I went to college from 1983-1987 (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo CA) and those were some of the best years of my life. I went from being a quiet geeky brain in high school to a somewhat less quiet geeky brain who hung around with other geeky brains (mostly playing RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, and endless hours playing Spade and Bid Whist in the university union–I met my spouse from this group, and we just celebrated our 20th anniversary last month).
There were some practical jokes and folks who just couldn’t cope very well got teased (one example was a guy in my gaming club whose personal hygiene was seriously lacking–his dormmates put something obvious in his shampoo to see how long it would take for him to notice it, and I think he ended up eventually leaving school (no idea why, but he really didn’t fit in and had a lot of issues)).
I didn’t hang out with the Greek crowd at all, but my friend’s roommate our freshman year was a sorority girl. She had a lot in common with the “typical” sorority girl stereotype (acted like a ditz even though she was smart, drank too much) but was otherwise a pretty nice person. I probably managed to miss a lot of the more obvious cruelty that went on just because the group I hung out with was pretty cool, but honestly I don’t think there was that much of it going on.
I went to school in the early 2000s and had a blast. No real meanness or intimidation as far as I can recall. We had a big Greek scene definetely, but for the most part, the frat guys were easy to get along with, and not the stereotypical alpha-male assholes that you see in the movies. There were cliques, but they weren’t the viscious , exclusionary types you had in high school. They tended to form along the lines of interests or majors, rather than social status - like the art students would hang out mainly with the other art students, the people who worked on the school paper tended to hang out mainly with other people who worked on the school paper, architecture students with other architecture students, etc. There might be some good-natured ribbing between the groups, but unlike high school they didn’t go out of their way to undermine or otherwise antogonize each other.
One big difference from my college experience and many other college movies I’ve seen is that drinking in the dorm rooms was strictly prohibted. And I went to a place that was famous for being a party school and having kick ass parties off campus. But drinking in the dorms was a no-no and would get you automatically kicked out. That’s not to say that it didn’t happen. It did, but it was usually pretty discreet - like a couple of guys having beers in their room with the door closed- and nothing like the big keggers with everybody getting trashed in the dorm hallways, like you see in the movies. It might have once been that way, but today they’d just be asking for a lawsuit if they openly allowed that sort of thing. All it takes is one drunk person falling down the stairs for the school to be out a couple of million dollars.
BTW can anyone comment on the fraternity name “Saint Ray” which sounds rather odd? It wouldn’t be Catholic, since IIRC RC doctrine does not approve of fraternal organizations.
In the late '80s I briefly went to a private college on scholarship, and this one had some pretty nasty people. I think maybe it was all the rich kids with a sense of entitlement but whose parents couldn’t get them into more well known private universities, or something like that.
I mean, seriously, it was right out of a bad movie. The redheaded bitch who thought she was hot stuff because her uncle directed a Twisted Sister video and insisted on telling everyone. The foreign guy who tried to convince everyone he was an amazing genius when the test scores in question didn’t sound like they were all that… and who got a girl pregnant and was worried about it but had some of the most stereotypically obnoxious male friends telling him to not worry about the tramp and just insist she had to get an abortion and have his father pay for it (not that his father necessarily would, I think these tools just assumed that parents existed solely to pull them out of shit of their own making). The dorm floor party that consisted of playing porn movies at the highest possible volume at one in the morning on a schoolnight right below a floor with women trying to sleep and who refused to turn it off when they complained. Fire alarms being pulled pretty much every night for a long stretch of time, sometimes three times in a single night. The Greeks acting like they owned everything, and, realistically, as far as the university was concerned they did.
Maybe it was just bad luck that I ran into nasty people nonstop, I don’t know. There were some cool people I met now and then, but they seemed to be surviving the onslaught of sheer sychopathic idiocy just as tenuously as I was. At my first opportunity I jumped ship to a public college and found most people there to be pretty human instead of ridiculously over the top self-absorbed psychopaths. What was the exception at one was the rule in the other, and vice versa.
I went to New York University which is quite different from how most colleges in this thread are being described. Since the school is located in Greenwich Village, there’s no actual campus per se, just the city itself. Perhaps that is why whenever I see a movie/read a book about “typical” college life it all seems so foreign. There were fraternities, but they weren’t a big deal. I’m sure if you were the type of person who wanted to join one, you could, but if you didn’t care about them then it wasn’t like everywhere you went you’d see mentions of it. I remember one building had a banner with Greek letters on it, that’s all I can remember ever seeing about fraternities. I lived in the dorms all 4 years, but they were converted apartments, so each room would be it’s own suite, containing 1-5 people (and each suite would have 1-3 bedrooms.) Floors were intersex, you just couldn’t have guys & girls in the same suite. No shared bathrooms or showers or anything like that. I can remember a few nights of loud parties in the hall, but it certainly wasn’t constant. It really just depended on what the people were like on your floor. I didn’t feel there was much of the jock culture either. We have no football team, so there was no big game to go to, and it’s the 3rd most gay friendly school in the country. I never had a single problem roommate. I loved my time there.
