What was college like "back in the day?"

In My Humble Opinion
1

You choose how you define “back in the day.” I’m asking this because I was just watching Animal House and was reminded of how much college has changed. There seems to be this sort of mid-20th century collegiate archetype at work, with lots of tradition and students really being into school pride and wearing school sweaters and so on, as well as a good deal of formalism for the day-to-day campus lifestyle. Compared to modern times, this seems quaint, as the modern collegiate campus feels like a bunch of random commuters who are just in to get a degree and get out as quickly as possible.

What was college like back in your day?

2

1969 - 1973

I’d say we had school pride, but not the rigid sweatered pride of earlier days. Fewer logo t-shirts, more things like IHTFP and Institute Screw shirts.

My daughter is in college now, so I can offer some comparisons. First, there is a lot more security now than there used to be, more card keys, stuff like that. Probably a good idea.
We were just beginning to explore co-ed dorms. We got rid of parietals just a few years before, and some schools still had restrictions on members of the opposite sex staying over in the middle of my term. (Not us.) In fact, me and another guy switched rooms with two women in the girls dorm for the experiment. Now it is standard. This is a lot freer than in my day, when there were real dates and other such antiquated stuff.
There is a much bigger choice of foods now. The only fast food place near MIT was a Jack in the Box which no one I know ever went to. My daughter’s cafeteria has a lot more options than the two ours had, and a lot of healthier ones. If we wanted to go to a different dining hall, we needed a signed slip. Our cafeteria worker memorized all our faces. I cooked in my room for two years, but it was illegal, and standard dorms didn’t come with lounges with refrigerators. No microwaves when I went to school.

It was also a lot cheaper. Very few kids had big loans to worry about. I had a bit, but back then you didn’t have to pay until you got out of grad school, and with the > 10% inflation of the Carter/Reagan years my repayment was trivial when I started to work. Much lower interest rates on the loans also.

We seemed to be less into drinking than kids today, but that might have been my living group. We had plenty of other vices.

3

I don’t think I’d take National Lampoon’s Animal House as an indicator of how how college “really was”. I went to the Univ of MD College Park from 1976-1980/81, and from what I can see of my kids current college experience it’s not wildly different except for:

1: Presence of personal computers
2: No smoking anywhere on campuses
3: Higher security levels - less tolerance for horseplay

Now college in the 60’s was different, but you’re pushing 40 years ago+ at that point.

4

I started college in 1987 and finished in fivish or so yrs :slight_smile:

We did have a lot of school pride, but it WAS Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater (anyone? anyone?)

The thing I think is really different today is there is a lot more in-room technology. There was only one phone for a whole hall (maybe 30 people) and only handwritten messages taken by hallmates. It was very unusual for anybody to have a television and you couldn’t get cable if you did have one.

A lot of people had computers but they only used them for wordprocessing. Only people with an unusually specialized knowledge of computers (i.e. geeks) had any access to or even knowledge of the first whispers of the internet.

A similar demographic were the only ones to have any of the primitive videogames available.

Any special requests of a professor had to be made IN PERSON! no email (gasp!)

The hugest difference is cellphones. As far as I can tell (I live in a university town) today’s college students spend about 80% of their waking hours talking or texting on cellphones. Back in my day if you wanted to talk to your friends you had to actually track them down.

Now stop puking on my lawn you whippersnappers!

5

I’m fairly certain that Animal House was not a documentary.

6

I was an undergraduate 1975-1980 and the one thing that was really different was that the Resident Advisers promoted alcoholism. We pretty much had a kegger every weekend in the dorms where the booze was provided or at least completely condoned by the RA’s. We were also pretty reckless in the pranks we pulled off. The most unhinged people finally got kicked out of school by causing a hundred thousand dollars worth of damage by flooding the entire building by clogging the drains in the showers and turning them on inside the top floor of a 6 story dormitory and throwing couches off the roof. Hell, even after they stuck a cow in our lounge that shit all over the place, I’m pretty sure they weren’t kicked out.

7

Actually, my college (early to mid 90s) was very much like what you describe. Lots of big mansion-like fraternity houses with the big white collumns. Football tailgates (we’re home to the oldest college football rivalry). J Crew catalogues in everyone’s mailbox. Lots of drinking and partying. Cocktail parties. Fraternity parties. Hotel parties (parties in the fraternity brothers rooms instead of the party room). Football tailgates. Tiki torch parties. Greek Week (kind of a fraternity olympics). Even an occassional toga party. Lot’s of Phish, the Dead, Dave Mathews Band, Blues Traveler playing all the time. Very strong alumni network.

Fraternity parties were very much exactly like what you would see in Animal House or PCU. Basically, each house has a big ‘party room’ which is basically a big concrete room with a sound system, a drain in the floor, a bar and usually various fraternity memorabilia on the wall. Parties were free for all guests and open to just about anyone (capacity permitting).

