You walk out of your room in Biever Hall one Friday morning on your way to your 9:30 class, and three girls in tank tops, miniskirts and high heels run past you laughing hysterically. The stench of stale cigarette smoke and alcohol trails behind them.
As your day is beginning, theirs is just ending.
I read that scenario this week in a paper a freshman wrote in my communications writing class. My students had written descriptions of campus life, and the more I read, the more I regretted making the assignment, because life at what they call “Loyola High” seems to be more about drinking and sex than about the critical thinking Loyola boasts of on its sweatshirts.
Freshmen, I learned, are introduced to a culture of drunkenness at the ADG’s Red Tide, an orgy that has “a simple but memorable gimmick,” as one freshman put it: “all the drinks are red, and red water and alcohol are sprayed from hoses lying around the house and booze thrown everywhere by partygoers. The frat house is waterproofed to insure that the partygoers can get as soaked as they want without damaging the house.”
Fraternity members pass out fliers for that event at freshman orientation sessions, he said. “The message sent to the student population by a school-sponsored party of that magnitude was profound. Red Tide suggested to many of us that hedonism is still alive and well in New Orleans and sponsored by Loyola University.”
During the semester, residents often get drunk in their rooms – “pre-gaming,” they call it – and, at 10:30 or 11, stumble off to Friar Tucks, The Boot, T.J. Quills, The Palms and Bruno’s. And not just on weekends. Thursday nights “are the first Fridays of the week,” a student wrote. She was surprised if half of her classmates in a Friday morning class showed up. “‘I got so shitfaced at Tuck’s last night,’ may not be a professor’s idea of a valid excuse for missing class, but for a hungover student, it is.”
It’s not just the booze they’re after. The bars, one wrote, with pun possibly intended “are notorious for being a breeding ground for sexual attraction,” or what’s called “hooking up” – meeting a member of the opposite sex to take to bed. Residential Life has a curfew for males and females being in the same room, but students regularly flout it. And most of the time, the residential assistants “are busy with their own lives or breaking the rules, too.”
Females heading into Biever often can be persuaded to take in “guests” who don’t live in the dorm but who want to get to a male’s room. “Who am I to refuse to help a friend around the school’s visitation policies?” one “hostess” wrote.
The next morning, a person sneaking off the “wrong” floor is said to be taking “the walk of shame.” And what often follows is what one student described as the embarrassing situation of “passing a stranger on the way to class one day and realizing that an intimacy has been shared with him or her that doesn’t exist by day or while sober.” She has overheard her roommate on the telephone: “‘So, did you hook up with him last night?’ and the shrill voice through the phone admits, ‘I don’t remember.'”
There was more, but you get the idea. It was depressing reading for a professor who does not excuse absences by the “shitfaced.”
If the testimony of those students is to be believed, we at Loyola have an acute problem with excessive drinking and promiscuous sex. Student drinking has been a concern at universities for years, of course. But can’t we deal with it more effectively?
As for the sex, Saul Bellow wrote in Ravelstein, “Nothing in the sexual line is prohibited anymore, but the challenge is to hold your own against the general sexual anarchy.” Can’t we do a better job of facing up to that challenge?
Students themselves should give sober thought to their sexual activity and their drinking, if only out of fear of the physical consequences of both. But they do need help, and Student Affairs ought to be providing it in a more sophisticated way than by posting easily ignored rules.
Let us hope that those who will search for a new vice president for student affairs make it a priority to find someone who has demonstrated the imagination and determination to deal with those twin vices, both so destructive of the academic enterprise.
Otherwise, I’d say, stock the bookstore with a maroon sweatshirt with gold lettering that reads “Sex and Alcohol University.”
Larry Lorenz. Ph.D., is the A. Louis Read Distinguished Professor in communications.
