Editor’s Note: Max Winter is a University of Richmond alumnus reflecting on his time at UR in the late ’90s and the campus culture he experienced. You can read more of his work on his Substack HERE.
Recently, while eating carnitas in East LA, I check my phone and get blasted with an absurd screenshot.
A text out of nowhere from my old college roommate, Dave:
“Dude, been a minute! I was reading about the esteemed Kash Patel and wouldn’t you know, he went to the University of the Institution!”
(That’s Dave’s nickname for the University of Richmond — but more on that later.)
“He was a year younger than us. One of the leaders of ‘The Richmond Rowdies,’ a ‘spirit squad.’”
My eyebrows skyrocket and I immediately show my wife.
“Wow,” she says “Looks like someone’s cos-playing as a white guy.”
As usual, witchycowboy cuts straight to the bone.
I don’t write about politics here, but let’s not dance around it: Kashyap is another case of a sad, self-loathing soul — debasing himself for acceptance from people who despise him at their core.
Think Usha Vance.
Or a disturbing number of rappers.
They suck up to a movement that includes white supremacists and Nazis who use this platform to call them “mud people.”
But I digress.
When Dave sent me that text, it dragged me back to a time I’ve tried hard to forget. I realized I’ve not only been avoiding news and politics — but something else.
(And this one for a lot longer. We’re talking decades.)
The fact that I went to the University of Richmond at all.
Many of you know, I graduated from NYU.
The reality is that I’ve systematically erased my stint as a “Spider.”
It’s never appeared on a single resume.
It’s not on my LinkedIn.
I never bring it up.
I’ve never talked about it, let alone written about it.
For decades I’ve felt something close to shame about that period of my life.
But now seeing Kash in that Polo shirt with that ridiculous beaded hemp necklace — it’s all flooding back.
The white college baseball hats with the curved brims…
The pastel polo shirts with popped collars belted into khaki cargo shorts…
The fucking Birkenstocks.
You may ask: Did I wear Abercrombie & Fitch or listen to Dave Matthews Band?
No, I did not.
So, why do I feel so much shame about that era?
Well, back in 1997, as my Mom drove me down to Virginia in her Subaru Outback, I really had no clue about the bizarre world I was about to enter. Or that the experience might traumatize me to the point where the thought of stepping foot on that campus over 25 years later gives me the physical shivers.
“You never told me…” my wife says now. “Why did you even go to that school? It just doesn’t seem like you at all.”
“That’s a really good question,” I admit.
If you’ve read my work at all, you might be asking the same thing: Why the fuck would someone born in New York City, raised by a single Mom in the fashion business, with a Dad living in the Chelsea Hotel, ever matriculate to a school where Kash Patel gallivanted around as a male cheerleader?
Bottom line: I was young and dumb.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as my wife says.
In high school, it never even occurred to me to apply to NYU. Back then, it was considered a “safety school.” Too easy to get into. Plus, going to college 20 minutes from home seemed lame — even if we were talking about New York City.
Looking back, I guess I wanted something that felt like “the true college experience.”
Richmond had a gorgeous, idyllic campus often listed among the most beautiful in the country.
You see that lake in the middle? In 1997 the men’s and women’s dorms were separated on each side — which seems insane to me now — but more on that later.
Academically, it was right in the zone of where my modest high school “accomplishments” could get me accepted. (I was smart — but partied too much.)
When it came to the question of “Greek Life,” I was agnostic. Knowing frats were a big deal there, you could say I was frat-curious. I was open to it, at least until the day I arrived on campus.
Now that I’m married, I believe in love at first sight. When you know, you know. But Richmond? The University of the Institution? Instantly, the opposite reaction.
From moment one, I was dubious of the crowd moving into the freshman dorms on the men’s side of the lake. Really boys.
Let me try to break it down: I was born in 1979. The very last year of Gen X.
At my high school senior talent show, our graduating class performed with live bands, playing actual instruments. When I came home and watched the next year’s show? The 1980 kids? Not a single live band. It was entirely choreographed, lip-synched dance numbers to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
We were experiencing a cultural shift.
Richmond was behind the times in nearly every way imaginable. (Did I mention the gender-segregated campus?) But maybe the one thing they were ahead of the curve on? Leaving the Gen X aesthetic in the dust and embracing Millennial Cringe.
In my mind, I was Kurt Cobain showing up to a school full of Justin Timberlakes.
