It was an age of smoking Marlboros and getting loaded before watching Star Trek: The Next Generation every night at 11:00 with friends. Unfortunately for the cumulative college GPA, reading for personal pleasure and intellectual enlightenment was the order of the day every day. Books like Generation X, The Basketball Diaries, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Siddhartha were consumed with an appetite both voracious and insatiable.
A different aesthetic played big in those days. Earning the degree meant tons but not selling out to the man after getting that piece of paper meant more. Doing important work without going all corporate was what it was all about for anyone who was tuned in to the countercultural zeitgeist du jour of the times.
Of course, abject idealism doesn’t pay the bills in the real world.
At least they didn’t in my case. Not without a haircut.
The Adventures of ALS Boy 
I still have (and cherish) the copy you gave me of the Basketball Diaries, with a personal inscription from the ALS Boy himself!