Posts tagged with beer.
A lament for fun
Over the last few years, it seems as if UBC's gradually been losing its sense of fun. Just as the air slowly leaks out of a balloon, so is the joy leaking out of campus life. By my calculations, the fun deficit has reached the point where, in balloon terms, UBC is about to suddenly collapse and go PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTTT as it flies around the room, only to land in a corner, a flaccid, deflated reminder of what once was.
The symptoms began appearing about five years ago, with the steady decline in beer gardens. It used to be that come 4:00pm on a Friday, you'd grab your best plastic beer stein, load up your pocket with change ferreted out from the sofa cushions, and then wander campus in search of the best party. Later that night, you'd wake up under a van or in someone's driveway missing your glasses and wearing someone else's pants . The festivities did not please The Administration, however, who felt that neither prodigious liver capacity nor the ability to trade pants with someone without taking off your shoes were traits characteristic of the "global citizens" they were trying to mould. Thus, with the co-operation of the campus RCMP detachment, the number of beer gardens was significantly reduced.
As the veins of students gradually returned to a state of being filled with blood rather than beer, other symptoms appeared. In 2005, the Radical Beer Faction - UBC's oldest political party (emphasis on the "party") - went dormant. Active since 1988, the Science-led RBF never had much of a platform beyond "we like beer" and "hey, let's mess up the elections", but consistently placed not-last in the elections for nearly two decades. (In fact, I ran as one of their candidates in 1999 - the year we ran a traffic cone for Director of Finance - with a moustachioed, dictatorial sock puppet called Generalissimo as my running mate. We placed not-last with a remarkable 19% of the vote, probably thanks to Generalissimo's intimidating penny-eyed stare.)
Two years later, the Arts Undergraduate Society cancelled the Arts County Fair, a concert/beer garden that had, since 1992, marked the last day of classes. While attendance had reached heights of 15,000 in the late 90s, numbers dropped steadily in the events' later years, with students opting to study for finals instead of partaking in the shared euphoria of crowd-surfing, uninhibited dancing, and shuffling from foot to foot trying not to pee while waiting in an hour-long portapotty line.
Even the infamous UBC Engineers are no match for the fun recession. Their clubhouse/den of iniquity, the venerable (some might say venereal) Cheeze Factory, is being razed on account of various health and safety issues, and after the arrest of five students during this year's attempt at hanging a VW Bug from a local bridge, the long-standing tradition of Bug-dangling may come to an end.
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT. There goes the balloon.
Today's students, while not averse to the odd bit of fun (the RBF did recently rise from the ashes, and the AUS is attempting to revive the ACF in a different form), are devoting more of their extracurricular time to career preparation activities. While it could be argued that during my time we were doing the same thing, assuming our chosen career was barfly, these students are instead organizing things like mentoring and networking events, mini-conferences, and career fairs, and they've replaced beer with baking, cocktails with crudités, and those plastic beer steins with clipboards and name tags.
It may have something to do with value-for-money and the fact that tuition now costs about three times what it did when I was an undergrad. It might be that this generation recognizes that with more of them graduating - undergraduate enrolment has gone from about 26,000 students when I started in 1996 to over 36,000 today - they need to focus not just on their degrees but also their soft skills if they're going to outcompete the others for a job. Or it just might be the natural result of turning off the draught taps and letting the campus' collective liver detox for a few years.
Whatever the explanation, this cynical old campus party girl expects the trend to continue. It's unfortunate really, as having fun in university and enjoying academic and career success are not mutually exclusive, as my friends have proven over the years. The guy that woke up glasses-less in the driveway having traded pants with someone else is now one of the design world's most respected digital artists. The fellow who sought drunken shelter from the rain and napped under a parked van has deployed software projects worth millions of dollars. And the girl that used to sit in the civil engineering building's wind tunnel egging her friends to turn it up higher, she writes some sort of weekly thing for some globecampus.ca website.
And if that's not enough to convince you that a little beer and trouble-making won't doom you to a lifetime of mediocrity, let me leave you with a little UBC trivia. In 1968, someone on campus decided UBC was no fun. He campaigned for the campus' first pub, which began as a beer garden-style event in the Student Union Building ballroom and eventually moved to permanent digs, where it's been serving up beer for over 28 years. The man that brought 35-cent beer and a much-needed injection of fun to the campus? David Suzuki.
Tagged with
beer,
partying,
students
| Comments (55)
| 
JENNIFER GARDY 
