When Evie Cantwell SC ’28 walked through Scripps College gates in fall 2024, she was already familiar with the traditions waiting for her inside, after years of hearing stories about both her mother and grandmother’s experiences on campus. Now, as Scripps Associated Students (SAS) 5C event co-chair, alongside Avni Kalia SC ’28, Cantwell is trying to bring those traditions back just as the school’s nightlife takes on new forms.
Since joining SAS event planning in her first year, Cantwell has helped bring back Mardi Gras and Eurobash, filled SAS events with student performers and vendors and kept large 5C parties on the calendar despite what she described as a shrinking budget. As she stepped into her role, Cantwell felt that she had big shoes to fill. Her mother had been social chair on SAS when she attended Scripps.
“She did, essentially, the job that I do now: planning parties,” she said. “There are legendary stories of these epic parties in the humanities courtyard that I heard growing up.”
Scripps has suffered from a reputation among the Claremont Colleges as having a less than stellar nightlife. In the infamous ‘January Scripps’ Halloween shutdown of 2022, Scripps administrators ended a school-sponsored party about 45 minutes in after a crowd broke through a barricade and knocked down entrance gates. The administration put a hold on nightlife until it was tentatively relaunched with Tomorrowland in November 2023, and then Scripps’ first “darty” a semester later.
Cantwell’s recent events have featured interactive touches such as steaming beignets and face painting, student dancers, expressive decorations and creative themes.
“It’s so exciting to see your friends dancing on stage and in costume, or having your face painted by your roommate,” Cantwell said. “For future events, we’d love to try to get more students across the 5Cs involved and really build a super creative collaborative party environment.”
Aside from SAS parties, Scripps students have also created their own nightlife culture through Queggers, unofficial kegger parties with a queer twist, which occur sporadically throughout the academic year. These parties, which originated in 2017 but experienced a revival in 2025, are smaller, with exclusively sapphic themes such as ‘lesbian wedding’ that the meticulously planned SAS parties, bound by an endless list of requirements, administration approvals and limited budget, do not have. As smaller, student-run parties like Quegger draw crowds of their own, SAS faces a new question: do Scripps students want big parties, or are the best nights out the small ones?
Even with its nightlife’s revival, turnout at large Scripps parties in 2026 remains low, despite wristbands for parties usually “selling out completely or nearly selling out every party,” according to Cantwell.
Still, some students have noticed an uptick in SAS party quality and effort in the past two years.
“Even just going and seeing this year’s amount of effort that was put into planning gives you a whole new appreciation for where you’re at, but I think that a lot of people don’t really appreciate it as much,” Scripps partygoer Victoria Lugomer-Pomper SC ’28 said. Nora Verner SC ’27, who has seen the Scripps nightlife scene evolve over four years, has appreciated SAS’ effort.
“I have certainly appreciated the attempts to revamp Scripps nightlife and I like that we are one of the campuses that host bigger events now,” Verner said.
A lot of what makes a party fun, Verner said, is the possibility to randomly connect with people. In large settings, students seem less inclined to mingle with strangers as opposed to smaller communities where everyone knows everyone.
“I still feel like the best parties are the smaller ones,” she said. “I see a lot more success and a lot more of Scripps’ true identity coming out at a Quegger than at Eurobash.”
For that reason, Verner sees something unique in parties like the Queggers.
“I still feel like the best parties are the smaller ones,” she said. “I see a lot more success and a lot more of Scripps’ true identity coming out at a Quegger than at Eurobash.”
Scripps’ nightlife legacy is defined by large parties such as Eurobash. But the tension between old traditions and new ones raises questions about what students want from their nightlife, especially in the fast-paced, high-turnover world of college, where the current generation of students may not share Cantwell’s connection to traditions from years past.
For Verner, the answer isn’t choosing between old and new.
“I certainly would not kick the big parties entirely,” she said. “Both the revival of more unofficial parties and better official parties have helped to give Scripps students spaces on our own campus hosted by us, to go out and participate in nightlife.”
Lugomer-Pomper echoed Verner’s sentiment, and also said she wishes to see a stronger callback to Scripps’ traditions, which is what Cantwell and Kalia are aiming for.
“I know that Eurobash was the first step in [returning to Scripps’ roots], but it’d be nice to know [our] school’s history and ‘true’ Scripps traditions,” she said.
Both old and new can exist simultaneously on Scripps’ campus: Mardi Gras, Eurobash and Halloween have made their comebacks, while Queggers, which began in 2017, have also experienced their revival. Now, the challenge lies in uniting the two.
“We are always looking for feedback and advice,” Cantwell said. “If you think of something that you want to see at a Scripps party, reach out to us event chairs. We want to hear it, and we want to make it happen.”
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