Going Loco

a new conservatism infects the campus as schools try to act like parents

When I was in college in the late Eighties, I once sent out party invitations with a quote from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Those were the days.

These days, sad to say, campus social life is very different. Hedonism is under attack and a joyless new conservatism infects American campuses. The crusty old term in loco parentis is even staging a comeback. It's Latin for "in place of a parent," and it signified the authority adults in academe held over students until the late Sixties and early Seventies, when rules and close supervision of students' personal lives all but vanished from campuses.

Now, all forms of wildness and excess--or just partying--are being monitored by committees of bureaucrats and students. The idea, which many students seem surprisingly willing to accept, is that they can't control themselves and need to be guided in even the most personal areas of life.

Some of the new foster parents fear that having a couple of drinks and going home with someone after a party is as dangerous as being air-dropped into a war zone.

•

I graduated from Harvard in 1989 and spent three years at Princeton doing graduate work in English. Along the way I stayed in touch with campus life and observed a gradual change in atmosphere. The trouble we have today began in the early Nineties when feminists succeeded in establishing crazy new guidelines and rules about sexual harassment and date rape. I published my first book, The Morning After, in 1993 in response to the dangerous absurdity of those new rules. In 1997 I published Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End, which also chronicled the creeping return of repressive rules. Since then educators have installed more and more roadblocks on the "road of excess."

Take the termination of a tradition at Princeton--the Nude Olympics. Every year, beginning in the early Seventies, hundreds of sophomores, usually wearing just scarves and boots, gathered in Holder Courtyard on the night of the first snowfall of the season. They drank and then ran around campus, occasionally straying into town. Naomi Dunn, class of 1991, recalled its heyday. "It was fun," she said. "You'd end up seeing your friends facedown in the snow, naked and puking." In 1992, 31 Princetonians were arrested when they carried their nude carousing into town. They pleaded guilty to minor charges, paid fines and performed community service. Still, the tradition remained unchallenged.

The January 1999 Nude Olympics put five students in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, and university officials were not pleased. A New York Times report on the incident read, "In addition to the drinking, school officials have cited concerns about lewd activity that took place in Holder Courtyard on Friday night."

Princeton president Harold Shapiro issued a death warrant for the tradition in a letter to The Daily Princetonian. "While I recognize that versions of this event have been a regular occurrence in recent years, I believe we can no longer tolerate the risks that it has come to pose to our students," he wrote. "I am simply not willing to wait until a student dies before taking preventive action." Shapiro appointed a committee to study the future of the Nude Olympics and the board of trustees approved the committee's recommendation to ban the event.

No one approves of binge drinking--nor, for that matter, passing out in the snow with hazy memories of sex partners. But the severity of the administration's reaction struck some Princeton alumni as excessive. "Can't undergraduates run naked in a restrained and dignified manner anymore?" asked Peter Dutton, class of 1991, in an e-mail message to other alumni that was quoted in The New York Times.

A few months later the Times cited the Nude Olympics episode in a comprehensive story about the changing mood on campus under the headline. In a Revolution of Rules, Campuses go full Circle.

"What is evolving is a tamer campus and an updated and subtler version of in loco parentis, the concept that educators are stand-in parents," reported Ethan Bronner. He cited changes-- most involving increased adult supervision of social life--at a number of campuses, including the University of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Virginia, Lehigh University, Dartmouth (the inspiration for Animal House) and elsewhere.

In Madison, Wisconsin there was talk of "scavenger hunts" in which students and faculty members try to bond and have wholesome fun. "Learning communities" is the increasingly popular buzz term for places where faculty or other staff members closely supervise students. The Times reported mixed reviews from students, including this observation from Carrie Mayer, a senior at the University of Wisconsin: "When I think about the new learning communities versus the Animal House atmosphere of the Eighties, I feel it is just great. There is an enormous need for structure and a certain comfort in returning to the era of Donna Reed."

"Today's young people are growing up in different circumstances," Penn State president Graham Spanier told the Times. "We do not want to make them more childlike. But parents are constantly contacting us, asking what is going on with their kids. They want in loco parentis. Parents say, 'Give them structure.'"

Lehigh president Gregory Farrington declared, "We get paid not only to teach but to mentor, and we'd better do that well. There is a much greater focus on adult supervision."

•

I have to wonder if some authoritarian measures address the needs of students--or if they are even feasible. At the University of Arizona, for example, there has been discussion of putting a cautionary announcement in course listings for any class that would cover a subject deemed "potentially offensive." The University of Massachusetts--Amherst has banned alcohol at football tailgate parties, and in May 1999 the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education voted to require all state university branches to notify parents when underage students are caught with alcohol on campus.

Lehigh University has joined other institutions in a virtual war on parties. The new rules are so strict that even parents might disapprove. Beginning this fall at Lehigh, every party on campus, including small gatherings in dormitories, will require two security guards and a bartender if alcohol is served. The hired help will have more on their minds than breaking up fights and making Long Island iced teas. The security guards will have the task of checking IDs and making sure that no one 21 or older passes a minor a drink. The bartender in turn has to decide who gets another drink. (Imagine having to say to a brawny football player, "You've had enough.")

Not that it would be easy for students to get drunk. The new rules ration the amount of alcohol at the bar, using a complicated formula that involves the number of guests and the duration of the party. Hosts are required to provide plenty of food and to make nonalcoholic beverages as conspicuous as the liquor.

