| Traditions | |
- Family Weekends: Moms, dads, and siblings all have their own weekends to come visit OU, which make for some of the best times on campus (there’s nothing like watching a bunch of soccer moms getting tanked off their martinis while dancing and singing to “Pour Some Sugar on Me”). While the University offers some fun activities for each weekend (Casino Night, Mamapalooza, Glow Fishin’), most students opt to take mom and dad to the bars. Either way, it makes for a weekend to remember, not to mention being profitable for the bars. (Mom’s weekend in May brings in more alcohol sales than Halloween weekend!)
- Homecoming: A notorious party school, OU definitely knows how to celebrate Homecoming, even though the student body usually cares very little about the football team. On Homecoming Saturday, bars open up as early as 6:30 a.m., and half of the campus, still buzzed off of Junction Punches, fills the bars. Stick around for the parade that starts around 11 a.m. (it’s best enjoyed from a friend’s porch where you can continue drinking and catch the candy that the parade-goers hurl at you). Then grab some food, go home for a nap, and head back uptown to continue the celebration.
- Palmerfest : A day full of drinking, Jell-O wrestling, beer pong playing, and avoiding cops on horses, Palmerfest is a huge block party that takes place every May on Palmer Street. Palmer residents, wearing T-shirts customized for the occasion, become everyone’s best friend as they stand at their houses’ entrances with a list of who is worthy to enter. Needless to say, most people have a friend of a friend who can get them into at least one house on Palmer, and once it gets dark and the makeshift fences have been trampled down, you can pretty much get in anywhere.
- Shuffles : Students usually partake in this ritual their senior year. Wearing T-shirts bearing their shuffle’s name (“We’re Going to Be Teaching Your Kids Shuffle”; “If Found, Take Me Home Shuffle”, and more), they try to make it to every bar on campus, which is easier said than done. A highlight of every shuffle is having bar patrons sign the T-shirts, which always makes for a few good laughs in the morning, as well as signing your shuffle’s name on each bar’s bathroom wall (just make sure you don’t get caught—some bars will make you stay and clean the walls).
- Time Change “Riots”: Leave it to OU students to riot when the clocks are turned ahead each spring and (God forbid) they lose an hour at the bars. Well, that’s supposedly how the notorious Time Change Riots began in 1997. Since then, students, whether returning from the bars or just out of curiosity, have been gathering at Court Street, leading to vandalism, fights, many arrests, and the use of tear gas and rubber bullets by police. While many students just go uptown to check out what the excitement is all about, many innocent bystanders actually end up getting injured, arrested, or both. But, no matter how many warnings the University sends out, there is still a huge crowd that hangs out on Court Street after the bars call it quits an hour early. Use your best judgment.
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| Urban Legends | |
- If you step on the school seal in front of College Green, you will never graduate
- In 1908, the University’s board of trustees formed a committee to obtain squirrels for the campus green (apparently they were inspired after a Harvard visit, where the campus was populated with squirrels). This is supposedly why squirrels run rampant on campus.
- Many places on campus are haunted, including Wilson Hall (where a girl supposedly committed suicide after writing on the walls with blood), Simms Cemetery and the Ridges (an old insane asylum, which has a haunted “stain”).
- People have been saying for years that Athens holds the record for most bars on one stretch of street.
- Supposedly an English professor once told a student, “I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.”
- While a student at OU, Paul Newman supposedly was expelled after crashing a beer keg into the University president’s car.
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