Labor of Love (11 page)

Many of them did indeed remain single. Of those educated at Bryn Mawr between 1889 and 1908, 53 percent never married; at Wellesley and the University of Michigan, the figures were 43 percent and 47 percent. They may not have minded. Women's colleges like Mount Holyoke were described as “hotbeds of special sentimental friendships,” where female students “fell in love at first sight” and engaged in “smashing”—cuddling and kissing in their dorm rooms. But many of the new Coeds seemed to have different interests.

In
Town and Gown
, the spinster dean of women feels their differences keenly. “The vulgarity of their dress, their frankness, their cigarettes, their dancing, the things they read, the shows they saw—a mad sex-swirl!” Young women no longer had to choose between men and their studies. The Coed rebelled by putting romantic adventures at the center of her curriculum. Dating dominated social life. Outnumbered by her male classmates by ratios of five or six to one, she could go out with three or four different College Men every week.

*   *   *

What did a college date look like? It could start as a drive. In his 1928 book
The Campus
, Professor Robert Cooley Angell of the University of Michigan argued that “the influence of the automobile on the relations between the sexes” could not be overestimated.

“The ease with which a couple can secure absolute privacy when in possession of a car and the spirit of reckless abandon which high speed and moonlight drives engender have combined to break down the traditional barriers,” he sniffed. “What is vulgarly known as ‘petting' is the rule rather than the exception.”

The College Man with a car often took a Coed
somewhere
. In his “low slung racer,” the champion Fusser Andy Protheroe takes girls to the Orph, a vaudeville theater that is the hottest date spot in
Town and Gown
. The entertainment that the College Man and Coed watched together could be salacious. At the Orph, scantily clad shopgirls, topless “Egyptian” dancers, and adulterous vamps take the stage in quick succession, while male members of the audience catcall them with phrases like “sweet papa!” and “hot dog!”

After the show, the College Man took the Coed to eat or drink. The “football joint” Protheroe favors is called the You'll Come Inn. It is “a basement establishment with wooden tables, latticed booths and parchment-shaded lamps,” where two chocolate malts cost 50¢. One naïve date of Protheroe's is “thrilled” by it. Her more sophisticated classmates hardly seem to notice the food or jazz music. “The couples in the booths about them were petting whenever the watchful manager, watchful in the fear of an edict from the executive dean would ruin his business, was in another part of the place.”

The most important kind of date a College Man and Coed could go on was a dance. Fraternities hosted slews of formals, usually organized around sporting events. Dean Robert Angell estimated that at the University of Michigan in the 1920s, three hundred dances took place every year. At coed and single-sex universities alike, students invited “imports” to attend football games and the parties that surrounded them. More clearly than any other activity, these dances distilled and dramatized the principles that governed college dating.

The first rule was that sex was a secret that young people kept to themselves. Whereas parents had overseen older forms of courtship, now dating took place as far away as possible from watchful adults. On his way into a dance, the College Man would encounter the chaperones, or “shaps,” whom university bylaws required to be there. Fraternity hosts became adept at sidetracking them. In the 1924 novel
The Plastic Age
, by Percy Marks, the hero, Hugh Carver, learns how it works as soon as he arrives at his first fraternity dance. “Six men had been delegated to keep the patronesses in the library and adequately entertained.”

Second, fraternity dances staged intense competition among peers. Both men and women worked hard to “rate” or merit good dates. Passing the shaps, the College Man joined the stag line at the side of the crowded dance floor and waited for his opportunity to cut in, or steal a Coed from her partner. This system dramatized the idea that courtship was a contest. Even when the College Man invited a Coed to a fraternity party, he accepted that his brothers would take turns dancing with her. Indeed, bringing a girl whose dance card would stay full was taken as a sign of
his
high social status. For the Coed who wanted to impress her date, the best strategy was to flirt with as many others as possible. To do so also cemented her status with her female peers. In
Town and Gown
, the bitter social climber Ellen Pritchett reflects that “men were only the gloves with which one slapped the face of girls. It was women one dueled.”

Finally, college dances were explicitly sexual. Your sexuality was the currency you put down to play in this arena, where spending money on clothes and flowers and cars and tickets allowed young people to consume one another conspicuously, too.

In the same way that my parents used to freak out about how children of the 1990s “grinded” to hip-hop, adults in the 1920s panicked about the sexually arousing effects of dancing to jazz music. They fretted about “button shiners” (boys who danced so close to their partners that they appeared to be burnishing their suit or shirt buttons on their dresses), “crumpet munchers” (who danced close enough for, as one young girl told Judge Lindsey, “the kick they get out of it”), and “snuggle pups” (don't ask). And like critics of hip-hop, critics of “unspeakable jazz” expressed their fears in terms that were often racist.

“Anyone who says that ‘youth of both sexes can mingle in close embrace'—with limbs intertwined and torsos in close contact—‘without suffering harm lies,'” an editorial in
Ladies' Home Journal
declared. “Add to this position the wriggling movement and sensuous stimulation of the abominable jazz orchestra with its voodoo-born minors and its direct appeal to the sensory center, and if you can believe that youth is the same after this experience as before, then God help your child.”

Combined with heavy drinking, dances encouraged petting—and more. When Hugh Carver attends his first party in
The Plastic Age
, he is frankly shocked to realize how many of the female imports are hammered. The first girl he cuts in on has breath “redolent with whisky.” Another clings to him violently, as they dance, whispering, “Hold me up, kid; I'm ginned.” He has to rush another girl to the garden so she can vomit. His fellow Greeks do not behave much better. “A number of the brothers were hilarious; a few had drunk too much and were sick; one had a ‘crying jag.'” When the first girl he cut in on accosts Hugh, slurring “Le's—le's pet,” and plants a kiss on him, he flees. On his way out, he darts into a friend's room to pick up a shawl for a shap who accidentally left it there, and stumbles in on two strangers having sex.

