Was your college experience in 19xx as vile as campus life is often portrayed?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m currently about halfway through I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe which is the story of a poor girl from the NOrth Carolina back country who wins a full scholarship to “Dupont University”, a private, exclusive school on the level of Yale, with about six thousand students.

(Note, I did say “halfway through” so please no spoilers. I was going to link to Wikipedia rather than Amazon until I remembered that they spoil endings).

When I say “bad”, I mean pernicious, vicious, and mean. Not “vicious” because there’s a lot of “vice” going on, but because of what seems to be unending snarking and put-downs among peers, and intimidation and antagonism among separate social groups, such as Greeks, jocks, the guys who work on the newspaper, and so on. The non-Greek dorms are similarly beset, at least the co-ed dorm from this main character’s perspective–not least because she has to put up with freshman boys’ grossout bathroom humor and honest-to-God excremental competition. Among girls, there seems to be snarkiness to an unbelievable extent; the girls on her floor who don’t get dates lie in wait, as it were, to gossip about their less socially adept peers when they return. Meanwhile, the alpha males typically seem to seek out the weak for some sort of torment, whether its between members of the same basketball team, or between the lacrosse team and anyone they feel needs a lesson. Members of the “Saint Ray” fraternity house strut around campus like the lords of the universe, and fight physically for one another much like the Hells Angels say they do. Fighting, as in fisticuffs? We didn’t even have fights in the public high school I went to, let alone college.

I went to college in the late 1970s, and that wasn’t always sweetness and light either. There was always apt to be a practical joker or two in the dorm, but the jokes and ragging were usually of a good nature as among friends. Hard-ass put-downs and predatory victimization were extremely rare, although that’s not to say if a fellow student’s manners or behavior were totally bizarre, they wouldn’t be mocked. I remember one girl who chomped her food, and would raise the whole piece of meat to her mouth and then cut it, instead of first cutting off a piece. That certainly didn’t go unnoticed, and she was not well liked. In general, though, it was a carefree, easy time for just about everyone socially. We didn’t have a Greek set, although I myself did belong to fraternal club that used a similar system of pledging and invitation-only membership. We also didn’t field football or basketball teams of any consequence, and IM sports were popular. Alcohol and drugs we had aplenty. Were we all so mellowed out from all that toking that we didn’t fight and bitch and backstab and cut each other to pieces like the students do in the novel?

Was life in your college a high school nightmare continued and magnified, or was it an easygoing delight? I was so happy to be where I was I wouldn’t have changed anything.

2

Missed the edit window - I did my time at Revelle College, UCSD, 1975 - 80.* Feel free to indicate where and when you did yours, if so inclined, in your responses.
(Yo, Biffy the Elephant Shrew, who I still haven’t been able to place but must have known by sight, as he was there for part of the same period.)

3

Good God no! College was delightful. It was the nineties for me, so it wasn’t all that long ago.

4

I loved college - also nineties.

5

Sheesh, college is the most fun I’ve ever had. Moving out of your parents house into a large group of people your own age? Getting away from the crap of high school social dramas? There is a Greek system that I’m not a part of, but it’s pretty well implemented- maybe 30% of the student population, and tons of open functions and lots of good-natured social mixing.

Appleciders, Whitman College, currently a junior.

6

I wonder this occasionally. Slightly tangentially - there is a scene in The Butterfly Effect where a paraplegic character (who also can’t walk and depends on a wheelchair) falls out onto the floor in the corridor of their college campus. The students in the corridor turn and laugh at him as he’s struggling on the ground, unable to get up.

There aren’t enough :eek: in the world to convey my reaction to this when I watched it. It took that movie to actually make me imagine such a thing happening. There are people attending modern American universities who would laugh at a helpless paraplegic?!?!?!?? I actually cannot conceive of any person, in any age group, in any setting doing that. Ever. If someone did that I could only assume they were an alien trying (and failing) to mimick human behaviour.

7

Just found the scene I was referring to - go to 6.53 and watch from there to share in my horror.

8

college, 70’s - never experienced any childish behavior but didn’t do the dorm or fraternity thing either. I had as much fun as I could have at school.

I also never understood the desire to stay at a dorm if the school was close to home. Free room and board with a good cook and laundry service beats a bunch of slobs any day. When I was out with college buddies I was OUT so the dorm didn’t matter. When I was studying I wanted peace and quiet and not a dorm full of fools.

9

My undergrad experience in the late 90s was nothing like that, at all. I went to UC Santa Cruz, where the greek scene is almost non-existent, for one. People were, by and large, pretty mellow. I found the more-liberal-than-thou attitude pretty annoying, though - and I’m a liberal!

