In my time at Goshen College, I believe I experienced a prominent shift within the GC student body: party culture. 

We do not congregate on the weekends like we used to, for better or worse. Currently, most on-campus students spend weekends together in their same friend groups, huddled in dorm rooms and apartments. It’s cliquey and exclusive, but not intentionally. I think we just don’t know how else to gather. Some will invite a larger group to their spaces, but that risks noise complaints and violations.

It hasn’t always been this way, though. For much of GC’s history, students, especially upperclassmen, turned to off-campus house parties to socialize. 

Adam Scharf ’01, alumni and occasional partygoer said, “It was a place where you saw people that you didn’t otherwise cross paths with on campus, you know?” 

“Maybe baseball players would hang out with people in the choir, but they would only do that at party houses.”

Drew Smoker ’24 explained that at parties, “the spontaneity in which I would reach out to people outside of my immediate friend group really changed,” following her freshman year spent in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“They were just places to have fun,” Scharf said. 

Student houses rotated hosting parties and each had a different sort of vibe than the other. Nicknames were assigned to the houses based on their unique characteristics or location, for example, Dam Green House (green house by the dam), Gray D house (gray house by the D-Mart), Rubber House (on Ninth Street across from the rubber plant) and more recently, Sketch and Douglas. 

They were often walkable, and the parties they hosted did not adhere to the rules of a dry campus, but they served as a space for students to socialize and escape campus life for a few hours.

Beginning in the fall of 2023, students were required to live on campus all four years, unless they were four years removed from high school, turned 23 years old before Dec. 31, were registered as a part time student, or commuted from a guardian’s home within 30 miles. In this change, the college cited the benefits of community living on campus among other reasons. 

The end of off-campus housing almost entirely ended off-campus gatherings. Depending on your point of view, this might sound like a positive shift, like the student body is straightening out. 

I disagree. 

It has not stopped students from partying as you might have guessed, even with our dry campus rules. It also hasn’t brought us together as a community. To be completely honest, it has pulled us apart by incentivizing exclusive hang-outs on campus, individual alcohol/drug use and has diminished group responsibility at times when we really should be looking out for each other. 

“Of course, then there are instances of students getting alcohol poisoning,” said Smoker.  

“I understand that’s really scary, but I think … pushing students to do it secretively and in their own spaces is dangerous because it doesn’t allow for the accountability of others.” 

Res Life and Campus Activities Council has continued to host events on campus and I thought Kick-Off this year was fun as always. But it’s difficult to replace what made the house parties unique: organic, unsupervised and conducive for socializing. 

In the year that I attended them, I felt more connected to many different groups of people on campus than ever — outside of my team and major. 

I want to name that I am not endorsing off-campus parties, but I want to acknowledge that the change to exclusively on-campus housing does not inherently bring us together.

I had a lot of hesitation in writing this, but it’s important to acknowledge the ramifications of change that aren’t talked about: forcing people together in proximity does not automatically build community. It may just do the opposite.