What was college like "back in the day?"

[Spavined_Gelding]

!960-1967, undergrad and postgrad at the westernmost Big Ten university:

Greek system was the center of the whole social system – if a man was not in a frat he better have a girl friend in a sorority if he was going to have any social life beyond hanging out in some dingy room.

Smoking all over, including in class rooms but only if you brought your own ashtray. Proper women always sat down to smoke.

Mandatory ROTC for freshmen and sophomores unless you were in the marching band – on drill days you wore the uniform to class.

Alphabetical registration, every third year you registered on the third day and all your classes were at 7:30 AM and 3:30 PM. If you needed a class you found someone who was registering on day one and had them sign up and then go in with you to drop, creating an empty seat for you.

Cheap. Undergrad tuition in liberal arts was (I think) $95 per semester and law school was $125. Medical school may have been as much as $200. But then nobody had much money.

Few cars. Lots of walking. Gas was like $.30 per gallon.

Very tolerant local and university police who expected and accepted a certain amount of bad behavior from undergrads.

Segregated dorms (male-female) and on the opposite sides of campus. Curfew for women in the dorms and in sorority houses – midnight six night a week and 1:00 AM on Saturday night. The first warm week end of spring precipitated a panty raid – the men’s dorms emptied and the whole outfit marched in mass across the river to the women’s dorms. The men, maybe 5000 of them, stood in the street and howled for the women to throw their underwear out the windows. The cops put up with this for a while and then told everyone to go home. They did.

No grade inflation. You had to work your butt off to get a B and As were few and far between.

Mixed classes - classes with both undergrads and post grads in the same class. Post grad women in history department were hot, sophisticated and unapproachable.

Not much baggage. Most people went to school with a suitcase and a clock-radio, maybe a portable record player.

The whole thing has a Tom Brown’s School Days air to it. It seems awfully remote and simple now. I get the idea that the riots over the Cambodian Intrusion, the Kent State Massacre, Vietnam, the free speech movement, marihuana, and 18 year old voting changed everything.

[TV_time]

@ShibbOleth

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

At least when (mid to late '60s) and where I went to college - yep, pretty much was.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Spavined_Gelding

Cheap. Undergrad tuition in liberal arts was (I think) $95 per semester and law school was $125. Medical school may have been as much as $200. But then nobody had much money.

True enough. It’s easy to forget that $20K was considered a handsome salary in those days, though by 1967 inflation had presumably begun to take its toll. For comparison, my quarterly registration fee at UCSD in the late 1970s was about $212. A few years later, at UCLA it was about $400.

Not much baggage. Most people went to school with a suitcase and a clock-radio, maybe a portable record player.

By my time the portable record player had become a component stereo, but still, it was much as you describe. People might also bring one or two other large items, such as a surf/skate board, bicycle, or a guitar, but that was usually it, apart from that one suitcase. At UCSD they used the dorms for conferences during the breaks, so you had to pack out completely for Winter and Spring breaks. “Spring Break” had not become the phenomenon that is now, though certainly many who could spare the money did travel to warm tourist spots.

[DrCube]

Quick question:

In The Graduate, there is a scene at UC Berkeley I think, where they actually have bells that ring when class starts and ends, like high school. Was this at all common in the late sixties? Was it common in any colleges ever? It seems like an entirely high school thing.

I think it is unlikely that everyone would have class at the same times in college. But stranger things have happened.

[Sonnenstrahl]

@Spavined_Gelding

Post grad women in history department were hot, sophisticated and unapproachable.

That’s totally the way it still is today.

Lisa, postgrad history student

(Interesting thread, too!)

[Voyager]

@UncaStuart

Changing subjects and adding to my earlier post:
Hardly anything in the way of personal electronics. The cassette tape was not yet in use for music and the Walkman was more than a decade in the future, so the only music came from transistor radios or from portable stereo systems for LPs. No portable TVs. No calculators. I did have an 8-track added to my car, however. But I was one of the few people with a car as a freshman.

In 1970 I had a reel to reel tape deck with an amp and speakers built in - not portable like a Walkman, but not bigger than your average stereo. By 1971 one guy had a small TV, which we all gathered around to watch.

