The Five-Year Party (16 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
Even the 20 percent of college students who do not drink at all, either for religious, moral, or health reasons, felt the impact of the problem. At colleges with high binge drinking rates (that is, the party schools), 71 percent of students said they had their sleep interrupted by drunken students; 57 percent said they had to take care of an intoxicated student; 36 percent said they had been insulted or humiliated by a drunken student; 23 percent had experienced an unwanted sexual encounter with a drunken student; 23 percent had had a serious argument with a drunken student; 16 percent had had personal property damaged by a drunken student; 11 percent had been pushed, hit, or assaulted; and 1 percent had been the victim of sexual advance, assault, or date rape.
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This silent minority of nondrinking students has become increasingly disgusted with the immature behavior of the boisterous majority and the peer pressure it puts on nonbingers. Meredith Austin Granwehr, then a junior at University of Connecticut, one of New England’s most notorious party schools, wrote about her frustrations in an op-ed piece published in the
Hartford Courant.
Walking through the college social scene without the ubiquitous red plastic cup, she said, makes her the target of other students encouraging her to drink up.
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Hartford Courant.
Walking through the college social scene without the ubiquitous red plastic cup, she said, makes her the target of other students encouraging her to drink up.
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“My generation seems to have the frightening conception that extreme binge drinking, to the point of blacking out, is the key ingredient for a good time,” she wrote. “Sadly, this trend is spiraling out of control, carrying grave consequences with it.”
During her first weekend back at school in September 2007, she said, she saw three students being taken to the emergency room on stretchers because of their excessive drinking. Among the newest fads, she said, was mixing alcohol with caffeine-based energy drinks like Red Bull to mask the effects of intoxication and make students think they are more sober than they really are. This leads students to drink even more excessively and to think they can drive a car while impaired.
“My generation loves to overindulge,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, our obsession with excessive consumption of alcohol carries severe consequences. Even if one does not die from binge drinking, it is sad to think that someone may not remember the events of the previous might, or worse, remember something she wishes she could forget.”
Parents, she said, have no idea what their children are doing at college. They think that a little underage drinking is just “being a typical college kid,” but are clueless about the amounts and the ways students are drinking and how dangerous it is. She thought parents and administrators needed to be more involved in efforts to curb the binge drinking epidemic on campus. Without that assistance, she said, her peers were likely to become members of a “wasted generation.”
Nondrinking students like Meredith are under enormous pressure from their drinking peers to neglect their studies and join the party. The mother of a college student wrote to Dear Abby in 2008, relating how her freshman daughter, Christie, was having trouble studying when her roommate and suitemates were drinking constantly and not going to classes: “This makes my daughter not only unhappy but isolated.” Abby suggested that her daughter try transferring to a different dormitory with more serious students and try to find a study group for serious students.
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Parents of students headed for college are becoming more alarmed by the amount of abusive drinking that takes place, according to a 2008 poll. More than half of parents said they are less likely to send their children to a known party school and 70 percent said they wanted colleges to inform them if their child violates alcohol policies. However, as we will see in the next chapter, most colleges refuse to notify parents of any kind of disciplinary violation, citing confidentiality rules. Three-quarters of parents said they supported stricter enforcement of existing alcohol rules, but only a tiny minority of students felt the same way.
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Henry Wechsler, the nation’s recognized expert on college student alcohol abuse, advised parents to “put pressure on schools” to explain what they are doing to solve the problem. On campus tours, he said, parents should ask to examine dormitories to look for signs of alcohol abuse such as excessive noise and vomit in bathrooms.
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The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which spoke with college presidents around the country about binge drinking, concluded that it is the most serious problem on college campuses today, not just on its own, but because it contributes to many other problems. According to C. D. Mote, president of the University of Maryland, “Virtually every sexual assault is associated with alcohol abuse. Almost every assault of any kind is related to drinking.”
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But drinking alone isn’t responsible for such behavior. A culture of prejudice and disrespect, allowed by a lack of discipline by administrators, does the rest.
