College Life - The Quiet Way -- Universities Offer Alternatives For Students Who Want Refuge From The Image Of Campus Life Gone Bad

Karen McCord spent her first year at the University of Washington lodged on a smoking floor of a towering, concrete dormitory. One party seemed to ebb just as the next one started to flow. To her, the noise seemed nonstop.

"The place smelled like smoke twenty-four, seven," the 20-year-old from Chehalis said. "They were great people, but I got a little bit sick of the 3 a.m. (parties). It gets a little old when I have a test the next morning. I just wanted something different."

Then a friend told McCord about Hansee Hall and its immaculate hallways, its locked front doors, its private rooms, its 24-hour-a-day quiet rules. She packed up and moved there as soon as she could.

"The nice thing about living here is people respect the hall," said McCord, a sophomore English major. "I've had my freshman year. I don't need to share someone else's."

McCord is one of countless college students at the UW and elsewhere who stand in contrast to images of campus life gone bad - alcohol-poisonings, drunken falls from frat-house windows. The strongest such image came in the form of a booze-fueled, fiery rampage that erupted in the streets of Pullman last week after Washington State University students apparently decided to fight for their right to party.

Students like McCord at virtually every campus in the country - WSU included - are discovering plenty of places for a more placid collegiate existence.

In addition to the 311 residents in Hansee Hall, another 150 or so students live in Mercer Hall across campus, where the rules are the same: No noise is allowed to seep outside the rooms. At any time. Night or day. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

In addition, the UW sets aside about 1,200 of the 4,400 dorm spaces on campus for "quiet floors," where excessive noise is forbidden during evening and early morning hours.

Drinking rules are simple: Students over 21 may drink in their rooms, as long as they keep to themselves. Illegal drugs, of course, are banned.

That's also the rule for all dorms and the rest of campus. But students laugh at the suggestion that there's no illegal drinking or drug use in the dorms, where most of the students are young adults who are away from home for the first time ever.

Like it or not, drinking and drug use among college students are facts of life. A study published last week by the Chronicle of Higher Education showed alcohol arrests tripled and drug arrests nearly doubled at the UW between 1995 and 1996. At WSU, arrests for alcohol climbed 27 percent. Drug arrests there, however, dropped by a half. Nationally, arrests for alcohol were up 10 percent on average while drug busts climbed 5 percent, the Chronicle reported.

UW dorms are staffed with student patrols that are backed up by campus police, said Kelly Boyer, assistant director for residential life. Students caught with drugs, for example, typically get three strikes before they are booted out. But the law can't be everywhere at once.

"I'm not going to deny it goes on," Boyer said. "But I'm also confident that it's not rampant. Things are under control. When we become aware of a problem we deal with it."

Meanwhile, though, there isn't any campus without some sort of arrangement for students who want refuge from the ruckus of the regular housing units, said Ronisha Goodwin of the Association of College and University Housing Officers in Ohio.

WSU, too, offers several dormitories where noise is restricted.

Rebecca Teniente, a graduate student of criminal justice, earns free room and board as the in-house director of Scott and Coman halls at WSU. Scott is the "wellness hall" on campus, with floors where all alcohol and tobacco are banned. Coman is the "scholar's hall" where students gravitate if they prefer books to booze.

"The students who live here are responsible students," Teniente said. "I'm not saying they never do anything wrong, but they know their limits. We're not all disgruntled and taking to the streets."

In the Puget Sound area, several private universities also offer calmer - albeit more expensive - environments.

By far the strictest is Seattle Pacific University, a $15,000-a-year college founded by Free Methodists. Drinking, smoking and premarital sex are forbidden for all undergraduate students - on or off campus - at risk of expulsion for repeat offenses.

At the UW, a stroll to Hansee Hall on a typical midterm evening last week proved to be a tour of the gamut of college life.

Less than a block from Hansee, which perches on the northern edge of campus, a stereo blared from the taped-up window of an antebellum-style fraternity house. At another house, young men with their hats on backward shot hoops, hollered, and downed Miller beer.

Farther onto campus, crowds mingled and chattered in front of the twin towers of Haggett Hall, where McCord spent her freshman year. It was the same scene next door at McMahon Hall.

But along a pathway through deciduous trees and past students playing sand volleyball, a sense of calm falls over a wide courtyard at Hansee Hall.

Through the ever-locked front doors and down a narrow hallway to another wing in the building, about two dozen residents sat haphazardly in well-upholstered chairs in a room ornamented with woodwork and chandeliers.

It's "Hansee Action," the weekly dorm meeting where the active types play micro-politics and catch up on school events.

A boyish young man in a black Nike cap and a gray sweat shirt updated the group on a recent student-body-association meeting. There's a report on a minor campus-power struggle. Then, about a half-dozen candidates for student office gave the perennial speeches promising to boost student power on university issues.

The Hansee residents actually seemed interested.

While they recognize many peers may assume they are nerds, they point to full social calendars. The hall hosts a yearly dance, for instance, that attracts students from all over campus. And Hansee people are not a bunch of prudes and party-pooping snobs, the residents assert.

After the meeting, Trevor King, a 20-year-old junior who wants to go to medical school, climbed a flight of stairs to his small, single-occupancy room. Inside, a framed, black-and-white poster of a topless woman greets visitors. So does a jug of fermenting honey and water he hopes will become a gallon of mead in a month or two.

Like McCord, King quickly burned out on life in Haggett Hall after he came to the university from Guam two years ago.

"I like to party, but I don't want to come home and clean the puke off the floor," he said, reclining in a leather chair.

"This is sort of a maturity step. You live in the (other) dorms and then you move somewhere where people are more refined."

In the end, King and McCord say they don't care what people think. They're both moving back to Hansee next year.

"Hansee is really a well-kept secret," King said. "If the nature of the hall got out to the general populous, Hansee would be booked."