IIRC they have school bells at many junior colleges, but I don’t think it’s usual at four year colleges, except maybe at the small, strict colleges that some have mentioned here. Also, I think there was such a bell in the English Lit classroom scene early in Animal House. (Fiction, of course, but, one assumes the producers didn’t want to stray too far from reality in the mundane features of the setting.)
Late '60s. I went to more than one college, and boy, were they different.
The first one: Women couldn’t wear pants on campus during the day. After dinner and weekends it was okay.
Smoking allowed everywhere.
Some of the dorms had communal bathrooms. In those cases there was a sink in the room itself, but the occupants had to go down the hall to use the toilet or shower. The newer dorms had suites with a bathroom for every two rooms.
Girls locked in dorms at 10:30 and then a person, called a proctor at that school, would come by and do a head check. Boys could come and go as they wished.
No members of opposite sex in anybody’s rooms, any time. Not often violated.
Dorm rooms were checked once a week to make sure their rooms were clean enough.
All single students had to live in the dorms. Exceptions for commuters (“townies”) and for upperclassmen. When I was a freshman one of the students in the dorm was an older woman who was coming back to school after a divorce–hence single, so she had to live in the dorm. One of them was a nun!
All dorm rooms had phones. The switchboard was extremely old and the phones worked only internally after 11 p.m. when the board was unmanned. (That is, you could only call someone else in the dorm, not outside.)
Had the same PDA rules as somebody mentioned above, except on the steps of the girls’ dorm at curfew, where things could really get hot as people said goodnight. Frustrated women! The dorm mother would flash the lights 5 minutes before curfew and then turn on a really bright one.
**Girls could get in trouble for any of the following: Using the pop machine after 11 p.m., having a messy room, skateboarding down the hall, being late getting back to the dorm, using the laundry room after 11 p.m. (except for ironing), being out of their room after midnight (except for going to the bathroom, for those in the dorms without bathrooms connected to the rooms), being caught on campus wearing pants at the wrong hours. You could end up getting sent to talk to the Dean of Women if your hair was too messy too much of the time. Every time you did something wrong in the dorm you got a check. When you got five of them you were campused, had to go straight to your room after dinner and could not leave until breakfast, and the proctor checked every hour or so.
Boys could do anything. They did not have a check system. Nobody cared if their rooms were messy or if they skateboarded down the halls, and they could come and go as they pleased. I think untucked shirts might have got them a talking to.**
Football was big, fraternities/sororities were big. People wore their fraternity blazers most of the time, and definitely to the football games. Pledges were supposed to wear their pledge pins at all times including in the shower.
Rush week was legendary. It was party time. Booze, food, whatever. The guys were much more unrestrained and tended to have free-for-alls where they invited all the girls they could find, but only unaffiliated freshman boys. The sorority rush was a lot more invitation only and involved things like dainty little sandwiches and god help you if you wore a hat, or forgot to wear a hat, depending on whatever.
It was a very big deal to have a date for Homecoming, and people got corsages to wear to the football games. (Imagine people dressing up to go to a football game.) I managed to avoid that by wearing a band uniform.
After one semester I realized I did not fit in (having set a new record for number of times being campused), so I transferred into a totally different world. At the new school:
Anybody could wear whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You could go to class in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt. You didn’t even have to wear shoes. (There were some professors who demanded it, however.)
There was no football team.
There was no curfew.
The dorms were co-ed (but by floors).
There were no fraternities.
People smoked marijuana fairly openly, but usually not in the classrooms.
Now this had been a girls school until fairly recently, and my understanding was that at one time, in say the early '60s, it had the same kind of rules as the first college I went to, with the added thing of people having to go to chapel every morning, girls being required to wear gloves, & other stuff like that. All gone by the time I got there.
Because it was still transitioning, there were something like three girls for every boy on campus, which made dating very competitive for women. To add to the problem, about half the boys were gay. (Well, that’s what it seemed like.) The whole gay pride thing was just getting going so they were coming out proudly instead of trying to fit in by dating girls. So again, frustrated women. Girls dancing with girls at the dances.
By the time I left there the word had apparently gotten out that there was an imbalance of women, and men were enrolling from both coasts, which evened things up a bit.
Not nearly as much drinking as the first campus, and a lot more drugs.
You had to go WAY out of your way to get into trouble.
It was very weird to go back and visit friends on the first campus. It felt like I had stepped back into the '50s. It was hard to believe these two campuses could exist in the same country at the same time. I still don’t know why the women on the first campus didn’t rise up and complain en masse about all the things they could get into trouble for that the men couldn’t. Messy hair for god’s sake.
Er…how…umm…where…?
Oh, never mind.
Uphill each way!
In our mouths. You thought–what! How could you!
At Georgia Tech, we have an extremely loud steam whistle that can be heard across campus in most classrooms. It sounds at 5 minutes to every hour between 9:55-4:55 (I think, not too sure about that). Because the vast majority of classes here end at the :55 mark, it actually does signal you when class is over, and tells you when there’s 10 minutes until your next class. Most classes start on the :05.
I started college at UT Austin in September of 1966, just after Charles Whitman did his thing in the tower. It was mostly hard work; some classes sucked, most were okay, a few were really interesting.
I took several years off because I Knew Everything. When I finally grew up enough to realize that I didn’t, I finished off my degree at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University) in San Marcos. It was mostly hard work; some classes sucked, most were okay, a few were really interesting.