The way Hugh Carver describes these scenes suggested that a gentleman would not take advantage of a Coed when she was incapacitated. Who knows how many real-life College Men followed this rule? By the end of
The Plastic Age
, even Goody Two-shoes Hugh has fallen into the fray. At the advice of friends, Hugh buys “hooch” to pregame his final prom with his girlfriend, Cynthia. By midnight, “Hugh was aware of nothing but Cynthia's body.” When she asks him to “ta-take me somewhere,” he leads her to the dorm room of the straitlaced friend who lives nearest to the party. In a deus ex machina move, the friend returns early from his holiday, to find them petting on his carpet. It is only this chance event that keeps the couple from “going the limit.” The mutual embarrassment they feel at the extremity of their behavior breaks them up just in time for Hugh's Sanford graduation.

*   *   *

College students may have always misbehaved. In 1752, Yale President Thomas Clap kicked a student out of the university for “sundry riotous and impudent Crimes.” The kid had gone on a beer-fueled rampage—yelling and jumping, damaging the walls of the rooms of his tutors and, worst of all, saying that he did not
care
if they expelled him. But in the twentieth century, with the introduction of women into the mix, attitudes toward what constituted acceptable behavior on college campuses dramatically shifted. Increasingly, the kinds of authority figures or disciplinarians who had once been shaps abandoned that supervisory role. They left the kids to work out their own system.

A long legal tradition had argued that colleges had the right to discipline students in loco parentis, or “in place of their parents.” The thinking was that by voluntarily entering a university—or, in the case of those under eighteen, being enrolled by one's guardians—a student surrendered many liberties. In 1913, the Supreme Court of Kentucky upheld the right of the private Berea College to expel students for going to a restaurant across the street from campus. In 1928, a New York appellate court upheld the right of Syracuse University to expel a student for not being “a typical Syracuse girl.” The opinion argued that if a student harmed the “ideals of scholarship” or “moral atmosphere” of even a public university, she had violated the terms of the contract that she signed in the form of her registration card; the university was therefore entitled to terminate it.

In the 1960s, however, a series of cases brought an end to in loco parentis. Over the course of the decade, judges argued that public universities could no longer expel a student without due process. As more and more undergraduates became active in civil rights protests, courts also defended their rights to freedom of speech and assembly at school.

These decisions had major implications for how college students conducted romantic relationships. Until the 1960s or '70s, “parietal rules” had strictly governed the interactions of men and women at both coed and single-sex universities, imposing curfews and enforcing “intervisitation” policies like “open door, one foot on the floor.” Starting in the late 1960s, however, schools dropped these regulations, and more and more dormitories went coed.

In retrospect, it seems clear that the end of in loco parentis was part of a broad shift in how the public viewed higher education. The first American universities were founded to train ministers; the secular schools of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still were thought to perform a key civic function, preparing young people to be productive democratic citizens. Since the heyday of campus activism in the 1960s and '70s, a new consensus has emerged. Rather than seeing public universities as social goods, with an important moral vocation, more and more public figures speak about them like
businesses
.

By the twenty-first century, corporate universities and defunded state schools were allowing students to conduct their private lives pretty much however they wanted. The new philosophy held that students were customers, and they were always right. One would hope so. Since the mid-1970s, tuition at private colleges has increased at nearly triple the rate of general inflation; at public institutions it has more than doubled. It hardly seems unreasonable for the individual bearing that kind of expense to have a little fun.

And so being an undergrad gives you carte blanche. If that time you had sex with the student council president in the laundry center, then accidentally emailed the entire staff of the student newspaper about it, ever comes up, you can simply shrug. That photo of you making out with three friends in broad daylight on top of a U-Haul truck?
It was college!

*   *   *

In the 2000s, academic sociologists and university administrators started taking an interest in the growing number of news reports about student promiscuity. It was the first time that many of them had heard that the practice of dating on campus was endangered, and they wanted more than an anecdotal basis to understand the changes taking place. Starting in the mid-2000s, several scholars set up the first large-scale, social scientific studies that aimed to investigate both how undergraduates hooked up and how they felt about it. Like Judge Lindsey in the 1920s, they found that the revolt of modern youth had not created chaos. Rather, it had generated a new set of conventions that peer groups strictly enforced.

While it might have surprised onlookers, undergraduates in the 2000s were in fact having less sex than their predecessors in the 1980s and '90s—if you accepted their definition of sex as vaginal intercourse. (Those of us who grew up during the Clinton years learned from our president that activities other than intercourse do not constitute “sexual relations,” however intimate they may be.) Nationally representative studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control have found that in fact there has been a significant decrease in rates of teen sex over the past twenty years. In 1991, their annual Youth Risk Behavior survey found that half of boys and 37.2 percent of girls age fifteen to seventeen reported having had sex in the past three months. By 2010, the number of boys fell to under 33 percent and girls dropped to 17 percent. The professors who turned to their own campuses found similar patterns.

Paula England, a sociologist at New York University, has carried out the most exhaustive research to date on hookup culture. Over the past ten years, England has interviewed individual students, run focus groups, and conducted an online survey on more than thirteen thousand heterosexual undergraduates at four-year institutions across the United States. England found that on many campuses, the unusually chaste and unusually profligate tend to skew the average number of hookups between matriculating and the time of graduation. However, the median for graduating seniors is between four and seven—hardly a shocking figure, especially when you take into account that only 40 percent of these hookups involve intercourse. Nor were encounters always “random.”