Frosted tips and all.
On move-in day, there was exactly one female around who wasn’t a mom or little sister of an arriving freshman — chirpily handing out flyers for “Play Fair,” the big rally at the Robbins Center that would close out orientation.
Dave reminded me why we’d met in the first place: we didn’t get a normal dorm. Due to freshman overflow, by bad luck of the draw, we were assigned “temporary housing.”
Bunk beds, wooden wardrobe cabinets, mini-fridges, and desks were wheeled into a converted study lounge. Four of us squeezed into the makeshift space.
The kicker? It was in Wood Hall, which was the “Substance-Free” dorm. That whole idea gives me a double take in 2026. Wasn’t every dorm substance-free? It’s not like underage drinking and drugs were allowed everywhere else! But Dave reminds me:
“Choosing to live in Wood Hall was like an oath that you wouldn’t imbibe any mind-altering substances and I believe if you got caught the penalty (and dare I say shame!) was steeper than in a non-substance free dorm.”
You can imagine the type drawn to a place like this: Performative “Christians.”
People like our R.A., Shawn Ruger, who not only voluntarily lived there, but signed up to be a “mentor figure” to the substance-free boys.
Yikes.
As I was putting up my Leaving Las Vegas poster and sneaking PBR cans into our mini-fridge, I’m sure Shawn Ruger could tell right away I was there involuntarily — not seeking his “fellowship.”
Besides Dave, there was Harry Spitulnik, a spazzy kid from Massachusetts with real Adderall/Dexedrine energy.
Dave was always like: “Spitulnik! We don’t need a public announcement every time you’re gonna go take a shit! This guy’s the fucking Weather Channel! Constant updates!”
Spitulnik was obsessed with jam bands like The String Cheese Incident and Disco Biscuits. We had very little in common, but he was alright.
Also surprisingly alright? The son of Operation Desert Storm General H. Norman Schwarzkopf — a guy they called “Schwa.”
Somehow the nickname says it all.
They all had names like “Schwa” and “Trev.”
In the freshman yearbook, most wore jackets and ties — clearly arriving from prep schools — an extremely foreign concept to me. As uniformly white as I’m sure was then permitted by law, our class had eighties blond movie villain vibes.
Biff from Back to the Future. The members of Cobra Kai. Stiffler.
That was our student body.
For being as unworldly and sheltered as they obviously were, too many of them had an unearned bravado, a sort of preppy, pompous machismo. Dave called them “Strugglers.” They walked around in a slow-motion strut, like the burden of being so goddamn masculine made it a struggle to put one foot in front of the other.
If I thought I was Cobain, they thought they were the captain of the football team, the prom king, and the “Big Man on Campus.”
Dave was also a smart-mouthed New Yorker. I could tell by the way he was side-eyeing everyone — he was having a near-identical reaction to our new classmates.
It couldn’t have taken long before one of us turned to the other and said:
“What the fuck’s goin’ on here? Is it me, or does this place fucking suck?”
Probably happened the night of the orientation-culminating “Play Fair,” when we were first introduced to the “Richmond Rowdies” pep squad that Kash Patel would soon join as the token Indian.
You know — “Straight” “Christian” men shaking pom-poms…
(Was Bryon Noem on the squad?)
The manufactured “enthusiasm” in the gymnasium was nauseating.
Skipping out to find some hard liquor, Dave and I quickly fell into the dynamic that would define our Richmond experience:
Basically, we spent the entire semester sneering, scoffing, rolling our eyes, and making inside jokes at the expense of our classmates.
Were we Beavis and Butt-Head? Nah. We preferred Fonda and Hopper in Easy Rider(and watched the Venusian scene with Jack Nicholson on a pirated VHS in our dorm hundreds of times.)
In practice? We became a curmudgeonly feedback loop, reinforcing each other’s negativity and further alienating ourselves. I’m sure anyone reading this who happened to be there:
1. Won’t remember us — since we were likely in the corner somewhere quietly trolling them.
2. Found us absolutely insufferable.
We didn’t get laid. That’s for sure.
Why did Dave call it the University of the Institution?
We felt confined. Incarcerated. Like we were in Attica or Sing Sing.
Locked up on the male side of the lake — like sex criminals — too depraved to be let anywhere near the girls.
Freshmen weren’t allowed to have cars. With the campus nestled in a quiet, suburban residential area, we couldn’t walk anywhere. There was no escape.
