HAYWARD -- Got beer?

Not if you attend Cal State Hayward.

The 13,000-student campus is one of six schools in the 23-institution California State University system where beer taps don't flow for students, faculty members and staff.

Some feel beer and college is about as American as baseball and peanuts. Not at Cal State Hayward. And it's not so much that the university is unwilling to make beer and wine available for sale at the 342-acre campus.

It's a matter of simple economics: There's not a beer distributor in the region willing to take a gamble on the campus, perched atop Carlos Bee Boulevard overlooking south San Francisco Bay.

"We can't find a vendor," mused Kim Huggett, director of public affairs, when queried Monday on the history of beer sales at Cal State Hayward. "While we would entertain the idea of serving drinks as they do on other campuses, we have not found a vendor interested in taking on that activity. The market is just not there."

Beer once flowed freely at Cal State Hayward during a brief period in the mid-80s, when the alumni association operated a small pub, said Hal Gin, executive director of student development services and judicial affairs. Gin should know, because he was responsible for retrieving sales permits from the regional Alcohol Beverage and Control office.

"We did that on a weekly basis for a while," Gin recalled. "That is how we started selling beer on campus. We didn't do that for long, because the novelty of it didn't last. Not having evening hours didn't work out at all. It wasn't that popular."

Theories on the pub's failure abound. University officials believe it was driven out of business by the fact that Cal State Hayward is a campus of commuters, with only 400 students living on campus. A great majority of students are older, working-class people with families.

Thus the school is not the center of students' social lives. In contrast, students at many of the other CSU campuses are younger, live on campus in greater numbers and are more apt to hang around campus to share a cold one with friends.

"These are adults who don't have much time to linger for a drink after class," Huggett said. "They come to class, do their work and they go back home."

Other schools in the CSU system where beer is not sold on campus are Channel Islands, Maritime Academy, San Luis Obispo, San Marcos and even Chico, which some say has long had a reputation as one of the great party schools, not only in the system but in the country.

The irony of an alcohol-free Chico campus was not lost on Huggett.

"That's been an issue for them going back 20 years," Huggett added. "They have a 'reputational' situation going on there. That's why they feel they have to go in the opposite direction, because of their reputation as a party school."

Colleen Bentley-Adler, director of public affairs for the CSU system, pointed out that the Chico campus is centrally located, with beer readily available near the campus.

"You can walk off campus and there are several clubs right there," Bentley-Adler said.

There's an upshot to not selling beer on the Hayward campus -- the university doesn't have the alcohol-related problems confronting other schools. Still, Cal State Hayward is among a number of CSU schools that receive an annual $50,000 grant to fund programs that discourage alcohol abuse and binge drinking, which Chancellor Charles Reed in 2002 characterized as "the No. 1 problem on university campuses."

Bentley-Adler said it's up to each individual school to decide whether to permit the sale of alcohol on campus. She also noted that the problems Reed referred to in 2002 are not as serious at campuses such as Cal State, because "most of the students are of perfectly legal drinking age."

We don't have that population of 18- to 22-year-olds on campus," she continued. "You have to remember, the average age of CSU campus undergraduates is 24."

Is there a pub in Cal State Hayward's future? The school is poised to begin expansion of the student union this fall.

Elizabeth Sandbothe, president of Associated Students Inc., offers this advice to those waiting for a campus pub to open: Don't hold your hoops waiting for it to happen. "We're a commuter campus, and people don't want to drink and drive," Sandbothe said. "And the failure of the first one hasn't led people to jump at the idea. That doesn't mean there isn't a possibility. There are just no concrete plans to put in a new pub."