College Life

College in the United States is an odd mixture of higher learning and youth culture for its students, and it has been for over a hundred years. In the late nineteenth century American undergraduates themselves invented the youth culture of outside-the-classroom-college, naming it and passing it down to future generations. What has happened to this same youth culture among the students in the 1980s? In an effort to find out, I used anthropological methods, including two years of participant-observation in the residence halls of a state university, Rutgers, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a college of eightyfive hundred undergraduates embedded in a much larger, fairly typical state university. ' And the first thing I encountered in the Rutgers dorms was an elaborate, vigorous form of modern college life not the student of college catalogues, but an earthier set of mentalities and behaviors. Now as in the past, college life as the students understand it is one of the principal reasons they come to college, and it is what they often remember most fondly after they have left. Why should we care about anything as nonintellectual and lowminded as college life often turns out to be? Because, though contemporary outside-the-classroom college is often the focus of popular