Night shift: hanging out behind a poker face, freshman Chris EhlingerPhoto:Chris Hildreth

Now and again, most students do seem to yearn for better rest. But just why they stay awake as much as they do is a more complex issue. Many of them, of course, are hooked on communications technology. They're talking into cell phones at all hours of the day, and night. Wood sees the cell phone as "the replacement for the cigarette," a fixation that's hardly necessary but is powerfully seductive. Clack says he once counseled a freshman who talked with her mother by phone three hours every day; the freshman had additional cell-phone time with her boyfriend and her high-school friends. If those weren't always late-night exchanges, Clack suggests, they forced the student into late-night study habits.

The computer is at least as much a late-night distraction as the cell phone. Responding to my survey, students made statements like, "I am likely to be on my computer until right before I sleep." One reported alternating between "doing papers" and "playing Yahoo Pool" on the computer. Others had the habit of "reading every story on ESPN.com--and I mean every story," or spending "a good hour checking my horoscope." A typical comment was, "I talk on Instant Messenger, most likely between the hours of eleven o'clock at night and one o'clock in the morning."

Such electronic exuberance is confirmed in the snapshots of the campus over twenty-four hours provided by Robert Currier, director of data communications in Duke's Office of Information Technology. Currier's data track the aggregate electronic traffic on campus, including peer-to-peer file sharing, as well as electronic mail. The highest data flow coming in and going out is from about nine o'clock at night to just before midnight. But there's steady traffic until four o'clock in the morning. The only really quiescent period is between four o'clock and six o'clock in the morning.

From his office at the seat of power, behind "Danger, High Voltage" signs, Aurel Selezeanu M.B.A. '94, Duke's assistant director for electrical services, confirms that this is a powered-up environment. His energy-use graphs of East Campus show that the peak time for activities in the dorms is midnight. From there an energy-use decline sets in. What that probably means, he says, is that students are leaving the dorms for a few hours; his graphs show an upward spike around 2:30 in the morning.

On this Wednesday night, around ten o'clock, the Bryan Center is mirroring its daytime dynamics. Students tap away at e-mail stations, fixate on laptop computers, and cluster in small study groups. The campus McDonald's, next door to the smoothie bar, is closed so that a drain line can be replaced. "Thank you for supporting the progress at Duke University," reads a sign alongside the golden arches.

I make my own progress to the Wilson Recreation Center, which produces signs of more student activity--students in a slow-motion tai chi class and a fast-paced social-dance class, students confronting various exercise machines (including one treadmill walker talking on her cell phone) and swimming in each of the lap pool's eight lanes.

Nearby, on Clocktower Quad, there's another display of athleticism. A deliveryman for Cinelli's--which boasts among its offerings "famous pizza, calzones, and things"--is making a mad rush to a dorm. Clutching a famous pizza, or at least a pizza about to find an appreciative audience, he tells me that delivery on campus extends to one o'clock in the morning. "A lot of people are up studying late," he says. And a lot of people are fueling their studying with food. Jim Wulforst, director of dining services, says that a year's revenue for campus delivery comes to about $2.5 million. (Dining Services gets a percentage when students use their food points for deliveries.) Most of that is for business between the hours of eight o'clock at night and three o'clock in the morning.

The business of late-night studying is centered in Perkins Library. One yawning undergraduate is applying his yellow highlighting pen to an essay called "Trading Across Time and Space." Another student is poring over an almanac of Greece, 1905-07. The computer cluster is jammed. There, a student is intent on bonding. For an impending chemistry test, he's reviewing chemical-bonding energy; the test is scheduled for seven o'clock the next morning, the only common time, it seems, to gather all the students enrolled in every section of the course. Another is working on a paper about comfort food; she says she likes the free printer and the immediate access to library materials. Just upstairs, by the Gothic Reading Room, a student is chewing on his own comfort food, a peanut-butter cookie. He estimates that he'll be studying psychology until midnight.

It isn't quite that late when I reach the fringes of East Campus, which--as an all-freshman campus--presumably has its own psychology. About a half-dozen female students are painting the East Campus bridge. Amid a jumble of painted, pointed, and political messages ("France is Kerry country," "No Botox"), they're advertising a Saturday off-campus party that, they expect, will draw traditionally white, black, and Latino fraternities and sororities.

East Campus' Trinity Caf? is packed with freshmen clutching their cell phones, inhabiting their iPod worlds, and cradling their laptops. There are table tents all around--here, courtesy not of a drink product line but of the Duke Annual Fund. They display quotes from movies. One has a message that's just right for the night's mission: "This will be fun. We'll stay up late, swapping manly stories, and in the morning ... I'm making waffles." On an average weekday, less than half the freshman class will show up for a breakfast of waffles or whatever at the Marketplace, next door, and mostly between nine and eleven o'clock.

At a freshman residence hall, Southgate, I find sophomore resident adviser Matt Dearborn. It's just after eleven o'clock and Dearborn, just back from a campus performance of Rent and facing up to his reading assignment in Ulysses, introduces me around the dorm. Even as the faculty resident, Anthony Kelley, assistant professor of music, announces, "I have to turn in now," Southgate is energized.

In the lounge, several students are clustered as the Tonight Show is finishing its evening course. Jay Leno is asking people on the street to complete aphorisms, including "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and..." It's clear that any wisdom in these surroundings won't come from early bedtimes. A larger group of students is intensely engaged in Texas Hold 'Em, a popular brand of poker on campus. They're not very communicative with a visitor. Just beyond that group, enjoying a slice of pizza, Walker Fulks is juggling his coursework in math, Russian literature, history, and chemistry. A possible pre-med, he says he'll be studying until three o'clock in the morning. Fulks--asleep this morning at four o'clock, up at 7:30--juggles nighttime gatherings of the Campus Crusade, two-hour practices for club water polo, and house council meetings at 10:30 p.m. He says he spends a half-hour to an hour every night on his cell phone with family and friends.

Room 323 has a message scrawled on a display board, "The Room That Doesn't Sleep," which could serve as a dorm-wide motto. There, Devon Clarke is vigorously engaged in video-game action. Down the hall, about ten students mingle in what is nominally a triple room. Zach Robbins is absorbed in a game of online poker--"not for real money," he points out. "I can play for hours. It's the biggest time-waste thing I do." But even if he weren't so absorbed, the dynamics of the dorm would hardly permit an early-to-bed routine. "People are in the hall until three o'clock the morning," he says, and they're engaged in imaginative pursuits like "Wall Ball," which is "racquetball without the racquet," as he describes it. "I don't have the motivation to go to sleep."

At least one third-floor resident does have motivation to go to sleep. Jerry Chen is a member of the crew team, and, as he puts it, "Crew is pretty challenging as far as getting enough sleep." During the fall season, he has practice at five o'clock in the morning every Monday and Wednesday, afternoon practice on other weekdays, and practice at nine in the morning on Saturday. "I usually go to sleep after midnight, making those five o'clock practices pretty hard to wake up for," he says. "The few times I tried to go to sleep at ten or eleven, I didn't have much luck. People were talking or playing music in the hall. For the past semester, I have been constantly tired, taken a lot of naps, and fallen asleep in my classes a few times. If I didn't take naps, it would have probably been worse."

Maybe it's getting worse. Dearborn, the R.A., tells me some days later that his hall mates have become hooked on a new video game, which is keeping them awake past five o'clock in the morning. The game is called Halo 2; it pits space marines against aliens in a graphically dazzling display. Reportedly it had sales of $125 million in its first twenty-four hours on the market--the biggest single-day debut in entertainment history, eclipsing even Hollywood blockbusters.