[Siam_Sam]

Ah, memories. I recall the game of Quarters. It involved a small glass of beer and a quarter. You would sit erect, place the quarter’s rim at the top of your nose and let it go. It would roll down and bounce onto the table. It had to bounce once and then into the glass. If it did not, you had to down the beer yourself; if it did, you chose who had to down it.

No cellphones, no computers.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Siam_Sam

No cellphones, no computers.

No lights, no phone, no motorcars. Not a single luxury.

[Siam_Sam]

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

No lights, no phone, no motorcars. Not a single luxury.

And we walked 20 miles to class in the snow, even in summer school! And we liked it!

Dadgum young whippersnappers, grumble, grumble. :mad:

[KneadToKnow]

@dalej42

1987=1991.

Math major?

[robby]

@brad_d

Rice University, 1989-93.

Email was just a toy. I got an account on the Unix system there when I signed up for a FORTRAN 77 class my sophomore year. With it came an email account - the first one I’d ever had. Except for that particular programming class, in which assignments were submitted electronically (a novel thing), email wasn’t used for anything official; communication with professors was done either in person or by telephone.

Hey, brad, I didn’t realize you went to Rice (or if I did, it’s slipped my mind).

I graduated from Rice as an engineering student in 1991.

I was actually one of the teaching assistants for the self-paced course that taught FORTRAN and MATLAB. (I think it was MASC 223, in the math science department.)

@brad_d

Email was not a very fast way to reach most of your fellow students. They’d read it - eventually - but it could be days if they didn’t have a specific reason to be doing work over in the computer labs. (This was starting to change by my senior year, but it was still nothing like today.)

Agreed.

@brad_d

University policy at the time even prohibited the sending of email off-campus(!) This may have been officially rescinded while I was still there; it didn’t matter much, as very few of my not-at-Rice friends had email addresses to send anything to. During my senior year, I carried on a few talk sessions with a buddy of mine at MIT while over at the computer lab - it felt like a big deal.

There was no Web as we know it today.

I actually got special permission to be allowed to send email off-campus, and to be allowed to post on Usenet. (I had to come up with some B.S. reason to justify it; it basically came down to who you knew in computer support to get permission.

@brad_d

Some students had personal computers in their rooms, but many (such as my Apple) had no connection to the rest of the world. If I typed something up on that thing, I’d take it on a floppy over to the computer labs to print it out. Often it was easier to just do the work over in the Mac lab.

I did all my papers in the Mac lab.

@brad_d

Every on-campus room had a phone. We weren’t on the campus phone system - each room had to activate their line with the phone company just like they were an off-campus apartment. No rooms were wired for internet.

Yup. There was no cable, either. I put a TV in my room one year, but the reception was lousy, so it was only good for watching movies on a VCR.

@brad_d

Nobody had cell phones. People just weren’t as immediately-reachable as they are today - we’d never known any different so we didn’t fret about it.

Yup. Reading this thread makes me realize how much easier it must be for college students today to track each other down.

@brad_d

I was an engineering student, and most of the work was done with pencil and paper. Hell, most plots were done by hand on graph paper. For one or two labs we had to use some plotting software, and for the most part it was a royal pain in the ass - it was easier to just whip it out on paper. Like many other things, this had started to change by my senior year.

To a certain extent I agree with you, in that I did most of my homework with pencil and paper. However, I used MATLAB for almost all of my complex plotting (and computing), and later Cricket Graph on the Macs for lab reports.

@brad_d

All of Rice’s “residential colleges” were coed, although a few had only been so for a handful of years when I showed up. No permission was needed to bring guests to your room.

Sid Rich and Brown were still single-sex my freshman year; both went coed my sophomore year.

@brad_d

After-hours access to campus buildings was gained by swiping one’s university ID through a reader. Exceptions were the several residential colleges constructed in a “motel” style, where rooms opened directly to the outside.

Yes, it was nice having 24-hour access to the computer lab and engineering buildings.

I can’t believe I graduated over 17 years ago!

[robby]

@Hyperelastic

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). …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.

