Rather dim college years

BY BEN REITER

Rather dim college years My college interview, for the most part, was pretty standard. The interviewer asked questions like, "Why do you want to go to Yale?" (My answer: "Yes, please.") "How many A.P.'s have you taken?" ("I don't recall, but I didn't inhale.")

By far the most memorable part of the session was my interviewer's description of that legendary contest, the highlight of many a Yale career up until a quarter-century ago: bladderball. As he recounted the annual event to me, his face lit up just like Dubya's during a tour of the Drug Enforcement Agency's contraband room.

Bladderball was sort of like a massive, campus-wide game of beer pong. On one Saturday each fall, teams from the residential colleges and major extracurricular organizations would gather on Old Campus, having met earlier to dress in uniforms and drink their, um, morning coffee. Then, the bladderball—a canvas orb measuring six feet in diameter—would roll through Phelps Gate, after which all of the gates would be locked. What happened next can only be described as pure mayhem. Each team would fight to get the ball over a fence and roll it through the streets of New Haven all the way to the President's house on Hillhouse Avenue, where it would be ceremoniously presented and deflated for storage until the next year.

The bladderball was accidentally punctured with a meathook in 1975, and the usually wise A. Bartlett Giamatti, SY '60, GRD '64, ultimately banned the game in the late seventies. In the quarter-century since its demise, Yale has never been the same. As the air rushed out of the ball, so too did the spirit rush out of this University's students. It has yet to return.

Bladderball is not the main reason any of us come to Yale; obviously, getting a cushy job at an I-bank and becoming filthy rich is a far higher priority. The fall of bladderball and other quasi-bacchanalian traditions symbolizes exactly that one-dimensionality that is increasing in our lives. Universities are places where students make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Unfortunately, though I'm sure to the Administration's delight, Yalies are in the midst of a movement to abandon the former stage to rush into the latter.

We simply don't have a campus-wide event anything like bladderball these days. Look at the only large happening we have had so far this year: a tercentennial celebration with highlights that included a pack of slobbering canines and a row of overpriced food tents. We do still have The Game, but the very nature of that event is now being threatened as Harvard contemplates banning the traditional alcoholic libations from the tailgates and student ticket prices become more and more absurd. The only events we now have that even approximate the spirit of bladderball occur in very small, and even underground, groups: the societies, the fraternities, and the Pundits.

It's not helping that the residential college system is in a freefall. I don't mean just the renovations that will probably force students to sleep in tents out on Cross Campus. Allow me to wax nostalgic for a minute. The residential colleges used to be the lifeblood of Yale. Rivalries used to be fierce; pranks and inter-college contests used to abound. Now we have almost none of that. Look at Berkeley, my college. Sure, I'm grateful for overhead lighting, spacious common rooms, and radiators that don't threaten to explode at any moment. But I can't shake the feeling that we've made a deal with the devil. Berkeley used to have annual water-balloon and snowball fights between North Court and South Court; it used to play a game of human chess against Calhoun; it used to have a luau, open to all. All colleges used to have regular, unifying events such as these. And now? Well, our IM volleyball team is 6-1.

Life at Yale these days consists of going to class, drinking on the weekends, and hoping that that latest internship interview goes well. It sounds an awful lot to me like the routine of the average working adult. The Administration deserves a lot of the blame for this—it has become overly cautious about any potential "dangers" in student events and has sought to replace the bladderball with those nice little sponge balls you can get at Origins. But students—myself included—must take some of the blame as well. Apathy and complacency are at an all-time high, as we leave the wild stuff up to our crazier counterparts up in Hanover, New Hamp.

The inscription on the gate of Grove Street Cemetery reads, "And the dead shall be raised." One can only hope that the spirit of traditions like bladderball, dead now for decades, will too be resurrected someday.

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