I was never into the party or frat scene, although there were some times in my freshman year dorm that probably could have qualified for Animal House.
1970-1974, Univ. of Delaware. My freshman year was in a traditional all female dorm; the front door was locked and you had to use a code to get in after midnight. :eek: Sophmore year I moved to the first co-ed dorm, to an all-female floor, that by second semester had gone male/female every other room.
There was a lot of partying going on - drinking age was lowered to 20 during my time there but we always found ways to get booze. I remember one liquor store in Elkton MD that I don’t think they carded or they didn’t card often.
As others have mentioned, there were no phones in the rooms–just one or two phones per floor. Although the Pencader dorms, which I moved to junior year, did have phones in each room although you had to pay to have it turned on and pay for LD calls. Pencader dorms were torn down a few years ago–they only lasted 30 years. No electronics either - folks had turntables and speakers. 
What a change today - you need to have cell phone and computer.
University of Minnesota 1984-1988.
All my papers (except the first half of my freshman year) were typed on a computer. First my boyfriends Apple II, then later that IBM PC with Displaywrite that they had in the office I worked in. But no email or internet. My boyfriend was a CSci major and would dial in (via modem) to upload his work into the department. Someplace I have some floppy disks with my old papers on them - you suppose I might find something that would read them?
The UofM is functionally a commuter college for a lot of students -and it was for me - I never went to a football game or any athletic event. Didn’t ever own a UofM sweatshirt.
I did spend that first semester of college at the University of Iowa (before I decided I needed to be near my yahoo boyfriend who dumped me within months of moving back) - and that experience was co-ed dorms, quarters (and a host of other drinking games), greek life (not for me, but my dormmate was pledged and therefore I got a lot of exposure), football games, etc.
I did my undergrad from 1996-2000 at UC Santa Cruz, where there’s so little school spirit that when the administration wanted to give the school a moderately normal mascot, the students rebelled and insisted upon a really weird and useless creature to represent our pride in our school. There are only a couple of fraternities and sororities but there’s no Greek housing at all and no one gives a shit about them. There’s no football team, there are no athletic scholarships, and the sports people are most interested in are intramural ultimate frisbee and surfing.
Anyway, fast forward to August 2008 when I returned to school to do my masters degree at the University of Michigan. WHOA big difference. Honestly, it’s not really all that different here from some of the scenes in Animal House. There are loads and loads of Greek organizations and houses and people wearing Greek letter t-shirts. A fraternity across the street from my school has a beach volleyball setup in their front yard - when it was warm out, there was nonstop beach volleyball. I was out with friends the first Friday night of the school year and it was CRAZY. All of the houses were throwing parties and thousands of undergrads were stumbling around. I haven’t noticed any hazing activities, but I don’t spend a lot of time with the undergrads. The campus shuttles had anti-hazing placards up for awhile, going on about how you shouldn’t let yourself be forced into doing blah blah degrading activities.
And people have crazy school spirit. The football team was shitty this year and they STILL went to games wearing hideous bright yellow t-shirts en masse. (They call this “Maize Out”. I call it “Ow my eyes hurt”.) You can walk past a bar and hear crowds of drunken people singing the Michigan fight song. Alumni actually come to homecoming events.
It’s weird.
U of Arizona, 77-80 (a different school prior to 77)
There was considerable school pride, particularly because the “other” major university (Arizona State) tended to have better sports programs and got most of the press, and we (naturally) believed we were far superior.
Nearly every class was taught by a professor rather than a grad student. This was true even for freshman chemistry (which I had to go back and take due to some interesting interpretations of my previous school’s transcript).
The Greek system was pretty well developed, but not overwhelming. Lots of “Gamma Delta Iotas” (goddamn independents) around. I was in a frat that was just getting started again after having been banned from the campus for 4-5 years. We were not the usual fraternity types, and had a small house where about a quarter of the guys lived. The rest of us were on campus. We weren’t all that popular with the sororities, whether because of the members or for some other reason - probably the members 
We did have some pretty rowdy parties, but nothing like Animal House. 'Twas our goal, but we never got there.
I was in an old dorm. It was pretty laid back. The official policy was no alcohol on campus, but the RA’s enforcement was reasonable - as long as we didn’t get out of hand, we were allowed to bring in liquor and beer. Most of the drinking took place off campus - the good old days of 25 cent hot dogs and 10 cent beers during Friday happy hour are long gone. We’d often head down to a dive bar near downtown for (regular priced!) 25 cent drafts.
The phone system was probably installed by Mr. A.G. Bell himself. There was one line to the dorm. We had a phone monitor up front who would take a call, and then would let the person who the call was for that he had a call by pressing a buzzer for that person’s room. The person would then have to run down to the center of the hall and take the call. No privacy. There was no privacy in the bathroom, either. One per hall, large shower area, no dividers between the toilets.
Women were allowed in the dorm between 8 am and midnight. There were those who ignored the rule, but word usually got out fairly quickly. The rest of us had no sympathy to spare. We didn’t rat the guy (or girl) out, just made it fairly embarassing for them to be there.
There wasn’t much in the way of smoking that I recall. Probably more marijuana than tobacco, but that wasn’t all that widespread among the guys I hung out with. We did have a guy in the fraternity who I only ever knew as “Head” because he was pretty well into the weed.
No electronic games in the rooms, but there were a couple of big consoles where some of the guys would play in the Student Union building for a quarter a game. I seem to recall Asteroids and Centipede.
All in all, I thought it was great.