The College Kids Are Back to Normal

At least campus bars are healing …

When I was in college at the University of Illinois in the late 1990s, there was nothing quite as pathetic as a townie. Sure, I was here for four years, I had to be, but who were these people who were here all the time? Why would they choose to be in this … waystation? This was my party place, my town for self-discovery. The nerve of them to actually live there!

I now live in Athens, Georgia, home of the University of Georgia, with my family, which is to say: I am of course that townie now. I always try to remember the way I saw townies when I lived in Champaign, because I have no doubt these students look at me the same way: As some lame adult who doesn’t get to stay up partying all night anymore and resents those who gets to — who are supposed to. It makes me feel better knowing they’ll be the same way soon … sooner than they realize.

But the adversarial nature between student and townie was never more pronounced than it was during the pandemic. Covid-19 hit the United States right during spring break 2020, and its most polarizing, terrifying period coincided with what is supposed to be the most vital few months of a college student’s life … particularly a senior’s. Imagine being a college student, having spent 3 1/2 years (or however long it took them to near graduation) doing the right thing, getting good enough grades, navigating the social terrors that college can provide, enjoying themselves, figuring out what people they truly are, creating memories that they (like me, from my years in college) will have the rest of their lives. And just when all that was supposed to culminate in that story’s logical conclusion — graduation — the rug got pulled out from under them. They stopped being able to go to class, to see their friends, to have all the goodbye parties, to have their graduation ceremonies, to do any of the things college kids are supposed to do. Some of them got stuck in their dorms; most of them went home to their families and finished out their schooling in the old bedrooms, staring blankly into computer screens while the world burned all around them.

And not just that: If they did dare to try to go out and enjoy themselves — thinking themselves indestructible, as all college kids do — they were lambasted as social…