With only two lousy places on campus to eat, our cohort constantly ordered pizza, almost exclusively from Papa John’s — an absolute abomination to any self-respecting New Yorker. To this day, I refuse to eat it. Not just because the founder turned out to be a racist idiot. It’s fucking disgusting. We compared their mysterious white dipping sauce to spoodge and ordered from Chanello’s just to be contrarians.
The gender segregation seeped into everything in unnerving, subconscious ways. Think about study lounges. Not the one I was sleeping in —the ones where people studied.
Don’t you think one nice thing about reading a textbook in college might be to at leastsit next to a pretty girl? Nope. Hike across campus to the library for that! Our dorm study lounges were packed with a restless all-male energy.
Maybe I’m an adult who doesn’t particularly enjoy being around large groups of men — I don’t really watch sports, play team sports, go to the gym, gamble, or go on “boys trips”— because of the visceral repulsion it still triggers, like a bad acid flashback to those testosterone-drenched dorms.
The social life revolved around a single activity: Beer Pong. It seemed like the only thing that anyone ever did was play Beer Pong, watch others play Beer Pong, cheer people on playing Beer Pong, talk about Beer Pong, or plan the next time they were gonna play Beer Pong.
Not in the “substance-free” of course, but at Fraternity Row. Even here, Richmond couldn’t just be normal. They weren’t actual frat houses. Everyone lived in the dorms. They were “lodges,” four walls built around Beer Pong tables. Frat parties were permitted… on a strict curfew. Always shut down too early, always with the song “Fly” by Sugar Ray.
Like Dave Matthews Band, I probably don’t have anything against Sugar Ray or their music per se, but for years I flinched and recoiled whenever I heard the word “Sugar” followed by the word “Ray” — blurting out “Sugar Ray sucks” from pure muscle memory.
After “l just wanna fly! Put your arms around me baby!” the women would scurry back to their side of the lake, into their dorms where men were banned.
There were always some new restrictive rule being announced by the dean, who bloviated at us like a Deep South drill sergeant: “Gentlemen! Do not carry fraudulent identification in your billfolds!” As if any of these clowns ever made it to a bar downtown.
It seemed impossible not to succumb to the idea that only way to be socially relevant — or have a conversation outside of class with a female at all — was to join a frat.
“Pledge season” arrived. Spitulnik devoted himself to a full-on campaign, the best version of a charm offensive he could manage. Dave and I half-heartedly dipped a toe and attended a few events.
They were excruciating.
That these douchebags held enough social capital to judge if I was cool enough to be part of their little homoerotic club seemed to spit in the eye of God. At Richmond, it often felt like the universe was inverted into the Upside Down.
I think Dave got a serious look from one or two of the frats. He had an older friend from high school in one of them. Plus — of the two of us, I’m certain he was the more affable and likable.
But by the end of the semester, none of us received a bid.
Spitulnik was devastated. He’d really given it a “college try.”
As for me, I don’t think a single fraternity seriously considered me for a millisecond.
What came next was way more of a gut punch: Dave revealed that he’d been born with a heart condition and was taking the second semester off for an elective surgery.
Well, it wasn’t exactly “elective.” He had to do the surgery sometime and given how wonderfully things were going at The Institution, it made sense for him to pull the trigger and get it over with now.
Who could blame him? But suddenly I was facing the rest of the year as a true social outcast without a single friend, stuck in the campus prison.
A harrowing turn of events — for me.
Of course, Dave was the one undergoing life-threatening open-heart surgery that would crack open his sternum, fuck around with his valves, and leave him with a zipper scar across his chest.
Somehow, we both made it through.
While he recovered back in New York, I decided to take advantage of everything the school could offer outside of Frat Row, which I swore I’d never step foot on again.
For one thing, I started writing movie reviews for the school newspaper. I’d love to get access to The Collegian archives now and revisit the obnoxious pieces I wrote.
The Dazed and Confused screening on campus was my opportunity to write a hit piece on my fellow students. Something like: “The kids in this movie drank in high school, smoked weed, and were cool. They weren’t a bunch of sheltered dorks! So, I can relate to the film — even though most Richmond students probably won’t get it.”
It’s almost like I was begging for someone to come kick my ass.
But here’s the thing: writing for The Collegian was a good experience. And when I think about it now, outside of the trauma narrative I built for myself, I actually racked up a lot of good experiences.
