Harvard does not recognize fraternities or sororities because its rules governing discrimination currently prohibit groups that only allow members of one sex. This means that Greek groups and others like them are barred from using everything from school money to meeting space to bulletin boards, seriously compromising their ability to be a strong presence on campus.

“Harvard’s policy of not recognizing single-sex social organizations stems from the merger of Harvard and Radcliffe and the desire of the College to protect women from discrimination in joining previously all-male organizations,” Kidd writes in an e-mail. “Although the Committee on College Life sub-committee on Harvard student organizations looked into this topic during the year, no decision to change the policy was reached.”

Without the reliable standbys of frat row or cheap bars, the relatively meager social offerings on campus splinter even further, decentralizing the undergraduate community as students scatter in search of the perfect party, or really, any party at all. “Harvard is built much more upon [students] finding their own niches,” Aditya H. Sanghvi ’06 says.

Largely confined to common rooms, undergraduates must also answer to College regulations, which prohibit parties on 15 weekend nights a year, including the nights before LSATs and those during reading and exam period.

“It’s been a policy developed by individual Houses,” Associate Dean of the College Thomas A. Dingman ’67 says of the rules. “When Houses are aware that there are important dates, they try to avoid those in order to see that our students feel supported.”

Parties must also end by 2 a.m. on weekends, though students say this is an improvement over the previous deadline of 1 a.m. The Dean’s Office agreed to extend party hours in undergraduate common rooms last year, and this year the office encouraged the City of Cambridge to extend party hours in House common spaces like dining halls until 2 a.m. as well.

D. Brendan Moore ’07 saw the effect of these often obscure regulations this April, when he was forced to cancel a long-planned shindig after finding out at the last minute that parties were prohibited that day because of MCATs.

And with the planned location, Currier’s Tuchman Living Room, booked solid through the end of the year, Moore eventually had to postpone the party until September.

Rules also bar freshmen from hosting parties in their dorms, prompting the characteristic mass weekend exodus to the Quad in search of alternatives.

“Freshmen are somewhat characterized on a weekend traveling in packs, looking for a party,” Undergraduate Council Student Activities Committee Chair Aaron D. Chadbourne ’06 says.

At Harvard, freshman entryway proctors, typically graduate students far older than their charges, double as disciplinarians and mentors.

But at schools like Yale, Dartmouth, and Cornell, undergraduates usually fill the role of residential adviser, a difference that invariably lends itself to a laxer attitude towards drinking and a less paternalistic attitude than the one that can permeate first-year life at Harvard.

While Yale and Harvard have similar policies prohibiting alcohol in freshman dorms, even for those of age, the enforcement of these rules varies greatly between the two schools.

“Freshman dorms are definitely still full of crackdown mentality,” former Lowell HoCo chair Todd van Stolk-Riley ’06 says.

Jordan B. Weitzen ’08 says that he too saw an atmosphere of enforcement from proctors in Yard halls.