Also Beruit (beer pong) was huge.

8

1987=1991. Florida State University so there was a decent amount of school pride due to the football team.

I just missed the computer age. It wasn’t until my senior year that I wrote a paper on a word processor. How many endless hours did I waste retyping papers that had errors?

It was fun. The parties were great.

9

1987-1991 undergrad

Hardly any computers - and I was an engineering major. If you had an assignment requiring a computer, you got an account on the mainframe. I’ll always remember sending output to a certain 132-column line printer that was located in a far corner of the terminal room. You didn’t have to get up to check if your print job was coming out, because the printer sounded like a lawnmower when it started up. In another lab, you sent your print job to a printer behind a counter, where clerks would pull your printout and put it in a mail slot according to the last two digits of your SSN. That was actually pretty sweet because you never had to deal with a printer jam or empty paper tray (actually, there was no tray - it used fanfold). In one class we actually used analog computers. Interesting to play around with, but they went out with slide rules. The department must have picked them up as surplus. You didn’t need a printer to get output - you used an oscillograph or a pen plotter. We wrote out our lab reports longhand and made our plots on graph paper. It was still considered important to know how to plot data on semilog or log-log paper. Right around the time I graduated, everyone switched to word processors for reports.

Rampant, open drinking to the point of vomiting and blackout, by, I would say, 25% of the student body. One apartment building I used to walk past every day had a beer bong that started on a third floor balcony and extended all the way to the ground. I don’t know how you could use the thing without rupturing your esophagus. Once some friends and I “snuck” an entire grocery cart full of beer and liquor into the side door of our dorm. Only about 25 people saw us. Also, a kid burned his face half off doing a flaming 151 shot in the dorm. No action whatsoever was taken by any authorities.

College had a much more “shabby” atmosphere than it seems to today. There were no resort-like fitness centers or huge chain bookstores. The gym had no air conditioning - in the summer they set up these huge industrial fans to circulate the air, but it was still as hot and smelly as Randy Johnson’s jockstrap during a September game in Arizona. The main library was absolutely disgusting - you could smell the fresh gum wads stuck under every table. The grad student study carrels looked like cages in an animal shelter.

I had a blast!

10

Many differences in 1970-74.

  1. Drinking was legal. But people drank less – a bottle or two or beer at a time. Now they tend to get as drunk as possible as fast as they can. I blame it on raising the drinking age.
  2. One phone on each floor of the dorm. The guy with a room next to the phone had a terrible location and always took messages. Now, not only are there phones in each room, but everyone has cells.
  3. Worse cafeteria food.
  4. On the campus I was on, fraternities were big. Hazing, however, was pretty harmless – pledges had to count the posts in the fence surrounding the college, or recite the Greek alphabet before a match burned down to their fingers. One frat also had the “bum’s photo,” where all the pledges stood outside the front door looking as grubby as they could – and the sophomores dumped water on them.
  5. Little paper-backed foil ashtrays in all classrooms for the students who smoked.
  6. Only a handlful of TVs. We had to crowd into the RA’s office to see the Superbowl. Most TVs were old black and white sets; some didn’t even have UHF tuners.
  7. Refrigerators were illegal, so everyone bought big, old full-size ones. While I was there, the college gave up and made them legal – and only allowed the little cubes.
  8. Streaking.
  9. Much more political activism.
  10. Single sex floors in the dorms. Mine went co-ed my junior year, the first they had, and that was due to a mistake (the cleared out everyone thinking that it’s be all girls, but didn’t need the space, so put guys on the floor).
  11. Rules on when girls could be on the guys floor (which were always repealed at the first floor meeting).
  12. Wine and cheese parties with the professors.
  13. No projection equipment in the classrooms.
  14. Actual blackboards (or green ones).
  15. Pinball at ten cents a game (well, one older machine still was. Others were a quarter). No electronic noises.
  16. No gaming systems.
  17. Gym requirements for freshmen (though you could get out of them easily – I bounce a volleyball against a wall 20 times. The coaches prefered to coach the teams).
  18. LPs. My roommate had a reel-to-reel tape, which was considered exotic.
  19. Bridge. Games would start at noon and go on until after midnight. All you had to to was cry out “forth” and people would come running.
  20. Ivy covered professors and ivy covered walls.
11

It still is. Well, it was when I was in school (2000-2004) and every time I’ve been back to visit people still play it, and it seems the college students I sometimes find myself partying with up here play it too.

I don’t think it will ever become unpopular.

12

My dad went to the same college I did. He went in the early 60s. I graduated last year. I heard all about:

  1. Having to wear a shirt and tie to dinner, which was served family style by a waitstaff at a certain time.
  2. Smoking in classrooms.
  3. Boys not being allowed in the girl dorms. I apparently lived in the dorm where my dad’s girlfriend had lived. The lobby where he used to wait for her is now a study lounge. My hall was co-ed, as were all freshman dorms at my school.

