No class

Too hungover to learn? You're not fooling anyone

It’s 7:45 a.m. on a Friday, and you have to be in class in 15 minutes. As the clock breaks the bad news, your alarm begins its irritating beeping. You find yourself a bit surprised to be in your bed, having no recollection of how you got there the night before.

“Must … get … water.”

For many Kansas University students, this story is all too familiar.

“It seems like a lot of people come to class hungover,” KU sophomore Josh Mitchell said. “But on Fridays, campus always seems abandoned because lots of people go out on Thursday night and are too hungover or too lazy to come to class.”

Ilya Faibushevich, a junior at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, is taking a calculus class at KU this summer and has seen the same phenomenon.

“At Swarthmore, people go to class even if they’re still drunk. Here at KU, they don’t seem to come to class at all,” she said.

Professors, however, don’t find the issue to be too disruptive to class.

“Rarely do (my students) appear to be hungover,” said Shirley Harkess, associate professor of sociology, “though I’d imagine some of them are.”

Harkess only recalls a handful of times in her years of teaching in which a student was clearly under the influence of something other than sociological theory. But she knows what many of her students do for fun.

“Over the past 10 years or so, there seems to have been a proliferation of bars in Lawrence,” she said.

And visiting those bars can come with a price.

“I think when students start skipping class because of going out and partying is when their grades are put in jeopardy,” Mitchell said.

Sophomore Mark Whittemore recalls an anecdote from an introductory Italian class when a peer went out drinking the night before a class.

The student “stumbled into class without changing his clothes, even though he had quite clearly gotten sick on himself the night before,” Whittemore said. Nobody said anything, he said, as the class instructor’s attitude “seemed to be, ‘Whatever, it’s you’re life, but you’ll be screwed in my class.'”

While some students are enjoying their college years to explore all of the knowledge and perspectives that a university’s intellectual freedom has to offer, others are exploring a much different interpretation of the “freedoms” of college life.

Anybody interested in pursuing both needs to stock up on the aspirin.