A Panther’s State Patty’s Day

Penn State University greeted me last Saturday with a woman vomiting at my bus stop. It was around noon.

I was visiting State College, Pennsylvania, for the first time to see a concert and to celebrate a friend’s birthday. It wasn’t long before I realized everyone else was busy celebrating something else entirely: State Patty’s Day.

State Patty’s Day is a 10-year-old Penn State tradition that started as a way for Penn Staters to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day when the popular drinking holiday fell during spring break. Essentially, it is an excuse to binge drink while wearing green. I didn’t think mobs of students actually walked around that campus yelling, “We are Penn State.”

I was wrong.

To many college students, that type of booze-fueled energy sounds like a dream, but Pitt doesn’t really have an equivalent. As drinking is such a staple of college culture, it’s surprising that a school with more than 18 thousand people has few campus-wide celebrations focused solely on getting as hammered as physically possible. There used to be an annual street party after finals week, known as Semple Fest, but Pitt police cracked down on it in 2008 — and it stayed down.  The lack of drinking festivities makes more sense, though, once you consider our differing environments and how they affect our lifestyles.

Pitt students live in a city — Penn State students own a town. Those community relationships are extremely different.

The interactions between students and the areas around their campuses are almost always tense. Non-student residents of Happy Valley hate State Patty’s Day so much that they pressured Penn State into offering alcohol-serving establishments up to $7,500 to stay dry all weekend. Our own students have earned the disdain of South Oakland residents for taking over the neighborhood and covering it in trash and drunken urine. Our problems aren’t completely unrelated.

But the culture surrounding those messes, and drunkenness in general, is very clearly different depending on the location and what it provides.

On any given weekend, Oakland is full of house parties and drunk people wandering the streets, but the zone of debauchery is somewhat contained. People looking for a party can easily get a pretty good idea of where to find one, but those looking for a night in can be completely removed from the drinking scene.

At Penn State, it was a different story. There was no part of campus that didn’t feature numerous people looking as green or alcohol-drenched as their shirts. State Patty’s Day is a special event, so the version of State College I experienced is obviously not the norm. Still, the eagerness of people to intentionally blackout left me more confused than anything for much of my time there. When I saw Lil Wayne Saturday night, I had an easier time connecting with his mindset than many of the students around me.

I like drinking, but I do it casually. I grab drinks on the weekend with friends, and I have my fair share of weird liquors that I’ll never finish just floating around my apartment. So it was a bit jarring to see people actively pushing themselves, and friends, past clear limits.

I watched a guy shotgun a beer and then fall flat on his face as people cheered. According to Penn State University Police, 507 complaint calls came in, and there was a 56 percent increase in arrests compared to last year. There was a compulsion to drink because not doing so was seemingly a betrayal of tradition, despite the clear consequences of going overboard.

When I mentioned my surprise to the friends I was visiting, I got the same explanation that anyone who ever considered a rural school has heard: When you live in the middle of nowhere, there’s nothing really to do but drink. State College is an actual town, complete with places to eat and shop, but drinking is by far the easiest, most popular social activity around.

In Pittsburgh, we have museums and professional sports games to attend, and there are events scattered around the city throughout the week. We obviously still drink, and going to those things does not really supplant the draw of doing so, but the ability to do something with friends other than get plastered is surely part of why drinking is a lesser part of Pitt’s culture than elsewhere.

College culture varies so widely across the country that widely generalizing about student life based on location doesn’t accomplish much. There are plenty of “dry” schools that count stalks of corn as community leaders, just like some urban schools have huge alcohol problems. But the environments in which schools exist impact how we remember our college experiences.

I like living at Pitt, so personally, I’d just be satisfied to remember it.

Matt Moret is the Opinions Editor for The Pitt News. He primarily writes about politics and rhetoric.

Write to Matt at mdm123@pitt.edu