In one dormitory lounge, four Japanese students consulted hand-held translation computers, while five Americans played tabletop football and joked among themselves.

In the morning, Mr. Green appeared with his mentor and idol, Ralph Nader, to a standing-room crowd in a dormitory lounge at Columbia University.

Smoking will not be permitted in dormitory lounges.

Pop quiz: Why did 120 students pack into a dormitory lounge here at Michigan State University the other night?

"For a while there was a lot that I didn't remember," she said in a dormitory lounge.

Twenty years ago, TV sets tended to be found in dormitory lounges and fraternity and sorority houses, not so much in individual rooms.

"I was so depressed, and I looked at my face and my hands," he recalls, now sitting in a dormitory lounge for an interview.

Three years have passed since a predawn fire ravaged a dormitory lounge at Seton Hall University, killing three freshmen.

Their real political majority had come one Tuesday night, however, when they'd watched their country's president give a tense national address on the black-and-white television in the dormitory lounge.

Drinking in dormitory lounges or hallways, or elsewhere on campus is prohibited, but she said the rules are widely flouted.