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.
"Students can always pay a fine, but I think if students know they can get bounced with the three strikes it is the most effective new law within that program."
But this was only the beginning. In 2000 the university was one of four universities to receive additional funding and on-site assistance from the RWJF and AMOD program. With this effort came the Building Responsibility Coalition, made up of 130 members including university staff, community members, restaurant owners, students and city and state officials, which sought to change further the alcohol culture of the university and Newark.
"The main thread of that approach is that those students who drink irresponsibly don't just suffer the negative consequences of that by themselves; those consequences often affect others," stated John Bishop, associate vice president at the Center for Counsel and Student Development, and Project Director for the BRC, in an e-mail message.
"If one compares this line of reasoning to the public health approach to smoking tobacco, e.g. smokers just don't harm themselves, second-hand smoke is harmful to others, it seems to make a lot of common sense and we thought it was worth trying."
The BRC continued regulating alcohol consumption, working for stricter laws governing area liquor distributors, the creation of an alcohol task force made up of three Newark policemen to enforce Delaware Alcohol Beverage Control guidelines and a prohibition of car passengers having open alcohol containers, making Newark the first city in Delaware to pass such a law.
"Delaware is clearly one of the campuses that has done a tremendous amount," Yoast said. "From my own perspective it's been very successful because it's got the community involved."
While the AMOD grants ran out in late 2005, the university has since received another grant to address student alcohol consumption from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The university was the only school of the four which received special assistance from the A Matter of Degree program to also receive this SAMHSA grant, which funds the Making Over Substance Abuse Intervention on Campus program to treat alcohol abusers.
Nancy Nutt, program director of the Wellspring Student Wellness Program and principle iInvestigator for the MOSAIC program, praises these grants, and the extensive other work supported by them, for making the university a leader in anti-alcohol programming.
"There has been a significant movement on the national level to address binge or abusive drinking of college students. In many respects, this can be credited for many of the significant changes which have occurred at UD which have had an effect on the current student drinking culture," she stated in an e-mail message.
The examples of alcohol culture change are abundant outside the direct work of these grants as well. Since Roselle took office, numerous fraternities and sororities have been suspended, including five in 2002 alone and three more in just over the past two years. Numerous Newark bars have been shut down since 1990, including the largest and most popular bar on campus, The Stone Balloon, which closed in December 2005. That same semester Newark police instituted a Zero Tolerance Policy allowing officers to break up parties without having a complaint issued.
Nevertheless, the party at Delaware is far from over. Successive studies from the Harvard School of Public Health have shown little impact on student attitudes here toward alcohol, with one of the largest changes being a growing disfavor in the current alcohol policy. These marginal changes resemble national difficulties at changing alcohol use among college students despite continued efforts.
"Up until '02 I hadn't seen any changes," said Tim Brooks, Dean of Students from 1981 to 2002. "There's been a huge crackdown. Fraternity life has completely changed. But the question is whether there's actually less drinking. I don't know if there is."
While the university and community's efforts to curb student binge drinking look to transcend the Roselle years, a solid foundation has been built here to erode the party-school image. It appears Roselle did n't kick the keg, but do not come to Delaware anymore expecting a free cup.
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