Anyway, for my sins, I have ended up doing graduate work at a Big 10 university ten years later, and it’s pretty different, socially. As a grad student, I am not much involved or interested in the antics of the undergrads, but I can definitely imagine that crazy shit goes down. There are lots of fraternity and sorority houses, and riding the campus shuttle, I have overheard the teenagers agonizing about pledging various greek houses and whether or not they get it. The intense interest in athletics + alcohol has some negative effects - a friend of mine lives in an undergrad ghetto, and I attended a party at her house the evening before a big football game last fall. When I left, drunk kids from the other school shrieked a lot of rude epithets at me as I walked down the street.

There are boutiques around campus that sell outrageously expensive clothes that I could never afford on my student loan-funded budget, and there is definitely a “hot girl” type uniform that you see everywhere. (The parts of which are fairly pricey.) I am sure that there is a lot of classism going on.

FWIW, I’m really enjoying going to school here, my classes are great and I’ve made some wonderful friends. But I’m not sad I didn’t go here as an undergrad.

10

I read Charlotte Simmons recently and didn’t pick up on meanness as being the central theme of the book. I thought the meanness that did occur was subsidiary to the moral crapulence of the student body.

I went to a large urban state university a few years either side of 1990 and it was remarkably egalitarian. I knew kids from less moneyed backgrounds who lived in old, wrecked houses, and I knew kids who had more money than they knew what to do with and lived in fancy air-conditioned apartments with hot tubs, and we all went to each other’s parties. For that matter, I knew born-again Christians, unbelievers, and total freaking degenerates, and we all got along just fine. The only conflicts were based on petty crap like someone borrowing someone else’s CDs without asking.

Sadly, my alma mater was turned into what amounts to a big shopping mall a few years later. They razed all the substandard housing and firetrap bars and put up a bunch of Urban Outfitter type stores. So I’m sure there is a lot more status-seeking there now. It’s what the powers that be wanted, apparently.

11

I share almost exactly **Spectre’**s time frame – at West Virginia University, which has long had a reputation as a party school, and the legal age for alcohol then was 18.

The women’s dorm I lived in during my freshman year was on Maiden Lane, which ran between College Ave. and N. High Street, where all the frat houses were. When I moved in, the frat houses had various “Welcome” banners painted on sheets and hanging out the window. The one I remember featured a cherry dripping blood and the message, “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll take care of your daughter.” Nice.

The dorm housekeeping staff cleaned our rooms! They dusted, mopped the floor, cleaned the bathroom (I was in a suite, with two room sharing a bath) and CHANGED OUR SHEETS!

I remember my college years fondly. I wasn’t friends with anyone in the partying or sorority crowd, so it was all good.

12

I went to college in the late 1980s - early 1990s.

We drank. And studied. And drank. And studied. And…

That’s all I remember.

13

Undergrad 1973-77. College was a blast. Loved the courses, loved the extracurricular activities. Dorm life was bizarre and interesting, but no overt meanness.

14

No overt meanness of the type described as in the summary above. I had a great time in college in the early 80s. In my four years I only knew one person who was mean like that.

15

I don’t remember the movie that well, but if the scene was supposed to be in the past, as I imagine it was, it is true that cruelty and personal violence did use to be more acceptable than they are today. In colleges there was often general hazing of freshmen just for being freshmen, as opposed to the ritual hazing of those who voluntarily join a fraternity, club or team. (I don’t condone that either, but consider it marginally less objectionable because it’s not based on the mere unchangeable status of the person). From Charles Bukowski’s autobiographical Ham On Rye, we get the idea that macho stare-downs and fights were an everyday occurrence at Los Angeles City College in the mid 1940s.

For my part I have to say that during my year in Germany I was almost continually patronized and frozen out by the most of the other twelve residents on my floor, both German and citizens of other foreign countries. Once one went so far as to correct my English pronunciation. Another time, around Christmas I think, we had a gift exchange, and I was given a small garlic root (and some other vegetable). That was it. And I had contributed a bottle of wine, or something like that. I did make good friends elsewhere, but on my own floor, no. Not that I was Mr. Popularity back home at UCSD either, because nobody really seemed to be. But we almost always treated each other well, and I wasn’t used to being treated that way. I didn’t realize how bad it had really been until years after.

16

What? Did you put up a sign on this thread to keep out us geezers? :stuck_out_tongue:

I started college in '68 at a tiny school. My younger siblings all went to various versions of Enormous State U beginning in '70. I visited my sister often enough to get to know folks on that campus and had enough other friends in middle-sized and small schools to get a feel for their cultures.

