ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of student life from the colonial colleges to the development of so-called major sports, especially football, in the 1990s and early 2000s. The range of student activities is quite amazing, reflecting a myriad of interests on the part of students, faculty members, administrators, and graduates. Increasing enrollments of women students reshaped the sexual activities on campuses to some degree. The chapter focuses on sex and love as well as beer. Heterosexual relationships had a different dimension in the South well into the 1900s, however, with chaperones common at dances and in the case of one white women’s college, the requirement in the 1920s that a young man would have to meet the dean of women before he could visit a student. Football likely began with a Rutgers–Princeton game in 1869, but that game bore little resemblance to the contemporary version. The development of football at California State Colleges in the early 1950s is instructive.