I went to a community college for two years (and now work there) in the mid
1980s, then off to a four-year state univ. for my next two degrees, getting my last one in 1991. Had a great time at both, no horrific memories.
Went to college from 97-2000 (tested out of my freshman/first year) at McGill University. It was nice but I found the school too large and beurocratic to penetrate. We also did not live on-campus after our first year (not that I minded, the dorms were not to my taste). It was very easy to get lost in the mix and I found it difficult to make friends after my tenure in the dorms was done. That is partially my fault, as I was much shyer back then.
The frats and the sole sorority were a joke. I felt like it was basically like going to school in Europe-the politics, a very international scene, not too much camaraderie or being gung ho about the school. My law school experience a midwestern state school was far more about school spirit and I really enjoyed that.
It’s a hard call. I had an academic scholarship, the tuition was a pittance and they let me finish school in 3 years. I graduated debt free and that’s the best thing I ever got out of McGill. Oh yeah, and I never had to deal with living with a roommate in my own room (the dorms were all monk cells and you got it to yourself). OTOH, I wish I had taken my partial scholarship to Brandeis or just paid up for Northwestern as I feel I’m much better suited to an American academic environment.
I started college at UT Austin in 1966, quit in 1968. Went back to college at Texas State University San Marcos in 1975, graduated in 1977. I never took part in the frat scene, but one of my roomies my freshman year did. There wasn’t a weekend that he didn’t wind up shitfaced drunk. If it was a boring party, he’d be able to stagger in under his own power. Otherwise, people would drag him into the room and drop him on the floor. It got to the point where we felt obligated to commit atrocities on him as he lay passed out, such as stripping him naked, carrying him in a blanket across the alley and throwing him in the swimming pool of the girls dorm on a very cold winter night.
We also shot water balloons off the roof with a 10 foot long, home-made slingshot.
That was as close as I got to the “vile campus life”.
Because I’m sure that after they threw him in they immediately ran away and didn’t watch to make sure he was OK.
How does someone even read that and come up with “for them to drown” as something that sounds like an at all reasonable conclusion to themselves? That’d be like someone saying, “Hey was drunk, so we took his keys.” and someone else saying, “It’s vile to run off with someone’s keys to steal their possessions.” WTF, dude, come back to reality here.
I would say that is a fairly accurate description. Or at least that’s how I imagine it could appear to an outsider. There is a fine line between “hilareous” and “mean / vile”. A lot of stuff that went on at my school certainly seemed over the top. A lot of it was pretty funny as no one ended up permenantly injured. But much of it was a little ridiculous.
Another thing I found out was that the frat guy who everyone thought was an arrogant prick - his brothers often thought the same of him.
Yeah, I think that’s sort of an East Coast preppy upper middle class affectation. “Tie one on last night Simmons?” “Hey Simmons! We’re heading up to Lambda Chi! You coming?” “Nice ‘walk of shame’ Simmons!” and so on and so forth.
Some others:
Excessive use of the term “random”. “Who are these ‘randoms’ just showing up?” “He bought a pink AMC Gremlin? That’s so random.”
Hosting little jacket and tie cocktail parties where everyone proceeds to get obliterated.
Playing lacrosse, soccer, ice hockey or rugby.
Crashing a BMW into something.
Pretending like you are an imbecile (don’t kid yourselves. Just because you think some of those people act like jerks or drunken buffoons does not mean they aren’t actually pretty smart. Then again, a lot aren’t.)
Hating your parents.
No PDA with your significant other.
We did the same stuff. Just replace “roof” with “balcony” and “water ballon” with “Cornish game hen”.
I’m pretty sure that is a fraternity urban legend. So is anything having to do with farm animals (although we did let one of our brother’s labrador retriever run through the house to scare the pledges while they were locked in the rooms. “OMG!! Is that some sort of goat! No it sounds like a sheep! You’re from Long Island how the fuck do you know what a sheep sounds like! SHUT THE FUCK UP! NO TALKING PLEDGES!!”
Spectre of Pithecanthropus - It’s possible that “Saint Ray” is a local fraternity. Most national fraternities I am familiar with are Greek. ie Tau Kappa Epsilon, Kappy Sigma, Chi Phi, etc. With national fraternities, all chapters at all schools share the same historical traditions and customs. There are also strict guidelines they must follow in order to keep their national charter - i.e. minimum GPA, good standing with the university, etc. But other than dues, a few national conferences, an occassional visit from a rep and the same catalogues for buying official stuff like pins and pledge books, each house is pretty much left to their own devices.