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But drinking alone isn’t responsible for such behavior. A culture of prejudice and disrespect, allowed by a lack of discipline by administrators, does the rest.
Barrett Seaman, the author of
Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You
, spent a year talking with students at elite colleges around the country and was surprised to find very few racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks. “What I found instead was a vast majority of students well schooled in the need to show ethnic and gender sensitivity and who seemed anxious to avoid any kind of confrontation,” he said.
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Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You
, spent a year talking with students at elite colleges around the country and was surprised to find very few racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks. “What I found instead was a vast majority of students well schooled in the need to show ethnic and gender sensitivity and who seemed anxious to avoid any kind of confrontation,” he said.
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At party schools, however, racism, sexism, and homophobia are alive and well. Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes, said college campuses are the third leading location for hate crimes, after homes and highways.
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Young people are viewed as more racially tolerant because schools have taught them about multi-culturalism and diversity since they were children, said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an African American studies expert from Princeton. “On the other hand, young people lack impulse control, drink heavily and stand around outside.”
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In October 2005, Steve Wessler, the executive director of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence, conducted a series of focus groups at Keene State College in New Hampshire, a college that has a black president but whose student body is 98 percent white. Students had scrawled the word
nigger
across the front of a poster advertising Black History Month events and there had been complaints about harassment of Muslin students, gay students, handicapped students, and women. Incidents of racial, ethnic, and gender harassment including graffiti, verbal slurs, and threats were reported. A female teacher reported that she had been sexually harassed by a male student. The college hired Wessler to find out what was going on.
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nigger
across the front of a poster advertising Black History Month events and there had been complaints about harassment of Muslin students, gay students, handicapped students, and women. Incidents of racial, ethnic, and gender harassment including graffiti, verbal slurs, and threats were reported. A female teacher reported that she had been sexually harassed by a male student. The college hired Wessler to find out what was going on.
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Wessler’s report was a wake-up call for the campus. Bias and prejudice are deep-seated, he said. On a daily basis both male and female students hear male students use sexually degrading words about women. A number of Jewish students said they were uncomfortable being openly Jewish on campus.
Women were commonly referred to as
hos
,
bitches
, and
cunts
in regular conversations. Many female professors told Wessler that they were often afraid of attacks in their classrooms from male students who treated them with a lack of respect and courtesy. In their anonymous evaluations of faculty at the end of the semester, students used sexually suggestive terms about teachers’ bodies.
hos
,
bitches
, and
cunts
in regular conversations. Many female professors told Wessler that they were often afraid of attacks in their classrooms from male students who treated them with a lack of respect and courtesy. In their anonymous evaluations of faculty at the end of the semester, students used sexually suggestive terms about teachers’ bodies.
Black students were called
niggers
. Muslim students were called
terrorists
and gay students were called
dykes
,
queers
, and
fags
. The responses revealed widespread and casual use of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic jokes and language, hierarchical attitudes of faculty towards staff and students towards faculty, and unwanted touching of women’s breasts and buttocks, leading to feelings of isolation, self-hatred, and fear for the targets.
niggers
. Muslim students were called
terrorists
and gay students were called
dykes
,
queers
, and
fags
. The responses revealed widespread and casual use of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic jokes and language, hierarchical attitudes of faculty towards staff and students towards faculty, and unwanted touching of women’s breasts and buttocks, leading to feelings of isolation, self-hatred, and fear for the targets.
The report told of students calling a convenience store clerk the
Iraqi Paki
and Jews
cheap
. It listed racial slurs and described a student who writes poems about his hatred of black people, which usually end with them dying. He reads these poems aloud at parties. One woman recalled several men following her around campus and yelling “Go back to India, bitch!” One of my students wrote a news article in which he ridiculed students who were blind or who used wheelchairs on campus. A female student told Wessler she was sexually assaulted and nearly raped twice in the same night. After listing page after page of this kind of behavior, Wessler concluded his report by saying that Keene State was not all that different from other colleges he had studied. In other words, the things he found were common on most college campuses.
