Is this the end of freshers week? Nottingham Trent University is attempting to dissuade students from participating in the time-honoured activities of drinking to excess and pinching street signs by rebranding the freshers' experience as “welcome week”.

Students, it says, should be visiting the theatre, hooking ducks at the fair, watching films, playing sport and a variety of other genteel pastimes more palatable to middle-aged duffers whose idea of casual clothing is a fleece and brown semi-brogues.

This is a noble notion, but if there is one thing that has no place at the beginning of university life it is nobility. This is the most permissive moment of your life - a time when, incredibly, you are granted all the freedoms of being a responsible citizen while not being bearing responsibility for so much as buying your own bogroll.

Behaviour that would at any other time of life be inexcusably gauche is now not only acceptable, but laudable. You could, in later years, simulate a bullfight in a supermarket car park by acting as a matador while friends charge at you with trolleys, but you would rightly be dismissed as an oik.

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You could wait until middle age to decorate your bedroom with tie-dye sheets and African tribal ornaments, but you would be a tragic hippy throwback. There are clothes, hairstyles, piercings, opinions, dietary habits, standards of cleanliness, sleeping patterns, sexual positions, capers and crimes that could not be sanctioned at any other time without causing embarrassment so acute that your toes would curl at the memory like bathroom wallpaper in a Blackpool bed and breakfast.

None of this is true about Nottingham Trent's list of approved activities. As such they can be postponed until at least the second week or, in the case of sport, indefinitely.

Not all universities are following this ascetic line (although at least a dozen have installed smoothie stalls in their unions to try to divert students away from the bar) and the traditional freshers' week remains.

This will free up more time for less structured bonding activity, quite probably involving drinking. Alcohol is not a necessary part of freshers' week by any means, but does provide a way of breaking down social barriers that would otherwise require more effort. Teetotallers have nothing to fear

They will merely have to be more tolerant of others' self-indulgence and more creative in finding excuses for their own. (The only way of inducing camaraderie with less exertion for the would-be comrades is to place them in a live-fire hostage exercise, but if Nottingham Trent is offering this as part of its 350 activities it does not mention it on its website.)

Relationships at university, and especially during freshers' week, are fluid in a way that they never are again. The sheer variety of people means that it is easy to make friends, and, more importantly, just as easy to replace them when you find out they are weird, bigoted, boring or tight.

It is possible to argue that there would be no need to replace them if you had exercised more clear-headed judgment in the first place, but this is misguided. Making friends is not a science but an art perfected by trial and error. If someone is prepared to hold back your hair in the aftermath of four pints of colourfully named scrumpy then he is a good friend. If he suggests a game involving drinking a pint of Guinness through the gusset of a pair of pants, he may not be (unless you are studying medicine, in which case this is normal).

It is also the time when certain truths begin to emerge that even philosophy students, who are conditioned to say things like “Ah, but what is truth?”, will grudgingly acknowledge. They are:

1. All freebies, even novelty piggy banks and holographic mouse mats, are a worthless marketing gimmick.

2. The music album you thought defined your individuality will be owned by everyone else and played so often that it will begin to resemble an interrogation tactic familiar to inmates at Guantanamo Bay.

3. Someone will have a guitar, which will be used only to play the first 16 bars of Voodoo Chile by Jimi Hendrix.

4. Someone else will have bongos. He will have a friend called Marcus who knows where to get drugs.

5. The library will have three copies of a book considered indispensible reading for 1,000 students. It will have been written by your lecturer, who stands to make a small fortune in royalties from students forced to buy it.

6. People wearing black combat trousers with restrictive straps between the legs study physics.

7. Girls with Alice bands and candy-striped blouses with puffed-sleeves study history of art.

8. Someone, probably after a visit from Marcus, will have a psychotic episode and will never be seen again.

9. You will have at least one conversation about The Flumps, The Real Ghostbusters, the decline of Scooby Doo following the introduction of his nephew, Scrappy.

10. Freshers' week officially ends the moment that you receive your first written assignment, which you will ignore until the day before deadline, provoking a “work crisis” and a spike in the students' union shop's sale of caffeine tablets.

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