“Following the Rules” At Ashland University

When I was a senior in high school, I only applied to two colleges.  I knew where I wanted to go, and that place was Ashland University.  (I applied to the other place so I could have more than one school under my name on the senior bulletin board at school.)

See, I was a bit of a scaredy cat about being away from home, and my cousin Heidi would be a senior at Ashland during my freshman year, so I felt like I had a little back-up and guidance for my first year of living away.  So she was a security blanket.  🙂

And oh did I love Ashland.  LOVED it.  I felt at home there immediately, and actually started enjoying myself.  But while all my friends were off at rule-lacking colleges like BGSU and The Ohio State University, I was starting to realize how conservative Ashland was.

These are the rules that people laugh at when I say them:

1)  The closest guys got to girls in terms of living situations was co-ed by floor.  i.e. girls only floors, and guys only floors.  There was no mixing.  We had very quiet sleepovers.

2)  You had to live on campus until you were 22–which meant dorms until you were of senior status and could live in the senior apartments.*  You could get around this buy claiming residence within a certain radius of the university and becoming a “commuter.”

3)  *this is where the * comes in.  If you made one mistake, you couldn’t live in the senior apartments anyway.  So I drank my freshman year, got caught, and 4 years later, it bit me in the ass and I couldn’t live in the senior apartments.  Hello, dorm room.

4)  Any boy on a girls’ floor (or girl on a boys’ floor) after 11:00 pm had to be escorted by someone of that floor’s gender in the hallways.  (This meant walking boys downstairs to the community bathrooms so they could pee after 11:00 pm).  We ran down guys’ hallways at 3:00 am as fast as we could so the RAs and RDs wouldn’t hear us.

5)  Boys were NOT allowed on girls’ floors after 2:00 am AT ALL.  And vice versa.  Again:  We ran down guys hallways at 3:00 am as fast as we could so the RAs and RDs wouldn’t hear us and learned to be VERY quiet.

6)  Dry campus.  No alcohol whatsoever. You couldn’t find someone who can open a beer can more quietly than an Ashland University student.  So what if I was in Amstutz at 3:30 am with my roommate on a guys’ floor drinking Natty Lite out of plastic cups and Safety Services Cathy happened to walk by and “smell alcohol”?

Now, for a Judeo-Christian campus, these all seem like good rules.  I know universities that have a rule stating that if there are guys and girls in one room, all feet must be kept on the floor (so as to avoid lying down…so as to avoid booty).

And while these rules were obnoxious sometimes, I have to say that it made it a lot more fun.

Of course none of these rules stopped us.  But it rather made it a game.  It was FUN to see if we could get away with it.  And we did.  🙂  Except my sorry senior ass had to live in a dorm room.  Oh well!