I can’t really imagine going to college before cell phones. I was never in my room as a freshman, and didn’t spend much time there in later years, so calling my dorm phone would have been a tough way to reach me. The few times I was without a cell, I had so much trouble finding people.

13

I often forget that cell phones and the Internet didn’t enter into common useage until about a year after I graduated. Facebook litterally was still a glossy pamphlet with everyone’s photos they handed out the first week.

14

1994-98, same college as carlotta:

– I didn’t bother with e-mail until I was a junior. Plenty of professors didn’t bother with it, either.

– You could buy beer on campus if you were of age. If you weren’t, you could go to a fraternity party and get all the Beast Lite you could drink, no hassles. Professors occasionally hosted receptions with wine in campus buildings. There was, in general, a lot less concern about saving students from themselves, aside from the obligatory workshops in freshman orientation.

– Most people did not have cell phones or computers, although they weren’t completely unheard-of, either. A handful of people in my freshman dorm had TVs / VCRs, resulting in about fifteen people gathered in a tiny room watching a pirated tape of Pulp Fiction.

– Movies at the local art-house theater were $4 for students, and they had late-night showings of cult classics every weekend.

– No A/C in the dorms, unless one of your roommates was asthmatic, in which case you could have a window unit. (This was in Virginia. School started in August.)

– People who called their parents every day were considered decidedly odd. I believe the umbilical cords are shorter nowadays.

– While plenty of people were openly gay, homophobia was much more overt and more mainstream. The first campus production of Angels in America was a Big, Big Deal.

– As we were in a tourist town with only one real bar and far too many cops, people made their own fun. This included grits wrestling. (I’m told that more recent students have carried on this tradition, and also written a musical-comedy version of Titus Andronicus. I’m so proud :))

Ah, good times.

15

Really!? Dang, now I’m even sorrier we didn’t manage to meet.:smack:

16

UCSD, 1975 - 1980. That’s so long ago that most of what are now enumerated as “great school traditions” were started since my time. Also several campus landmarks which were known to us only by functional, anonymous designations (e.g. Central Library), now have donor names (Geisel Library).

There was little school spirit of the traditional sort, and there wasn’t any football team.

Intramural sports were very popular though.

Smoking was accepted almost everywhere, although not in the classrooms, where it had been banned a year before I got there. It’s odd now to remember buying my cigarettes in the Revelle sundries store, and lighting up after breakfast occasionally.

Alcohol, then as now, illegal for those under 21 but the law wasn’t enforced in the dorms. Once the ten of us on my floor were charged $5 each for carrying on a water balloon fight, and the $50 went to a mini-kegger for the dorm.

Pot, acid, etc., then as now, illegal for all but the local attitude was definitely relaxed. The set of students who had presumably descended in a direct line from the genuine hippie set of the late 1960s carried on a dedication to partying, in which the users of specifically exotic or illegal drugs more or less had merged with the traditionalist beer-pounding party set.

Regarding the last two posts, the school has a reputation for a hard-study then hard-party lifestyle.

There were no fraternities, but there was one campus club that adopted most of the practices of a fraternity, including invitational membership, and which did its best to be as much like Delta Tau Chi, in Animal House, as possible. We mostly succeeded. :slight_smile:

17

:smiley: Awesome!
OP, maybe you could ask if college was like Animal House in the year they filmed Animal House. I doubt it.

18

And about phones.

In my first two years, all calls were made from a few payphones. My third year I got a phone, and we hooked up a bunch of other phones to it - not strictly legal in those regulated days. Certainly no cellphones.

You were out of touch with your parents except for a once a week call and letters. Today our kids call whenever they are bored and walking to class. We get to proof read their papers, and I can give computer advice interactively. Hell, one kid is in Germany, and we talk to her more often than we spoke to our parents, thanks to Skype. So kids back then were a lot more independent than now.

19

I’m confused. Do you mean that you noticed that those “mid-20th century archetypes” were missing while watching Animal House? Because it certainly doesn’t depict a lot of formalism or school pride, except perhaps to satirize it with the stuck-up rival fraternity.

I’ve always felt like traditions and school spirit were more for the alumni than the students. You go to college, and everybody’s going to the same school, and nobody has time for sports or tradition or whatever. Then you graduate, and start working with alumni of a bunch of different schools, and where you went to college becomes part of your identity.

I have friends that never attended a single sports event while in college, that are now big fans and know all the school songs and all that.

20

I think it may depend on your school. I went to a very old, private university out in PA. Everyone wasn’t strolling around the quad wearing pea coats from Brooks Brothers and fraternity scarfs singing the campus fight song, but it did have a very old school scholar/athlete traditional vibe to it.

When we went to visit Rutgers, it had a very different vibe as a large, diverse state school.