Local fraternities and sororities are typucally only located on the campus where they were founded. So I imagine they can pretty much call themselves anything they like and do whatever the university lets them get away with.
Because I’ve heard of pranks like that ending in accidental death, that’s why (especially where alcohol is concerned). I’m sure the poster who mentioned the story wouldn’t have shared it with us if the punchline was “but he was so wasted he drowned whilst we stood there laughing”. I was simply trying to make the point that such things aren’t always considered that funny.
So thanks for painting me out to be some kind of moral hysteric, “dude”.
Actually it’s pretty much nothing like that.
It’s really a pretty good example of shit that seemed pretty funny at the time but was in reality pretty fucking dangerous. I’m not judging as we used to pull the same kind of stuff. Drunk driving, probably being one of the worst. But there was any number of incidents I can think of that had the chance to end really really badly.
Not to mention excess alcohol generally. Not that I don’t think students should be allowed to drink, and, for that matter, get drunk. But some people don’t know their limits and will approach lethal toxicity. This is probably more of an issue at colleges where most people live on campus or close by, because you don’t have to anticipate the drive back.
At one party we gave–it was a MAS*H themed party where all the brothers were officers and the pledges enlisted–a couple people had to go to the emergency room. We thought it was a hoot at the time, but obviously it doesn’t seem like it now. I’m amazed in retrospect that there were no serious repercussions. We were placed on social probation, but we thought that was a hoot too. Remember, this was the time of Animal House, and we thought if it was good enough for the Deltas, it was good enough for us. (The party was a huge success apart from that.)
BTW is rap really as all pervasive on campuses now as portrayed in the novel? I truly enjoyed living at college, but if I were an undergraduate today and I had to listen to rap day in and day out, it might actually make me prefer living at home and commuting!
Hey now, remember I haven’t finished it. But I’m probably a couple of pages away from that.
Was that just an in-group expression of your house, or of Greeks generally? Or was it fairly general among students? Our similarly over-used term was “mega” to mean “very” or “many”, but I never heard anyone outside the club use it.
This wasn’t really along the lines of wild pranks, but more earnest inquiry. One time, we launched a hot air balloon constructed of soda straws and a laundry bag. Yes, it did carry its own fire in the form of lit birthday candles. As an experiment it was a complete success, and the balloon rose so high that it resembled a star in the night sky.
On the other hand, clearly astoundingly stupid and dangerous! This was in San Diego, and our campus was covered with eucalyptus groves. Luckily, all the candles went out by the time it came down, I knew not where.
Michigan isn’t really that bad. It’s a big enough place that you can find what ever little type of experience you want. The Majority of students(I would guess 80%) did take their grades very seriously. And particularly Engineering students had very heavy workloads, which lead to the expected “Work really hard, party really hard, you can sleep when your dead” kind of thing.
From what I could tell only two or three of the frats really to being a "frat man"very seriously. The rest were pretty much a place to sleep and hang out for most members. Those two or three carefully screen applicants, and even who attended thier parties, and were anoying jerks as far as most people were concerned.
I haven’t read the book. Those are just examples I made up.
I’ve heard it a lot around my school (which is essentially the same as “Greeks generally”. Being Greek was common enough that the next question when you meet a fellow alumni is inevetably “where you in a house”.) as well as at schools with similar student bodies. It’s not that common, but common enough to appear in urban slang dictionaries.
But Greeks or particular schools do often develop their own odd slang.
Rap has been a staple on college campuses since Dr Dre came out with The Chronic. My freshman year, the only thing people listened to was grunge, 60s and 70s classic rock and jam bands. Around junior or senior year, a bunch of our younger brothers would “pre-game”* dresed all “gangsta” in one of the rooms listening to Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube, drinking 40s and playing domino. These are all white kids from Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut mind you.
Wolfe made it seem as though the ONLY music listened to on campus was rap (and the most crude, vile, talentless, moronic rap, at that - the lyrics of which he, hilariously, actually made up) :
“Take my johnson, knock it on some fox’s box/
my cock, sucker, I’m the fucker you forgot”
and
“Yo, take my testi-culls/
suck 'em like a pop-si-cull”
(I have a mental picture of Wolfe, dressed in a white suit, with a glass of bourbon, smoking a pipe, in a wood-paneled office with glass-front bookcases filled with leather bound books and a stone fireplace with a hunting trophy mounted over it, sitting at a mahogany desk with a brass-and-green-glass lamp, meticulously writing those words by hand.)
He completely ignores indie rock, alternative rock and punk rock, though, which I found to be quite flawed and unrealistic. But he did at least throw in a mention of Dave Matthews.