After reading an article in the New York Times entitled “Last Call for College Bars,” I was struck by the closing gap in the differences between British and American night life.
Courtney Rubin, the journalist who had clearly devoted a good few nights to sitting in college bars at Cornell University watching student after student slurp on fish-bowl cocktails and pitchers of dripping beer, probably partaking in some form of method writing herself, claims that many college bars are going out of business.
She comes to the conclusion that social networking and mobile phones have replaced the college bar as an essential meeting place. Gone are the days when we had to commit to plans and remember faces and names if we wanted to enjoy the luxury of a social life. Now we have begun to spin a web of contacts, both real and virtual, from the comfort of our own rooms. But this isn’t the only factor.
With college bars closing at two or three at the very latest, and students becoming more and more inclined to pre-drink elsewhere until later, it simply isn’t sustainable for bars to close this early. We are arriving at a cultural crossroads; taking a left would mean a slow decay of bar culture and the rise of late night drinking within the realms of campus housing, a right would mean a new late night and early morning face to bars around campus as they keep their lights on for a few more hours.
Student are creatures of the night. For two years I lived a nocturnal life, flying through the streets of Glasgow until the night intersected with the day at a floating and indistinct angle. Morning flooded the skies and by seven or eight I had usually managed to succumb to my own bed. The British drinking culture embraces the dark hours. This means that by the time I reach a bar or club, it is never before midnight.
Stereotypes aside, laziness is a common denominator for students almost everywhere and I put this factor down to my own late night starts, but because clubs are open until five or six in England, tardiness is accommodated. Here it’s a little more difficult. I find myself having shorter Fridays and Saturdays, dictated by the small piece of cardboard on the door of bars displaying their opening hours.
In Tuscaloosa this policydoes not affect the student population so much as the business of the bars themselves because, with a campus of thirty thousand young people, there’s always some night owls to play with. But surely longer opening hours would be an economically beneficial decision for their owners and would encourage steady drinking rather than rushing out to drink quickly before closing time or deciding to stay in, which seems to be the current choices for students. It’s worth consideration.
That said, there is still a thriving bar culture here, and even if it has to be before midnight for now, I’m happy to consider the matter further over a beer.
Lucy Cheseldine is an English international exchange student studying English literature. Her column runs on Tuesday.