I was an undergrad over the exact same time period as you. During my first two years at Rice, we basically had Macs in the computer lab, and mainframe terminals. The Macs stayed throughout, and were continually upgraded. In the summer of 1987, they removed most of the dumb mainframe terminals and replaced them with Sun workstations. I was therefore able to do reports and papers on the Macs, and engineering work on the Sun workstations. I actually did a lot of work on the computers. For example, all of my papers and lab reports were done on computer.

I had actually received an electronic typewriter for Christmas during my senior year in high school. I never used it once in college.

[robby]

@RealityChuck

…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.

I’m willing to bet that you actually called out “fourth”, as in you were looking for a “fourth player.”

[Hari_Seldon]

@Siam_Sam

And we walked 20 miles to class in the snow, even in summer school! And we liked it!

Dadgum young whippersnappers, grumble, grumble. :mad:

I did the same, only it was uphill in both directions.

Seriously, I went to Penn (not Penn State, dammit) in 1954-59, the first three years part-time and all of them as a commuter. But I knew students in the dorms. Men were absolutely not permitted in women’s rooms; women were permitted in men’s rooms for two hours on Sunday afternoon only, but they had to sign in and give the number of the room they were visiting and the door had to remain open and all feet on the floor (they checked). All this was in loco parentis. On the other hand, smoking was permitted everywhere including classrooms (but not, I think, the library). The men’s fraternities were big, less so the women’s (and they were called fraternities). Full-time tuition was $700 my first year and went up $100 every year. I imagine it is now at least $30000. To put that in perspective, my father worked in a factory and made around $6000. Nowadays he might make ten times that if was lucky, while tuition is up by a factor of over 40.

A folklorist was hired by the English dept in 1956. He said that in a dept of maybe 40, there were only three (besides him) who had not grown up on the mail line, done their undergraduate and graduate degrees at Penn and had spent their entire career there. Generally, he said, they preparted lecture notes in their first year and read them every year thereafter until they turned yellow and disintegrated, at which point they retired. (Ok, I made up the last clause.)

Another interesting fact is that Penn goes back to 1740 (a date that can be disputed, but not by much) and yet their current president is their 8th, the first having been appointed in the 30s, I believe. Previously, the highest rank was the provost. Oh for the days that universities were run by academics and not administrators!

[sunacres]

@DrCube

In The Graduate, there is a scene at UC Berkeley I think, where they actually have bells that ring when class starts and ends, like high school. Was this at all common in the late sixties? Was it common in any colleges ever? It seems like an entirely high school thing.

Fuck no.

Berkeley '78. The whole campus is a Beaux Arts fantasy, centered on a bell tower in the middle (the “Campinele”) which peals as many bells as each passing hour. No bells in class, however.

I think we might have smoked some dope, but I can’t remember.

[LouisB]

How far back do you wanna go? I entered Texas Tech in 1959. Actually, it was Texas Technological College. It is a University now, though still called Texas Tech. Dorms were strictly segregated by male and female. A guy caught upstairs in a girl’s dorm except on the one visiting day they had each year would be expelled, as would the girl; a girl upstairs in a male dorm would probably have been put in the stocks if not burned at the stake. Guys and girls were not allowed to hold hands while walking across the campus; that constituted a Public Display of Affection and both parties would be written up for PDA and both parties would have received serious rebukes by the Dean of Men and the Dean of Women. Kissing in public would have scandalized the entire school; God knows what the official punishment would have been.
Girls had to be inside the dorm by 10:00 PM and in their rooms by 10:30, at which time head count was conducted. The Girls Dorm would be LOCKED and I mean ALL DOORS at 10:30, except on Friday when a half-hour extension was granted. Saturday night was heaven; the hours were extended to midnight. Nothing changed about the basic rules, though, and the doors were still locked when time was up. Parking lots at the girls dorms were patrolled by security guards and necking sessions would be broken up. Girls were not allowed to smoke outside the dorms whereas men could do damn near anything that crossed their minds IF they could find anyone to do it with. Texas Tech was located in Lubbock, Texas, which at that time was a completely “DRY” county; no alcohol was to be found unless one patronized a “bootlegger.” One could drive to New Mexico if one had suitable ID; if driving East, one had to hit Fort Worth before legal alcohol could be found. I don’t remember the miles but it was at least a five to six hour trip.
Radios, stereo sets, and TVs in dorm rooms cost extra because they used electricity; electric irons were given a pass. Telephones were available in each room but they were used exclusively as paging devices. I’ve probably forgotten much more but I don’t care to remember it if I have.
Texas Tech, back in those days, was a fun campus, I can tell you that.
Texas A&M was worse by at least a factor of ten.

