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In 1925, Benjamin Lindsey attempted to explain the changes in attitude that he saw taking place. A judge from Denver, Lindsey had spent decades working in the juvenile justice system. Many of the cases that he describes in The Revolt of Modern Youth start with a date gone awry. Take, for instance, fifteen-year-old Helen, who had made plans for a friend of a friend to pick her up at school one afternoon and give her a ride in his new automobile. Though she explicitly stated that she would not let him “make love to” her, she had agreed to give him a kiss.

  “That’s a fair price,” she testified. When Helen’s high school principal intercepted her date plans, she had the young man with the car charged with attempted white slave trafficking. But Judge Lindsey marveled at the “strenuous, strict, and self-denying conventions of the strange Flapper-Flipper world she lived in.”

  Countless cases showed him that Helen was in the new mainstream. “Of all the youth who go to parties, attend dances, and ride together in automobiles, more than 90 percent indulge in hugging and kissing,” Lindsey reported. “This does not mean that every girl lets any boy hug and kiss her, but that she is hugged and kissed.”

  Lindsey concluded that by the end of high school, 15 to 25 percent of those “who begin with the hugging and kissing eventually ‘go the limit.’” The rate among boys was roughly the same as it had been in the late nineteenth century. But whereas previously most middle-class young men said they had their first sexual experiences in the red-light districts, now they petted their female peers on dates. Even if they refused to go “all the way,” “nice girls” were no longer insulted by being asked.

  In light of these facts, Lindsey argued that it was imperative that parents and educators discard their “wet dishrag morality” and speak openly with children. However, the real revelation was that school, in itself, constituted a kind of sex education. The ways the boys and girls mingled on school premises, and the dating culture that they developed after class, became a key part of what they went there to learn. In the relatively sheltered atmosphere that the school provided, students were willing to take the kinds of risks that only Charity Girls had ventured in dive bars or on boardwalks. When students left for college, they moved into the world of peers and immersed themselves in their rituals full-time.

  * * *

  The rise of coed college education drove the rise of dating. Between 1890 and 1920, the number of students attending college in the United States tripled. By 1927, a majority of colleges had also become coed. Higher education had long interested Americans, because of their belief in self-improvement; coeducation added a dash of sex appeal. In the 1920s and ’30s, the growth of the national mass media and entertainment industries fueled a college craze. The new advertising industries used images of well-heeled students to promote new goods. New clothing lines marketed popular articles of clothing as “college style.” An army of writers of both fiction and nonfiction told a broader public how to imitate college courtship patterns. They created two archetypal characters: the College Man and the Coed.

  Some disciplinarians tried to hold the College Man and the Coed to old standards. Campus YMCAs, YWCAs, and churches offered regular “mixers.” Deans exhorted young men to call on the female classmates they met at such events in the parlors of their dormitories or to take them for a stroll. Yet even stubborn traditionalists had to recognize that they were fighting a losing battle.

  The College Man and Coed mixed freely. The opening pages of the 1922 short story collection Town and Gown show the provincial Peter Warshaw arriving at the unnamed state school where he will study. Peter is frankly overwhelmed.

  “The passing and repassing of students was dizzying. Fur-coated co-eds with rouged cheeks; men wearing horn-rimmed glasses; an instructor or two hurrying by with green bags in hand; Chinese students in groups; two colored girls, hesitant and self-effacing; couples who sauntered, gayly glancing about for acquaintances.”

  The provincial student thrown into this environment had to become accustomed to interacting with far more classmates than he had at home. He also had to master a new, strange language.

  The terms that College Men and Coeds tossed around changed fast. Varsity novels devoted a lot of space to slang, dropping terms in scare quotes. In his bestselling debut, This Side of Paradise, the young F. Scott Fitzgerald constantly offered definitions. A chapter devoted to “petting” spent less time on love and sex than on how kids gossiped about it.

  A riff on the “Popular Daughter” or “P.D.” sets a chain of definitions falling like dominoes. “The ‘belle’ had become the ‘flirt,’” Fitzgerald wrote, “the ‘flirt’ had become the ‘baby vamp.’” In the male “fusser,” these girls met their match.

  Even if you arrived at school sexually experienced, learning to talk the talk constituted a key part of your higher education. The star of Town and Gown, Andy Protheroe, was “the champion fusser of a State University that made all of its activities competitive.” “Andy kissed a girl when he was fourteen; by sixteen he could ‘love em up.’” But during his first year at State University he develops a “new ‘line.’” “He learned to use the term ‘pet’ instead of ‘lovin up’ and to ‘fuss’ instead of ‘stall.’” He learns to dress the part, too, with “a tiny moustache, shell-rimmed spectacles, tight-fitting, gray coat, and silk gloves.”

  “Greetings, and all that old rot,” he sighs, like he is bored already, when he says hello. Over the course of Town and Gown, we see him use this same line on multiple Coeds.

  Andy is a “Greek”—a fraternity member. Any College Man worth dating was. A pretty Coed could hope to climb the social ladder on the basis of her looks. But the “barb”—short for “barbarian,” or non-Greek—faced steeper odds.

  In the 1920s, fraternities were at the center of campus life. For several decades, they had been expanding rapidly. In 1883, there were 505 fraternity chapters and 16 sorority chapters nationwide. In 1912, there were 1,560; by 1930, that number had climbed to 3,900, and 35 percent of all undergraduates were Greeks. Fraternities and sororities became ground zero of college dating.

  If the life of the College Man centered on Fraternity Row, the life of the Coed centered on the College Men who lived there. At least it was supposed to, according to the books that College Men wrote about her after graduation. In this, she was very different from her predecessors. The first generation of American women who attended universities in the 1870s and 1880s had inspired an outpouring from experts arguing that education would desex them. (The psychologist G. Stanley Hall, for instance, warned that earning a BA would leave a woman “functionally castrated.”)

  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 gov
erned 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.