What the OP decribes is a caricature of a small school intended to make it seem far worse than any real school. I’m sure that if you visited a few hundred schools in the late 1960s, you could find some Greek house or some dorm or some sport team where any of those phenomena occurred, but finding all of them occurring in every residence/class/sport in a middle-sized school? That would seem to indicate a school that was exceptionally twisted.
I’m sure that there were college fistfights, for example, but I never once had first hand experience or even second hand report of one.
If anything, the cliques of the high school years pretty much faded away in college. There were a few efforts by a few kids to establish the sort of cliques they had known in high school in the opening weeks of freshman year, but they never got any traction. (This is not to say that there were no groups who tried to band together and look down on everyone else. There were, just as there are in any community. However, there were so many students and so many cross-over activities, that cliques tended to be insular rather than dominating.)

For a different view of college life in the late 1960s, (if you like Fantasy Lit), try Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. The story is set on a fictional version of Minnesota’s Carleton College, (with around 1,500 students), at about that time period and while the story is fantasy, most of the dorm and social scenes struck me as prettty realistic. For that matter, pick up a copy of Trudeau’s Doonesbury: The Original Yale Cartoons for one student’s (odd and sardonic) view of college life at that period.

17

I would say that my undergrad college (mid 90s) would seem exactly as the OP described to someone who did not fit in and could not adapt to the social structure there (like my roommate for example).

First of all, it is a private, prestigeous Eastern university known primarily for business and engineering, about the same size as the OP described. Typical ivy covered old stone buildings and pillared fraternity houses like you see in the movies. The student body was typically from white, upper middle class and affluent families. Typical preppy athlete/scholar types. A few quasi-“celebrities” like the daughter of a well known brewery family, a vice president’s (of the USA) son and a kid who had the same last name of half the buildings on campus.

The city it was located in was depressed economically so you had the stereotypical “town/gown” conflicts you see in the movies.

The campus social life centered around Greek life and athletics (IM, varsity and club). Alchohol and drugs (mostly pot but some coke, shrooms and acid as well) also featured predominantly. At least 30-40% of the student body was in one of the 35 fraternities or 10 sororities.

Big party scene. Keg parties. Cocktail parties. Tailgates. Hotel parties. Beer games like Beruit, Asshole, Three Man, etc. A few off campus bars. Pretty much every weekend had hundreds of drunk students wandering around campus getting into trouble.

I wouldn’t say people were “mean”. I think there was a lot of phoniness and jockeying for social status though. You also had a lot of competitions and rivalries. Between dorm halls, fraternities, Greek vs GDI (God Damn Independents, not the dudes from Command & Conquer), townies vs college boys, school paper vs Greeks, etc, etc. Mostly they were harmless, but often they escalated into smack talk, mean-spirited pranks or even fights.

Oh and girls really didn’t “go on dates”. They mostly had drunken hookups and then did the “walk of shame” the next morning back to their dorm.

And yes, if you go picking a fight at a fraternity, most of the brothers will back each other up. And we did like to see how far we could push each other.

Basically it felt a lot like a cross between Animal House and something out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel.

18

I probably don’t count, since I entered college in 1999

Great experience. Huge State University, but small groups just tended to form - i.e., I was really tight my freshman year with my dormitory, sophomore year with dormitory + students in my major, etc.

I never saw any cruelty as described in the OP. Frat parties (I was never in a fraternity, but attended a few parties) got a bit wild. There were certainly some cases of sexual assault - none that I witnessed or had any connection to, but they were there. But overall, it was just a lot of friendly kids having fun at a great University.

I think the media trope of campus cruelty and/or anarchy is just that - a decent motif for a film, but not much rooted in reality.

19

I go to a modern American university, and it’s not something I can imagine either. Wasn’t that moive trying to be shocking as possible from start to finish so people would forget Ashton Kutcher’s only claim to fame was That '70s Show? I wouldn’t advise deriving any generalization about Americans from that movie.

20

Tom Wolfe is almost 80 years old. He has no more real world idea of college life in the mid-late 70’s (my era) than flying to the moon. It almost sounds like he’s trying to mashup different eras. Like all colleges at the U of MD College Park we had misbehaving groups in the general and jock dorms and some Greek houses, but they were usually stomped on hard and quick by the campus police and the college administration if their shit threatened to get out of hand. One group on the 7th floor of Cumberland Dorm “the Hogs” were actually broken up and scattered across campus after one couch too many got tossed from an upstairs window.

Re girls in the general dorms some may have had their dramas but my overwhelming impression was that people (women included) were focused on classes. The party hounds tended to last 1-3 semesters then disappear.