By: Jeff Forward

Jeff Forward
Fri, 02 Jan 2015 21:03:40 +0000

I was a former reporter and an editor at The Lantern in the mid-1990s; I started OSU in 1987 - let's be clear: booze has been and still is an integral and major part of the student life and culture. "Hairy Buffaloes," and frat parties with as many as 75-100 kegs of cheap beer were weekly events. Drugs were also rampant (I remember students smoking weed in some of the bigger lecture halls during class) as was sex in university buildings. We did a report one year on what campus buildings were used by who for what sex acts. From what my niece has told me (she's a senior at OSU now), things have been ratcheted down a bit. A major bone of contention between the staff at The Lantern and the OSU administration at that time was the plans to raze most of the bars on High Street and replace them with swanky and new (and most importantly, respectable) eating and drinking establishments, shopping, and housing. The university powers at that time (E. Gordon Gee) thought that the bars on High Street were a stain on the university (despite the fact these places were off campus) and a hindrance to fund-raising. Places like Mean Mr. Mustard's - where you could be a bucket of Old Milwaukee for $5 - and the 'crack house' row on 11th Avenue (with real crack dealers) didn't go over well with wealthy out of town donors and corporate bigwigs who wanted to have buildings named after them and get tickets to football games. Some of us called it the Ivy-League-ization of OSU. There was also a big push to clean up student behavior and Gee was a proponent of university punishment for students who broke the law off campus. After the wins over Notre Dame and the riots along 12th Avenue, Gee wanted to clean things up. The issue we raised at The Lantern was, where does punishing students off-campus stop? If a student gets arrested in Cleveland, should they be punished with university discipline? Or, was Gee's power only limited to things done on campus? There is no question that a lot of students succumb to problems with binge drinking and addiction, but it's not limited to OSU. You can find those issues at every university and college in the country. The problem we had was essentially what role (if any) does a university have in a student's personal life? Many of us then thought that the university took too much of a "big brother" role in our lives. I think that over-bearing presence is more prevalent today than in the 1990s or earlier.