drunk and did stupid/disruptive/gross stuff, you got written up/cops called. Cops didn’t come to the dorms unless called. (I was a RA, FWIW).
There were campus cops wandering around undercover on campus though- I was going from one dorm to another with a backpack full of beer that was clinking one time, and a guy shows up with his badge on a chain like a character in a bad detective show, and asked me for ID. Since I was 21 at the time, he was like “Have fun!” and let me go.
You had to be seriously demolished AND doing stupid stuff like peeing out in public to get a public intoxication citation from the cops though.
In theory, you could be threatened with expulsion if you ran a party and left drunk people curled up in their own vomit in public on campus, regardless of if they were underage or overage. Late 70’s.
1985-89 The school’s philosophy was 1) the local cops can do what they want with you if you’re out on the town drinking underage; 2) learning your limits with academics, sports, or alcohol is all part of becoming an educated, well-rounded person; so the school will not interfere with any aspect of your education unless it intrudes on the safety of others.
At “official” parties, there would be someone checking IDs and providing wristbands at the door, but it was pretty easy to get around that. Any other time, no one cared at all. There’d be kegs in the dorm fridges and people drinking in the quad.
The only thing they cared about was when prospective students (ie, high school kids) came to visit. They were not to drink, and it was strongly enforced by social norm (and, probably sometimes by security).
At the time I went to college, 18 year olds could drink. There were a handful of freshmen who were underage, but no one enforced the rule on campus.
Where I work now, security usually enforces it in the dorms by confiscating any alcoholic beverages they find.
When my daughter went to college, they were pretty laissez faire. You could be punished for drinking on campus, but it’d be done by the college. They also had a loophole: If you got so drunk you were sick, you could call for an ambulance and not suffer any consequences.* The thinking was that they’d rather have students call for help than to have them not get the treatment they needed because they didn’t want to be suspended.
*unless it arrived late.
UCLA mid-1980s: In the residence halls, “don’t ask, don’t tell” applied. As long as it was behind closed doors and not too loud, consumption of booze and other substances was completely ignored. Weed smokers would usually roll up a towel and wedge it in the crack under the door to keep the smell from drifting out. (Tobacco smoking was still allowed in the dorms at that time - hell, there was a cigarette vending machine in the lobby). Bring alcohol inside in a paper grocery bag and you’re fine. Walk down the hall with an open container in your hand, and you’d get slapped down hard, possibly evicted. Self-policing was the norm. I don’t remember ever seeing cops in the dorms.
Off campus, it was anything goes, provided it didn’t attract unfavorable television news coverage. Then it became a major crisis that would be dealt with immediately. I remember the Chicano Students Union protesting a frat that held a “Tequila Sunrise” party, that was advertised with all sorts of racial stereotypes, for about 2 weeks with no effect. Then someone had the idea to tip off the local TV station to cover the protesters. Next day, the administration announced the matter would be dealt with. Sanctions levied against the frat and a campus-wide ban on themed parties effective immediately.
Len Bias died that summer. I showed up at the University of Maryland in the fall. It was pretty strict. Still got away with a lot. It’s a big campus so unless you were stupid or unlucky you could still have a good time.
Late 80s, largish private school in the Midwest. Lived on campus all four years. The drinking age was 21.
The first few years, it was really loose. A dorm or a frat would have a party, and as long as you had a college ID (any college, not just ours), you could drink as much as you want. There was also a culture that celebrated heavy drinking.
My senior year the powers-that-be realized that someone was going to die this way, and they would get sued into oblivion, and things got a lot more strict.
Our campus (early to mid 90s) had an actual police force, but I believe they were only there for actual crimes and parking enforcement. On campus parties were monitored by campus security. Only fraternities could throw parties (at least anything larger than half a dozen guys playing “Three Man” in a dorm room.) And fraternities had to go through this ridiculous pantomime for “legal” parties where we had to register with some “guest list” of bullshit names. Assign various official and unofficial duties to fraternity members (front door, bar entry, bartender, dj, cop watch, and various other guard postings to restrict access through the house). My freshman year, they forced us to hand out “Over 21” bracelets, assigned to each house based on occupancy. Sophomore year, kegs were banned, so we had to buy loading pallets of beer. The bar had to be separated from the rest of the party area. Since fraternity houses were built with large “party rooms” with the bar already in place, most used temporary wood and chicken-wire barricades that usually fell over on people during the party. Every few hours the security (referred to as “Brownies” because of their uniforms) patrolled around to make sure everything was in order. This usually resulted in under-21s being moved out of the “bar area” while the house officers showed them around. But generally so long as there wasn’t any trouble and the party wasn’t too large, they just sort of let you do what you wanted.
But if you were caught throwing an “illegal” party (i.e. a Thursday night “hotel party” or even too many people playing beer games in your basement on a Tuesday afternoon), your house could get citied and put on “probation” where you weren’t allowed to throw parties at all for some period of time.
Do something horrible enough, your house could have its charter pulled and get kicked off.
But generally you could get as drunk as you like from day one of school. Oh…by the way did I mention that alcohol was free? Fraternities couldn’t charge money due to state liquor laws.
Drinking age was 18, but I went to a small evangelical Xian college. Fortunately, I commuted from home. My parents aren’t drinkers, so I didn’t drink at home. They didn’t set curfews, though. I just let them know if I was going to be getting home late.