A L S O_ T O D A Y

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Dark Hotel: Every night is orgy night in the CIA safe house

T A B L E_ T A L K

What advice would you give to an incoming college freshman? Share your wealth of wisdom in the Education area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

In the Bad Line
By Isaac Zava
Purgatory is standing with a hangover in a queue of non-tuition paying students
(12/02/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches
(12/02/98)

Hell no! We won't grade!
By Sean McMeekin
Will the upcoming strike by University of California graduate teaching assistants raise them from their serflike status -- or spell their eventual doom?
(11/30/98)

Debunking the myths of the Puritans
By Maria Russo
A revisionist argues that historians have turned the authoritarian, conformist Puritans into reflections of their own complex, Harvard-educated selves
(11/25/98)

It's all about parties -- and the bottom line
By Jason Zinoman
Every year the Radcliffe Publishing Course inducts another group of recent graduates into the glamour and drudgery of publishing
(11/23/98)

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E M P O R I U M
FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

BY JON BOWEN | Toward the end of my sophomore year, I got kicked out of college. Most self-respecting students never feel the blow of the university's boot against their backsides, but for those who have -- and for everyone else who's ever been ousted, exiled or dishonorably discharged -- take comfort in this story. You are not alone in the land of the banished.

The official charge against me was "immoral conduct." To get booted out of college for something as naughty as immorality, you have to plan everything just right. First, you enroll in a Baptist college, preferably one that doesn't allow alcohol or visitation between the sexes. Next you outfit your dorm room with a generous stockpile of booze, you proceed to get loaded and then get caught in flagrante delicto while frolicking in the wee hours with a partially clothed woman.

That's the way it went for me at Campbell University, a 4,000-student school in Buies Creek, N.C. The town of Buies Creek is so small -- this is not a joke -- that the local grocery store is named the Groc. The tiny store's tiny sign could only hold four letters. As a student at Campbell, a bastion of monotony in the middle of nowhere, you learn to make your own fun. You pile mattresses outside your dorm and do stunt-man leaps out the window. You cut your own hair. You cultivate an impression of yourself as a staunch nonconformist by doing all the things most college students do in the rest of the country: You drink and pursue your lustful urges.

The night in question was a blur of binging and noisy fornication that ended with my dorm's resident director, a former Atlantic Coast Conference fullback, shouldering his way into my room against my lame effort to bar the door. Next day, I was summoned to the administration building to meet with the dean of men. He gave me the low-down. I would have to appear before the university's Executive Council for a sort of shotgun inquisition at which I would be officially informed of what I already knew -- I now qualified as persona non grata at Campbell U. -- then I could mosey on home. Technically, I wouldn't be expelled. I would be suspended for one year. But in my mind it amounted to the same thing. Who wants to wait around a year so you can go back to the place that branded you immoral?

N E X T_ P A G E .|. A midnight ride to South Carolina