A weekend hardly could pass at Northwestern during the 1950s before students had to turn their thoughts to the next Friday.

“You were formally asked to go out by Wednesday night,” said Asst. to the Vice President for Student Affairs Margo Brown, who graduated from Medill in 1959. “If you didn’t have a date by then, you didn’t accept or you’d be desperate. If you didn’t have a date, you stayed home and played bridge.”

As both an NU administrator for 27 years and an alumna, Brown has a unique view of the evolution of student life at NU. She has seen traditions — like formal dating practices — come and go.

And with a three-day birthday party celebrating 150 years of NU tradition beginning Friday, Brown encouraged students interested in feeling a deeper connection to their school to attend.

“As an administrator I hear a large call for traditions,” she said. “People want something to make them feel a part of the Northwestern community.”

Brown came close to never even joining the NU community. She was valedictorian of her high school in Indiana, and though she wanted to attend NU, her father didn’t want her going to a “party school.”

“Northwestern was not as academically rigorous then as it is now, so I started out at the College of William and Mary,” she said.

But Brown, who wanted to be a magazine journalist, eventually persuaded her father to allow her to transfer to the Medill School of Journalism. There she excelled as a reporter, rising to assistant managing editor for The Daily and winning awards for her magazine articles.

“I wanted to be a foreign correspondent,” she said. After graduation, however, she devoted her time to her family. She had three children with her first husband, an NU alumnus and current Illinois congressman John Porter.

Though she didn’t get to be a correspondent, she felt at home in Evanston, where she has spent all but four years since graduating.

“I love the lake,” she said. “We live near it, we walk by it and go waterskiing in the summer. I love the sound of it.”

In 1973 Brown returned to NU as an assistant to the dean of students, handling student discipline and parent programming. In 1993 then-Vice President for Student Affairs Peggy Barr eliminated the dean position and changed Brown’s title to assistant to the vice president for student affairs.

“But it’s always been the same job,” said Brown, who chairs the University Sexual Assault Hearing and Appeals System review committee.

Brown joined the NU administration in the 1970s during the tail end of the student protest era, forcing her to deal with students involved in sit-ins and graffiti vandalism.

The conclusion of the Vietnam War ushered in a phase of fraternity pranks, including a memorable incident involving a fraternity brother who was tied up naked outside of a sorority house in the middle of winter, Brown recalled.

“It really was sort of out of hand. We had a lot of disciplinary cases out of that,” she said. “Frats got the picture they were only hurting themselves.”

NU also has become a more competitive academic environment.

“Students are concerned about behavior,” she said. “They don’t want anything to happen to not get the best job, so they’re concerned about their disciplinary records.”

A “Gentleman’s C” used to be more acceptable when she was an undergraduate, Brown said.

“You could get by with B’s and C’s and have fun,” she said. “That’s not the case today.”

But students today have some things easier. Relationships between men and women are no longer controlled by university policies as they were in the ’50s, Brown said.

Women had weekday curfews of 10 p.m. and had to be back in their dorms during weekends by 2 a.m.

If women were late, they were assessed “penalty minutes,” and if they collected too many, they received a “date jerk” — their dating privileges were suspended for a weekend. (Brown admitted she was issued a few date jerks.)

Today Brown lives with her husband, John, in a house by the lake and is starting to think about when she’ll bring her NU career to a close.

Reflecting on her own experiences at NU, Brown hopes students develop their own strong ties to the university.

“It’s important to have traditions, but they have to be yours,” she said.