Whenever I tell people stories from my college days, I try not to exaggerate. I didn’t exactly live through “Animal House” or anything, but things did get a little crazy from time to time. That’s what happens when you’re stuck in northwestern Pennsylvania in the late 1980s.

I had an immediate interest when I saw “Don’t Follow Me I’m Lost” by Richard Rushfield because it covered the same time period I attended college and chronicled the antics of his group at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

I had never heard of Hampshire, but the picture of a keg on the cover intrigued me. I had no idea what I was in for once I started turning the pages. I thought I came back from Allegheny College with some stories, but Rushfield had me beat hands down.

Hampshire occupies a unique place in American education. In 1986, when Rushfield arrived, the school had no standard curriculum and no grading system. Students work toward a final project, called a Division III. Division I and II prepare students for this by exposing them to a variety of courses, then focusing students on an area where they want to do their culminating project.

Or, in the case of Rushfield and his friends, this all allows them to pretty much ignore academics and live a life of freedom, experimentation and generally pushing people’s buttons all under the guise of finding themselves. This, of course, doesn’t go over well, but does a great job of providing stories for the book.

Rushfield goes through a series of roommates after arriving on campus and eventually ends up with a mysterious set of characters known as the Supreme Dicks, which was also the name of an experimental rock band formed by some of the group’s members. The veracity of the impact the Dicks had on campus has been debated since the book came out, but “Don’t Follow Me” is definitely worth a read, especially if you went to college in this era.

I saw how things such as forcing people to prove they were 21 at college parties, protests for individual rights and cliquishness definitely changed from year to year in that time period, but I never knew they could have an impact like they did at Hampshire, according to Rushfield.

I can’t say for certain if everything happened as he wrote it, obviously, because I wasn’t there. But I do know that people had an incredible tendency to overreact and inject a little more selfishness into the social equation each year. Rushfield does a great job capturing this spirit and giving me solace that I wasn’t the only one wondering what the hell was going on around me.