I took a course at the Jepson School of Leadership that might’ve been taught by former Texas governor Ann Richards. (I can’t confirm for sure.) For a semester-long case study, we worked in small groups to shadow a local organization. Ours chose the Richmond Police and did ride-alongs downtown, following cops into domestic disturbances and whatnot. At the end of the class, we gave a multimedia presentation — an experience that still impacts how I approach producing today.
I also took Intro to Journalism, which was really a critical thinking class in disguise. Maybe if every American was explicitly taught critical thinking at that formative age, people like Kash Patel wouldn’t be running the FBI.
At best, he’d be WebstUR the dancing Spider mascot.
Then there were the film classes, which I devoured, sitting for hours alone in the school library with bucket headphones on, watching Badlands and Days of Heaven on Laserdisc.
I cut my teeth in film editing with nearly unlimited access to the university’s Avid. In a school full of Kash Patels, no one even knew what an Avid was, let alone that Richmond offered one to students. So it was basically mine.
(After I transferred to NYU, there were so many aspiring filmmakers, you could be on a waiting list for weeks to get an hour with an Avid.)
My big masterpiece was a short film I shot of my high school friends partying at an artist’s house in Montauk. We’d stumbled into a collection of African or Polynesian masks at three in the morning, and I cut clips of us dancing in them.
Sitting in the editing room at three in the morning in Richmond, alone, watching it over and over, I wondered if any of my (actually cool) friends from back home were having as miserable a time in college as me.
(Nobody was.)
Without cell phones or social media in those days I barely heard from them.
At one low point, I saw a girl staring intently into the lake and walked over.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“Don’t you see those ducks?” she said. “They’re so beautiful!”
All I remember is muttering, “What’s so good about ducks?” and walking away.
What a piece of work I was.
Going into sophomore year, a healthy Dave would be roaring back. We’d be free of the “substance-free” dorm, out there with the civilian population, and my trusty Hyundai Elantra would finally give me the freedom to get off that beautiful, soul-sucking campus.
My big idea? To get a job as a Popcorn Boy at the local arthouse movie theater. It truly amazes me, looking back, that I was so desperate to do anything to break out of the rhythm of that school that I chose to don a maroon vest with a plastic name tag and up-sell popcorn to blue-haired old ladies lining up to watch Shakespeare in Love.
“Ladies! Did you know you can get a large for just fifty cents more?”
My film professor also set me up with the director of a student short film who wanted me to play “the boyfriend.” My only job was to knock on a door and hug “the girlfriend.” No dialogue. My brother was a famous model, so I had a complex and was extremely queasy in front of the camera. I turned in the worst two-minute performance in the history of student film.
Acting just wasn’t for me.
And that’s one critical thing that came from this period. The key question: Who do you not want to be?
The answer was clearer by the day.
It was years before the word “bro” would take over the lexicon. But Dave had a way with words. He called these peacocking, popped-collar fratboys “Guy.”
The first time may have been at an “Apartment Party” — the name given the supposedly cooler, seemingly more dangerous place where upperclassmen lived across campus. (Ooo!) In reality, “The Apartments” were nothing more than a cookie-cutter, suburban gated community full of pampered college kids.
Anyway, that’s where some asshole senior turned to Dave and said: “Hey guy, hold this!”
Not a request. A command. He just handed Dave his beer and went off to talk to a girl — or take a piss.
“Um, okay, guy…”
Pretty sure Dave ended up pouring it in the sink.
We were always talking about the conformity — the uniformity — all around us. How interchangeable everyone was. By the end, every Richmond guy was just “Guy.”
“Hey, Guy!” we’d say, contempt oozing through our voices. “What’s up, Guy?!?”
(That’s when we weren’t getting drunk and quoting Jack Nicholson’s Joker at the top of our lungs, howling into the moonlight: “This town needs an enema!”)
One night, I was standing in one of those identical, cut-and-paste kitchens at an apartment party when a salamander slithered by on the counter. I grabbed it and shoved it into a bottle of vodka, instantly dissolving its skin in the 80-proof.
Then I chugged.
When the lizard carcass dropped into my mouth, I crunched the cartilage and swallowed.
Yeah.
(“Don’t yuck my yum!” as Dave would say…)
I thought I was being shockingly cool in the face of these squares. Like: “This is how we do it at the Chelsea Hotel, bitch!”
