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In loco parentis was the model on which American, and to some extent English, colleges were built, whereas the concept was unkown in Europe: European universities provide only the academic education and students are on their own for everything else, including living arrangements and behavior. It's always been that way, from the middle of the 11th century when the University of Bologna was founded.

My grandfather, who studied at Bologna in the 1890s, always said it a place easy to misspend one's youth. My father, at UC Berkeley in the 1920s, said that the fraternity and sorority parties he attended -- not only the houses, but at major hotels in the Bay Area -- were often bachanalian. Marijuana was legal then, though booze was not. He said -- and others there in those days have confirmed -- there was at least as much pot, sex and booze as there was in the '60s when I was at the university. His comment was that the only things that seemed to change were the music (jazz gave way to rock, each considered equally shocking in its time), the names of the cars (he had a Stutz), and the quality of Cal football.

My experience of college life was at the UoM in the late seventies and those chicks were head cases. If you could get close, you had to just about shoot yourself to not have to listen to the angst load from the coeds.

Needless to say, I enjoyed Chicago in the eighties a lot more. And five children keep the old boy at home these days.