Welcomed With Kisses, Stanford Freshmen Risk the ‘Kissing Disease’

STANFORD, Calif. — It is minutes to midnight. A sultry full moon hangs over Stanford's Memorial Church, bathing the campus's red roofs and adobe-toned walls.

In the Quad, thousands of students mill around, some bobbing drunkenly, some giggling nervously, most of them wearing clothes.

Finally, a male senior saunters over to a group of the youngest-looking women and asks: "Hey! You freshmen? Can I kiss you?"

As the Stanford Band plays and a giant screen shows famous movie clutches, the bravest women step forward and receive the traditional welcome to one of the nation's most prestigious universities: a big wet upperclassman smack.

Days later, another tradition arrives: flu and mononucleosis, the "kissing disease," sweep the dorms.

Full Moon on the Quad — normally celebrated beneath the academic year's first full moon but this year held on Oct. 22 because of a conflict with Homecoming Week — is an event unique in American education: an orgy of interclass kissing reluctantly but officially sanctioned by the university.

It is a domestic example of a new field in public health, "mass-gathering medicine." The best-known example is Saudi Arabia's multimillion-dollar efforts to keep the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as epidemic-free as possible.

For Stanford, the struggle is: Since officials can't outlaw it (yes, they have tried), how can they make it safer?

The first step, said Dr. Ira M. Friedman, director of the Vaden Student Health Center, is to make consent paramount. "We try to create an environment in which they don't feel they must participate in the exchange of oral secretions," he said.

His center also offers shots against what it can fight: flu and meningococcal meningitis, a rare but sometimes dangerous infection known as "freshman meningitis."

To make it safer, the evening is overseen by student sobriety monitors and decorated with hand-drawn signs — of the ilk that usually say "Beat Cal" — but bearing slogans like "Consent is Sexy."

But the most crucial role is played by the "peer health educators" who live in each dorm.

They meet with freshmen before, and ask any with cold symptoms to feel free to watch, but not to kiss anyone.

And they teach safe kissing.

"We tell them, 'Don't floss beforehand, don't brush, don't do anything that could create microabrasions in your gums for germs to get in," said Michelle Lee Mederos, a former educator who graduated in 2011. "And we have tables where we offer mints and little Dixie cups of mouthwash."

Mouthwash is the main line of defense. This year there were two tables dotted with paper cups, along with condoms and other sexual health supplies.

The educators also have square latex dental dams to offer, "but they're generally made fun of," said Ms. Mederos, who used them in dorm demonstrations of how to safely perform oral sex on a woman. "In two years of ordering supplies, I had to order them only once — for those demonstrations."

Although the conventional wisdom is that mononucleosis spikes after the event, the health center has never compiled that data, Dr. Friedman said.

"It's also flu season," he said. "But we do think the event is a potentiator."

The event's origins are lost in the fog of history; legend holds that it began in the late 1800s with senior men presenting freshman women with roses.

Later, it waxed and waned, reputedly practiced sometimes by some fraternities. Many graduates over age 40 have never heard of it.

In 1988, several student officers made it formal.

"It was folklore," said Julie Lythcott-Haims, one of those officers. "We took it off the shelf and dusted it off. We had roses, a string quartet, maybe some champagne. A couple of hundred students showed up."

When she returned a decade later as an administrator (she eventually became the beloved "Freshman Dean Julie"), it had "become a thing," she said. "Thousands were showing up. It was crazy, it was wild. There were concerns about alcohol and safety."

Starting in 2002, deans debated outlawing it, rejected that as futile and decided to impose order instead.

Now the Quad is barricaded. Campus police check student IDs. Paramedics stand by. A concert is held so nonkissers have something to do.

It has been canceled only once: in 2009, the "pandemic swine flu" year.

After East Coast schools, which open earlier, reported outbreaks, "we decided we couldn't live with the risk," Dr. Friedman said. "So we made a very unpopular decision."

Francisca Gilmore, a freshman that year, said in an email interview from an internship in Cambodia that she and some classmates braved the odds anyway.

"Unofficially, a bunch of overeager freshmen and intoxicated upperclassmen gathered on the Quad and upheld the tradition," she wrote.

Dr. Friedman conceded that the ban "didn't work 100 percent, but I think it made some difference."

Lots of students got flu, "but we weren't as high as national or even regional rates," he said.

Since 2002, new traditions have emerged, leaving yesterday's roses looking wilted.

One co-op's contingent attends wearing just body paint. There is a "same-sex kissing" area.

Brendan O'Byrne contributed reporting.

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