Final Revision

Cheers to Naked K

Flashback to 1992 and Sublime front man Bradley Nowell singing about infamous “40oz to Freedom.” For him that may have meant big-time drugging and serious debauchery, but nearly two decades later, students on Kalamazoo College’s campus are exploring their own liquid courage by shedding more than just their inhibitions: they’re publicly discarding their clothes.

Male and female alike, students are streaking.

It usually happens late, right around midnight, on Friday and Saturday—an hour when the alcohol consumed post-dinner is just starting to stake its claim on students’ normally functional decision-making processes.

They do it for the rush. It’s a right of passage. Maybe it’s a bonding experience. How about a drunken whim?

Nearly every weekend once the weather recovers from months of winter, piles of pants, blouses, t-shirts, dresses, skirts, and sneakers litter the steps of Stetson Chapel as bare bodies can be seen racing, swaying, dipping and sometimes falling, from the top of the quad to the sign post across from Hoben. They might high five before forging back up the hill.

Some students make multiple streaking missions in the span of just minutes, others jump their quickly sobering bodies into clothes as fast as coordination will allow, and still more celebrate their jaunt by continuing to bask about casually in the nude.

At certain landmark events during one’s time at K, nudity, if not excessive drinking, seem all but required in order to fully soak up the experience. LandSea, Frelon, Senior Pig Roast: look carefully, there’s a footnote about the nudity one can expect at each of these transitional times.

For many freshmen, first experiences with public nudity take place on the LandSea orientation program, at which time peer leaders often partake in naked swimming and encourage their charges to do the same.

Though in no way is participating in naked swimming mandatory, there is a certain degree of passive prompting at play. However, for this one remove alcohol from the equation.

LandSea participants have to strip down to nothing without the help of the booze that is so readily available to the underclassmen on K’s campus. In the woods, nudity may actually be about self-acceptance and liberation from unrealistic, media-generated body norms.

“Certain boundaries drop and when you don’t have to worry about what other people think of you, and you don’t have to think about other people judging you about your body, it becomes less of a big deal,” says former LandSea participant and two-time peer leader Katja Samati.

She explains, “There was a cool quality to being alright with naked swimming.”

To recap: Cool meets Drunk, Naked Swimming morphs into Group Streaking.

No event better exemplifies this bizarre equation than that which takes place post-Frelon. On this night, hoards of students, comprised mostly of the production’s overwhelming female production cast, march from the Fine Arts Building to the quad where they drop trow, or leotard, and then proceed to streak.

It’s a tradition, and before 2009 it was one who’s sanctity had remained intact, not to mention its illegality ignored by both the administration and campus security. In Michigan, public nudity constitutes indecent exposure and two misdemeanor charges carry the potential to land carefree streakers in the same registry—the Sexual Offender Registry—as child molesters and rapists.

But back to the story.

The 2009 post-Frelon streaking event, one in which upwards of 200 students are believed to have participated, was turned into a mob scene by a group of freshmen men who had gathered to heckle the streakers. They arrived at the quad with boxes of water balloons and proceeded to hurl the brightly colored bombs at fellow students partaking in the tradition. The majority of their violence was directed at men, who represented the obvious minority.

The harassment progressed until two of the hecklers, Riley Wetzel and Martin Blanc, physically tackled several of the male streakers. Though their motivations for violence remain unclear and unattested to, both students admit to being under the influence of alcohol at the time they committed their assaults.

Neither attacker is of legal age.

The ugly scene ultimately concluded with Dan Hulbert, a senior, bearing a broken elbow as a result of Wetzel and Blanc’s liquid lunacy. Both students have been suspended as a result of their actions and Hulbert’s elbow is nearing full recovery.

In a May 1, 2009 email statement sent from Dean Sarah Westfall to all students, it is stated “…spring quarter is a time when the ‘K’ tradition of streaking comes alive…Because streaking has not historically been problematic at ‘K,’ the campus has not contacted the police for assistance in managing the crowds…”

The dean goes on to very clearly state: “Though the College does not condone illegal behavior, like streaking, your help is essential in ensuring that it does not become a problematic or dangerous tradition if and when it occurs.”

Nowhere in the email, nor in public discourse, was the quad’s resident elephant discussed. Sure, on the Sunday morning that followed the mass streaking, sidewalks throughout campus were sprinkled in theatrical attire and vomit, this didn’t inspire those in positions of power to publicly connect the cluster of three dots labeled Alcohol, Streaking, and Violence.

If annual traditions like the streaking that takes place both post-Frelon and after the Senior Pig Roast are founded on drunken liberation, it’s only commonsensical to question what it is that baring all offers to students.

This year, the pig roast, which also took place on the quad, actually boasted a keg for about thirty minutes before campus security intervened.

When student-coordinated events encourage underage drinking and indecent exposure in direct violation of the laws laid out by greater society, the nature of this institution’s traditions,’ even those that remain off the books, like streaking, implementation is immediately called into question.

As college-age students however, it is not the administration’s responsibility to handhold; no, it remains the duty of the individual to, as cliché as it sounds, drink responsibly or to not drink at all. While public nudity, or streaking, within the K bubble in and of itself may not be harmful, the alcohol consumption that enables it has the potential for causing great harm, as evidenced by the irresponsible actions of a few.

“I think what the administration is saying is that us, as a post-secondary educational institution, are not police and the scope or our practice is to teach and educate,” said clinical psychologist and psychology professor Charles Livingston. “If it’s not in their [the administration’s] mission statement, if it’s not in their scope of practice, then it’s a legal issue.”

And that’s why Americans generally, and K kids specifically, are in danger each time they strip in the name of glorious liberation, or life-altering transition, or, more likely, just blurry-eyed drunkenness.

If the large-scale nudity at last Sunday’s Senior Pig Roast is any indicator, the naked culture at K remains undeterred, even in the face of broken bones and potential prosecution. For the $2.50 a 40oz costs, some might say this breed of liberation is a bargain.