Mass nudity, screaming help students relieve stress
By Daily Bruin Staff
Dec. 5, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 The Harvard Crimson "Primal Screamers" at Harvard
University run around Harvard Yard naked.
By Josh Wolf
Daily Bruin Contributor
Midnight Yell at UCLA is only one example of college students
creating traditions to relieve finals stress, with similar
activities seen across town and across the country.
In recent years, administrators at UCLA, USC, Harvard and
Princeton Universities have responded differently to these
rituals.
At UCLA, administrators started warning students that they will
be cited and may face disciplinary actions, especially after fall
quarter in 1999, when students in apartments started burning
couches and throwing bottles onto the street.
USC has its own yell during finals week, but it is loosely
coordinated, said Kathy Stewart, an assistant director in the
Office for Residential and Greek Life.
 The Daily Princetonian Hundreds of naked students partake
in the 1999 "Nude Olympics" at Princeton. “It’s just an
excuse to have a study break,” Stewart said.
Primal Scream, as it is called at USC, is loosely organized.
Many dorms have their own events, but they lack campus-wide
participation. Between 10 and 10:15 p.m., students gather, scream
and then eat food provided by the housing department.
Three thousand miles away, students at Harvard University
participate in their own Primal Scream, but they have raised the
bar over USC.
At Harvard, Primal Scream is intended to bring people together
by removing barriers that separate them.
Every semester before finals, students get together, remove all
non-essential articles of clothing ““ shoes, socks, gloves,
and hats are recognized as essential in the biting winter cold
““ and run through campus.
The event evolved into streaking from its original, tamer,
origins of simply yelling.
Helena Lee, a third-year biochemistry student at Harvard,
participated in the event last year in negative-four-degree
temperatures and said it had the desired results.
“It was a real bonding experience,” Lee said.
But should people misperceive the intent of this naked ritual,
Lee has a first-hand perspective.
“Mass nudity is surprisingly unsexy,” she said.
The Harvard University Police Department assists with crowd
control to ensure participants go unmolested.
Students at Princeton University haven’t had the same luck
with their attempt at winter nudity. The Nude Olympics sounds more
athletic than it is, as students gather naked after the first
snowfall of the year.
The problem with this approach is that students in the past
found ways to entertain themselves that proved unsafe, said Thomas
Dunne, assistant dean of undergraduate students at Princeton.
“Some of the behaviors exhibited were potentially
dangerous to students,” he said.
Princeton’s President Harold Shapiro, reacting to the
hospitalization of 10 students due to alcohol consumption during
the festivities two years ago, called for an immediate review of
the tradition.
“I am simply not willing to wait until a student dies
before taking action,” Shapiro wrote in a letter published in
the Daily Princetonian on Jan. 13, 1999.
The final decision was to outlaw the practice, ending the Nude
Olympics and temporarily leaving Princeton students without a
ritual of mass bonding. While an interclass snowball fight was
proposed, it was dismissed for its damaging potential.
While traditions are important to students, administrators are
starting to place regulations on more extreme rituals, as seen in
Princeton’s Nude Olympics and UCLA’s Midnight Yell.