[kayT]

1964-68 Illinois State University. Much like LouisB’s description. My roommate and I had an electric skillet and an electric percolator (anyone remember those?) so we could cook gourmet meals on Sunday evenings since the dorm cafeteria didn’t serve Sunday evening meals.

We had the 3 feet on the floor rule; if you were in the lounge with a man you had to have a total of 3 feet on the floor. Really. Who could make up this stuff?

Anyone remember candlelightings?
God I’m getting old.

[jsc1953]

@DrCube

In The Graduate, there is a scene at UC Berkeley I think, where they actually have bells that ring when class starts and ends, like high school. Was this at all common in the late sixties? Was it common in any colleges ever? It seems like an entirely high school thing.

The question has already been answered, decisively; so I just want to add that most of the “Berkeley” campus scenes were shot at USC.

Berkeley, 1971-76 (5 year plan)

My experience was a little off-kilter, as I lived in a student-run co-op, not a dorm or a frat. So we were a little looser than a dorm (self-governing) but not as rowdy as a frat. There was a once/quarter blow-out dinner, with wine served (not beer, surprisingly), but very little drinking otherwise. A bit of weed smoked, but not excessively – there was still a bit of left-over 60s illegality about it.

One TV in the whole building, in a common room – which filled to overflowing for Night Gallery, of all things. Each room had a phone. No computers, of course…communicated with friends & relatives via snail mail & weekly phone calls.

One of my roommates came out while we roomed together, which was unusual. The subject arose because he wanted to be a schoolteacher, and there was a proposition on the California ballot at the time to ban gays from being teachers. I swear, I’m not making this up…some things have changed for the better.

There was a lot of pride in the school academically, and football games were coming back in popularity, after bottoming out in the more radical 60s. Frats were still not very popular.

“And when the game is over we will buy a keg of booze
And drink to California 'til we wobble in our shoes
So drink (tra la la)…”

[Zoe]

Things got much better after I transferred to Peabody in Nashville, but I started out in a…

Small rural church-related college 1961:

1. No black students allowed except for one male ministerial student.

2. One dorm for women; two dorms for men.

3. Women had to be inside the dorm after 7:30 or 8:00 unless they were signed out for Vespers and/or the library. Everyone went to the library to socialize.

4. Smoking in the dorm rooms and some classrooms was permitted.

5. Drinking on or off campus was not permitted and could get you booted out of school.

6. Chapel attendance on Wednesdays was required.

7. No computers, no microwaves, no cell phones. Just one coin operated phone for each of the two floors.

8. When our dates called for us at the main desk, the dorm mother called for us over the intercom.

9. Women couldn’t wear jeans, slacks or shorts except on the tennis court. We had to wear a coat over them on the way from the dorm to the tennis court.

10. Women had to sign out of the dorm if we walked off campus.

11. On weekends women had to be in at 11 o’clock.

12. The men were free to come and go as they pleased (except to the women’s dorm past certain hours.) They were never allowed in the women’s rooms.

13. Women were not allowed in the men’s dorms either. I did manage to sneak in for a poker game once.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@sunacres

Fuck no.

Berkeley '78. The whole campus is a Beaux Arts fantasy, centered on a bell tower in the middle (the “Campinele”) which peals as many bells as each passing hour. No bells in class, however.

I think we might have smoked some dope, but I can’t remember.

UCLA also has a carillon that rings out the hours. Each striking of the hours is preceded by a the short tune that goes:

Mi-Re-Do-So-So-Re-Mi-Do (I think every carillon in the world plays this). Then when the it actually begins striking the hours, a more ponderous and deeper sounding bell is used that does not appear to be tuned to the same scale. I’m actually not sure if there is a campanile or not. One of the Royce Hall towers is the right height and shape, but I always thought the carillon was in that squat octagonal thingy on top of Powell Library.