Iraqi Paki
and Jews
cheap
. It listed racial slurs and described a student who writes poems about his hatred of black people, which usually end with them dying. He reads these poems aloud at parties. One woman recalled several men following her around campus and yelling “Go back to India, bitch!” One of my students wrote a news article in which he ridiculed students who were blind or who used wheelchairs on campus. A female student told Wessler she was sexually assaulted and nearly raped twice in the same night. After listing page after page of this kind of behavior, Wessler concluded his report by saying that Keene State was not all that different from other colleges he had studied. In other words, the things he found were common on most college campuses.
Although party schools pay a lot of lip service to politically correct topics like multi-culturalism and diversity, they rarely make policy decisions that would enforce those ideas. At my college, a requirement that all liberal arts students learn a foreign language was scrapped because students said they thought it was too much work. Party schools’ commitments to diversity turned out to be not as important as the bottom line. Over and over again, party schools advocate for a politically correct concept like diversity but then refuse to take action against students who participate in the campus culture of racism, sexism, and homophobia. They allow students to get away with illegal and immoral misbehavior in the name of retention. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the way party schools deal with rape.
Police declined to take any action in response to a gang rape complaint filed in 2006 by Megan Wright, a student at Dominican College in New York, against three of her fellow students. Rapes take place all the time on college campuses, but what makes Wright’s case exceptional is that there was a video camera in the hallway outside the dorm room where the alleged crime took place. The camera showed Megan and the three men, all of them obviously intoxicated, returning from an off-campus party and entering the room.
A few moments later, one of the three men stood in front of the camera with a sign, supposedly signed by Wright, reading “I want to have sex.” After the incident, Wright went to the hospital, where an examination found physical evidence that she had been raped. But the school refused to prosecute the case because it said it did not have enough evidence against the three men named in her complaint. The sign, the police said, was evidence that Wright had given consent to have sex, even though Wright said she did not write on the sign.
Denied a trial, Wright was forced to attend classes and eat in the dining hall with the men she said had raped her. Her mother said Wright became increasingly depressed, which led her to take her own life seven months after the incident. Wright’s mother hired celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred and filed a lawsuit against the college for failure to prosecute the case, which has become a cause célèbre among college rape activists and was even featured on a segment of the
Dr. Phil
show called “Campus Crisis.”
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Dr. Phil
show called “Campus Crisis.”
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Because of the nature of the crime, it’s incredibly difficult to calculate the number of date rapes that occur on college campuses each year. Date rape is a crime in which the victim may not even be aware that she has been attacked and victims are often reluctant to talk about what happened, even anonymously. A
New York Times
report estimated that the number of women raped or sexually assaulted at colleges ranged from one in seven to one in twenty-five.
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Another study found that one in twelve college men admitted to forcing a woman to have sexual intercourse against her will.
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New York Times
report estimated that the number of women raped or sexually assaulted at colleges ranged from one in seven to one in twenty-five.
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Another study found that one in twelve college men admitted to forcing a woman to have sexual intercourse against her will.
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In December 2009, the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative journalism group based in Washington, DC, produced a lengthy report called “Sexual Assault on Campus” that found that one in five campus women are victims of rape or attempted rape by the time they graduate. The report said colleges try to discourage victims from filing complaints and deliberately falsify their crime reports to make campuses appear much safer than they really are.
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The “stop snitchin’” gangsta culture that dominates campus life frowns on students who file crime complaints with police. Serial date rapists can therefore usually count on their victims being “cool” and suffering in silence. Typically, a college rape victim is conflicted about making a report because she feels unsure whether she “sent the wrong message” or was not clear about her intentions before the rape. Women often feel that they might have led the man on, especially if both of them were intoxicated. A typical date rape, students told me, came about when two students, one male and the other female, were walking home from a party or a bar. The man assumes that this is an agreement to have sex although the woman does not or perhaps changes her mind as she becomes more sober. There is then a confrontation and unwanted sex occurs.
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