It was not quite like your typical cinematic, party-pooper entrance, where out-of-place person walks in, music comes to a screeching halt, and everyone whips around to stare at the unexpected newcomer.
Instead, David P. Roselle's entrance to the party that is the University of Delaware began gradual changes to the social scene here. His work has been substantial, too, because while the university's social scene in the late '80s and early '90s is much mythologized - a ubiquitous myth is that Delaware ranked as a top party school in Playboy or The Princeton Review, when neither publication provided an honorable mention - compared to today's standards, the party Roselle walked in on was a rager.
Stories of massive, double-digit keg block parties, students being dragged on water skis through mud at football games and a campus bar being ranked as one of the best in the country paint a picture of a radically different campus environment. Considering today's party atmosphere, even stories involving underage access to bars, walking around with open containers and fraternities having kegs outdoors are remarkable.
Alumnus Darren Kane, who attended the university from '91 to '95, has made it his job to collect anecdotes from this period detailing life as an undergraduate student. As the creator and operator "DelGrads," a MySpace page specifically for Delaware alumni, he collects stories on nearly every possible aspect of attending the university, and his book, "Glory Days at Delaware: The Completely Unofficial Modern History of College Life in Newark, DE.," will be out this fall. He guessed the university's peak of partying was right around the late '80s or early '90s from the feedback on his MySpace page.
"But I think a lot of the rumors about Delaware being a huge party school stem from nostalgia," Kane said. "When you're a graduating senior or alumnus, you always tell the freshmen or current students how much crazier it was when you were there."
Defining a party school, in general, is a highly subjective and arbitrary practice. While some schools consistently rank on party school lists, many more have campus urban legends about past party prominence.
"I heard [Delaware] was a party school, absolutely," said distinguished faculty fellow emeritus Stuart Sharkey, who has held various positions at the university since 1963, including vice president of student life from 1980 to 1994. "But that's such a self-fulfilling prophecy. How do you define it, and how does it compare? We were no different than schools like Rutgers and Maryland."
Regardless of the legitimacy of party school designations, no college or university wants such a label, and Roselle made this clear early in his tenure.
"Here's my whole outlook on the party school issue," Roselle said. "Take any school, and there's always a student trying to learn. When a school is labeled as a party school that devalues their degree and their hard work.
"If your deportment is to the detriment of other people, then we need to reanalyze that deportment."
The university finally did find a way to rank itself in 1994 with the publication "Health and Behavioral Consequences of Binge Drinking in College: A National Survey of Students at 140 Campuses," which found that 44 percent of college students were considered "binge drinkers," defined by the study as "consuming five or more drinks in a row for males and four or more drinks for females on one or more occasions during a two-week period" (an amount that brings the blood alcohol content percentage to 0.08 in less than two hours). While specific figures for universities were never released, the university was found to have an above average binge-drinking rate.
This study prompted the American Medical Association and the Robert Wood Johnson foundation to create a program called, "A Matter of Degree: The National Effort to Reduce High-Risk Drinking Among College Students." Out of the 140 schools surveyed in the study, the university was one of six originally chosen to receive a five-year, $1.1 million grant from the AMOD program for demonstrating a high rate of binge drinking, a history of efforts to combat student drinking and a willingness to publicly address the problem with campus, community and student support.
"The campuses found it very risky to talk about this because no one else had," said Richard Yoast, director of the Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse for the AMA. "No one knew what effect it would have. There was a possibility of all these negative things happening, like discouraging attendance and angering alumni.
"But the response was overwhelmingly positive. And it took people like David Roselle to show this could be talked about."
This grant was a catalyst for much of the alcohol and disciplinary culture change evident on campus today. In 1997 the university became the first university in the country to send letters home to the parents of students found guilty of violating campus policies. In 1998 the university instituted a points system for evaluating Greek organizations and instituted its "three-strikes-and-you're-out" policy.
In 1999 students arrested off campus were put through the university judicial system as well, and campus police began to stop tailgating once football games started. In 2000 the city lowered the DUI BAC to 0.08 from the statewide level of 0.10, restrictions were placed on certain properties to prohibit alcohol sales and the university stopped allowing fans to re-enter the stadium at football games.
"The fact that students can be ejected from the school for multiple offenses is the best tool in the bag," said Lt. Thomas LeMin, public information officer for the Newark Police Department. "We used to routinely break up parties with hundreds of people every weekend, and there would be several in one night. We could make anywhere from 10 to 75 arrests at these parties in the beginning of the semester. Nowadays we don't see nearly quite as many very large parties.
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