First of all, men and women would not be hanging out in dorms together.
As late as 1962, men couldn’t visit a woman’s room, and women couldn’t even go into the men’s residence halls. Women had an 8 p.m. sign out rule, and men had specific calling hours to visit women.

“There were pretty strict weekend curfews for women,” university archivist Anne Turkos said. Girls had to sign out for the weekend and say where they were going, she added.

“Students broke rules all the time,” the archivist said.

The most famous case was in the 1920s. Vivian Simpson was a student who broke a lot of rules, including ironing in her dorm, leaving her lights on after 9:30 p.m. and greeting “gentleman callers” in a bathrobe.

Simpson was ultimately expelled for breaking all of these rules, and although she sued the university, the decision was upheld in court. Interestingly enough, after her expulsion Simpson attended The George Washington University and went on to become the first woman to serve as secretary of state for Maryland.

Others who were not as rebellious were “campused,” meaning they were essentially grounded and not allowed to leave campus.

Hagerstown became the first co-ed dorm in 1969, but it wasn’t until 1971, after students started staging “sleep-ins,” that students gained 24-hour visitation privileges and curfews were eliminated.

“Students said ‘enough is enough,’”said Turkos. “It was the end of the 60s, with a lot of talk about personal freedom, and there was a lot of push on the part of the students for more freedom.”

Once students had more freedom, more security was added to campus, in the form of the University Police.

The Maryland State Police had previously patrolled the campus, but beginning in 1973 the University Police began patrolling the area, starting with about a dozen officers and growing to include student aides.

University Police spokesman Paul Dillon said Maryland was one of the first campuses in the country to start using student aides.

The police force started crime prevention programs and installed emergency phones around campus in the late 1970s.

Dillon said that before e-mail, fliers were posted around campus to alert people of crimes. Dillon said he didn’t think this method was effective since it only reached a small number of people. The University Police started using mass e-mails for crime alerts around 1999.

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