Being part of the most *active* university scuba club in Texas, I can say quite easily that often VERY long periods of club inactivity can and do happen. It's really up to the current selection of club officers as to how active they are, and university club officers tend to change every year or two. The high turnover rate generates a lot of apathy.
There really aren't that many university scuba clubs in the U.S., or at least ones that are relatively active and have large memberships. I think there's only about half a dozen in Texas, out of which only ours is really all that active, and we're one of the states with a high scuba diving interest.
I've actually tried convincing university student divers in Texas, California, and Florida to use ScubaBoard as an online diving resource and potential place to maintain a club website. The best I've achieved is that a few folks browse the boards here every once in a while, and that's it. There just wasn't very much interest. Everybody likes the idea, but nobody actually implements it. You know how college students are!
Even at the height of our own university club's "power", our in-house forum generated maybe a couple of postings a week, mostly from the same six or seven people. And we had over fifty members on our rosters. Nowadays, our enrollments about the same, but our forum gets a couple postings per month.
The best way I've found for a university student to see whether or no their school has a scuba program is the classical one; check the school's listing for extramural sports and clubs. Official university clubs are required to be on the books; these can be looked up online or via a visit to the local equivalent of the Student Center. Those records tend to be far more current than those found off of the club's indigenous website(s). Current officers are usually required to be listed (and with contact info), for one thing. Smaller universities aren't so particular about this, but then again, smaller schools don't tend to have large scuba diving clubs either.
Whether or no a club is actually active is far dicier. Activity can be high one year and drop off to nothing the next. Summers are normally "dead" for university clubs. Club websites may have "current" entries on them that are YEARS out of date.
