A damp Middletown road glistened beneath our feet as we headed down High Street on Friday night. But unlike most Friday nights—on which we eschew debauchery—we had a mission: to do some hard-hitting, investigative reporting on the party scenes on the Wesleyan and Yale campuses.

Wesleyan
Roused from our standard board game night, we swapped our jeans for leggings and applied our fuchsia lip balm in an attempt to blend in with the typical party-going crowd. We hoped to rove the Wesleyan campus incognito, subtly gathering quotes from the throngs of frat party attendees.

We set forth from our dorm with great trepidation, disturbed by the accounts of parties we had received thus far.

“Parties to me are a grotesque mating dance,” said London Perry ’15. “They highlight the ugliness of life.”

Braced for what we imagined would be a nocturnal excursion into the depths of sin, we were dumbfounded by a most unusual sight: the drizzly streets of Wesleyan were all but deserted. No pounding music greeted our ears, no stumbling crowds crossed our path.

Plagued by the suspicion that we were doing something terribly wrong, we cautiously walked past closed door after closed door as the usually boisterous frats seemed as though they were quiet just to spite us.

Disappointed that the fates had so conspired against us, seeking desperately for some sign of life, we sought out small groups of stragglers and asked for their impressions of Wesleyan parties.

“I think they’re great,” Rachel Schneider ’13 said. “The house parties are better. The frats are no fun.”

When asked why Wesleyan parties were superior to those at Yale, Kevin Brisco ’13 said, “You don’t have to have pretentious, douche-y conversations.”

He continued in a more philosophical line of thought.

“We’re animals,” he said. “We’re all social animals, aren’t we?”

Feeling as though we had learned little from the more experienced students, we bolstered ourselves with a rousing motivational speech outside the closed doors of Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE): “We two, we happy two, we band of partiers!”

Then, we star-crossed partiers headed to a tamer land: Usdan’s late-night option. The student center was unexpectedly crowded in comparison to the calm of the deserted streets. This, it seemed, was the true heart of campus nightlife. We ate a face-sized rice krispie treat and admitted defeat.

As we trudged dejectedly back to the Butterfield dormitories, we heard in the distance a drunken rendition of our national anthem. Struck by a sudden and rather off-key patriotic urge, students bellowed the familiar words, ending our night on a wretchedly out-of-tune note. We wondered sullenly what the following night at Yale would bring.

Yale
Equipped with Google Maps directions, a Yale campus map, and the essential basic knowledge of ancient Greek, we managed to locate the housing of New Haven’s own Phi chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE).

Yale’s chapter of DKE faced serious trouble last year when pledges were caught outside The Yale Women’s Center chanting: “No means yes; yes means anal.” The chapter was put on suspension for a period of five years, during which time it was not permitted to conduct any formal campus activities.

This, however, did not stop the fraternity from squeezing upwards of a hundred people into a dingy house roughly the size of Summerfields. Alcohol fumes and the dancers’ sweat hung in the air as we, strangers in a foreign land, watched warily from a corner. Though it was generally agreed that affectation is a problem at Yale, we saw nothing pretentious in the indecent amount of grinding we witnessed.

We couldn’t help but notice that the only people who seemed conspicuously absent from the scene were Yale students themselves, though we talked to quite a few students from Quinnipiac.

Curious, we targeted those few we could find and asked them about the quality of Yale’s frat parties.

“By junior year they get old,” said Victoria Lawrence, a Yale junior.

For a Yale freshman, that already seemed to be happening.

“They’re fun, I guess,” said Kristy Gudmundsson, her tone unenthusiastic.