The university plans to pay 100 percent of the cost of the second security guard for the first year, and 50 percent the following year. "We used to have the reputation of being a party school," Lehigh spokesman William Johnson told me. "But we've changed a lot over the past few years. We don't even allow kegs on campus anymore."

Many students disapprove of the harsh regulations. "I lost freedom going from my parents' home to my dormitory room," University of Tennessee senior Erin Zammett recalled. "Freshman year, when I lived on campus, we were not allowed to have any alcohol in our rooms or anywhere on school grounds. Men could be in our rooms only during visitation hours. Security cameras were at every exit to monitor any violation. The residents had to pull amazing stunts just to get their boyfriends into the building."

At Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina the venerable honor code is so respected that, as senior Ryan Seifert noted, "if two sodas came out of a vending machine, everyone would leave the extra soda. Everyone at Davidson agrees with the honor code. It can be harsh at times, but believing in the honor code and believing that it works gives us more freedom. It conditions you for life--you don't steal, you don't cheat, you don't lie. You just don't do those things."

Now, however, a batch of in loco parentis strictures threatens to undercut the code, which, the student handbook boasts, "produces an atmosphere of trust and freedom rarely found among American colleges." In the past few years, administrators have banned kegs from all parties and instituted regulations that require students to present identification, wear a special wristband and descend to a basement to receive a single beer. Many Davidson students feel the new rules are ridiculous and fear they encourage students to binge-drink in their rooms before going to parties where the rules are enforced by a security guard.

"I definitely think that there is a need for structure in college," said Noelle Harvey, a senior at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. "But there is not a need for restraint. If you're going to consider people adults by law, then you have to treat them that way. They are trying to take away everything college stands for." She cited recent new rules that put a damper on parties and permit the administration to notify parents if (concluded on page 147)Going Loco(continued from page 68) an underage student commits any substance violation, on or off campus. "The crazy policies just make students party in secret ways," Harvey observed. "They're moving the social scene off campus, which is bad because it leads to drunk driving."

•

Hypocrisy is never far behind when adult authorities try to dictate the morals of college students. Two recent episodes at Yale come to mind. In one case, a residential college master responsible for counseling students was indicted on charges involving child pornography. At almost the same time Yale canceled the classes of a lecturer and thesis advisor when he became a suspect in the murder of one of his students.

Besides, it doesn't seem like all these alcohol-free zones, chaperones and scavenger hunts stand much chance against the timeless power of teenage hormones and hedonism. Students will sneak out and do their tequila shots in dorm rooms upstairs, or they will go into the bathroom and do cocaine, or they will drink beer in the hallway. There have always been ways to slip by surveillance if you really wanted to. Think of Prohibition: the flourishing speakeasies, the barrels of bootleg alcohol, the Mob-controlled cops. Obviously, Prohibition didn't get people to stop drinking; it just made drinking more glamorous.

Why are these changes taking place? Certainly, there are practical reasons. Academic institutions fear legal liability arising from alcohol-related incidents both on and off campus. Several highly publicized deaths from alcohol poisoning made those legal considerations all the more compelling. But commonsense responses to these circumstances don't explain scavenger hunts. It was also the new conservative attitudes that permitted the book A Return to Modesty by 23-year-old Williams graduate Wendy Shalit to get the attention it did. An ardent advocate of virginity until marriage, Shalit writes, "I have secretly hoped, when someone has kissed me in public, that a police officer would interfere." This is the idea of protection and structure gone crazy. Her fantasy gives new meaning to the words police state.

But Shalit is hardly alone in her extremism. Other young people also want to have adult authority in their lives. Earlier this year an editorial in The Harvard Crimson complained that the university "does its students a serious disservice" in not fostering "romantic relationships" among students. The Crimson staff said that "close to 40 percent of our classmates have never had a romantic relationship that lasted longer than a week while at Harvard."

The dean, Harry Lewis, took the complaint seriously enough to address the issue a short time later in the Crimson. "During college, students learn to take responsibility for their own actions, to make choices and to live with the consequences," Lewis wrote. "Most troubling is the concept that it is the institution's responsibility to see that every student--every single one--feel a certain way."

It seems bizarre that he should even have to write that. But what is the administration supposed to do? How are adults supposed to stop those brief relationships and get the students to focus on monogamy and true love? Of course universities should not involve themselves in students' romantic lives. Lewis' comments are a refreshing antidote to the "in loco" mania.

•

What are all these students and administrators so afraid of? So you make mistakes. You do things you wouldn't have done if you hadn't had five plastic cups of cheap wine. But maybe you gained some kind of understanding from your mistakes. Maybe sometimes William Blake is right: The road of excess does lead to the palace of wisdom. Some of the experiences you contemplate through the haze of a hangover, your hair still smelling like cigarette smoke as you swallow two Advils with your coffee, do give some sort of wisdom, if only in making you think, I'll never do that again. You can recall the time you slept with your best friend, or your best friend's girlfriend, or your girlfriend's roommate, and not feel like you have to do it later in life when you are married and have three kids. Who knows?

If college is supposed to prepare students for the real world, the creation of artificial spaces, curfews, chaperones, alcohol-free zones and scavenger hunts does not necessarily do them a service. By sheltering and coddling and treating them like children and creating a world unlike the real world they are going to encounter, schools only make it harder for students to explore the freedoms and terrors, the misspent nights and elated moments, the regrets and thrills, the independence and loneliness that are adult life.