But only one person actually noticed. A bleach-blonde sorority girl’s jaw dropped in abject horror — she was not impressed.
(Maybe I was too depraved to be allowed anywhere near the girls after all…)
That night, I followed up the salamander stunt by ripping down a goalpost on the football field on my way back to the dorms.
Needless to say, I was in a dark place.
By midterms, I decided I could no longer deny the inevitable.
I may have eaten salamanders, but I refused to be a Spider.
I needed out.
While Kash Patel would spend his entire life doing whatever it took to fit in with these people, I would do anything to dissociate from them completely.
I applied and was accepted to a number of schools. Surprisingly, one was UNC Chapel Hill — the best school I’d ever gotten into.
But driving the Hyundai down to North Carolina to check it out, I realized it didn’t matter how “good” of a school it supposedly was. Another Southern school filled with Guys drenching their pizza with mystery white sauce was not gonna work.
I needed to go home.
I’d learned a lot about who I wasn’t — but also who I was:
A New Yorker.
An increasingly film-obsessed New Yorker.
My dorm mates would scream at their TVs during football games. The one time I screamed at mine? When Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan on Oscar night.
There was really no choice but NYU.
The exact opposite of what I thought I wanted just two years before, now I was determined to finish out my college years as far away from a “normal” collegiate experience as possible…
Far from any curved brim baseball hat or puka shell necklace…
Living in New York City, with my “job” being to go to class? To this day, the greatest privilege of my life.
My final memory of Richmond is my last night. I went out in the yard and started a fire. Like some kind of anarchist burning the American flag, I relished lighting up anything I owned with a U of R logo.
An older woman walked by. Not sure if she was a professor or just a local who liked to stroll by the lake and appreciate the ducks.
“What are you doing?”
“Burning my Richmond ID!” I said. “I’m outta here first thing tomorrow and never coming back.”
I’ll never forget her face as my U of R mug shot melted, the flames reflecting in her glasses.
“I guess I’m just shocked anyone could hate this place so much that they’d go as far as to burn their ID. It seems like a nice enough school.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Now I know, I was just an over-dramatic sadboy, about to go to the perfect school for me. Fuck the Spiders. I’d be an NYU Violet now. Surrounded by kids who looked like Lonnie from Flirting with Disaster:
Spitulnik would transfer to Boston University. Dave would transfer to NYU as well. We wouldn’t be roommates, but we’d stay good friends with plenty of adventures to come:
Real New York pizza at the Box on Bleecker. Young Dave Chappelle at the Comedy Cellar. Indie rock at Mercury Lounge. Late night lahmajun at Bereket. Hopping the wall into the Little Italy cemetery from Mean Streets, working together at Fox 2000…
At one point, Dave and I wrote dueling screenplays. Mine was goofy and forgettable. Dave’s was about his (actually harrowing) college experience, surviving heart surgery. It was great.
In 2002, the University of Richmond finally de-segregated the campus. Boys and girls now live on both sides of the lake. A year later, they introduced — gasp, imagine this — fully co-ed dorms.
I wonder if the culture has changed at all. If the student body is any more diverse or less “Guy.” I hope so, but I fear Richmond is probably just pumping out more Kash Patels.
Wish I could say I was optimistic about the future.
After Dave sent me that text, I also learned something else:
He recently had a heart attack at 46 and went into cardiac arrest. Had he not been in the exact right place at the exact right time — collapsing in an empty parking lot with a trained EMT right there — he wouldn’t have made it.
97% don’t survive this kind of cardiac arrest.
When he tracked down the EMT later to thank him for saving his life, he got a surprising response:
“No, I want to thank you,” the guy said. “More often than not, we lose someone in that situation. You being here right now makes what we do worth something.”
Inspired by that, I felt a genuine desire to thank Dave for being alive too.
There are two Bob Dylans:
The young, strident (and insufferable) one who wrote The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the older, grizzled, “seen it all” one who wrote Things Have Changed.
Now that I’m Grizzled Bob Dylan, I know I should’ve approached my life as a Spider differently.
Appreciated the ducks?
Maybe.
And maybe instead of deleting an unhappy episode from my memory, Eternal Sunshine-style, there are moments — and people — worth appreciating.
By Max Winter
You can more from Max on his Substack HERE.
Photo by Kaden Taylor
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