The Five-Year Party (14 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
The vast majority of my students, however, were employed after graduation as clerks and waiters. Whenever I encountered them in these jobs where they were making absolutely no use of the skills I taught them, I would ask them what had happened. Most of them were vague and unwilling to discuss how they were paying off their student loans. The ones who did open up said they were still waiting for their big break, for the fickle finger of success to bestow its wealth upon them.
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Party School Perils
J
ust before the students returned for the fall 2008 semester at Keene State College in New Hampshire, the city newspaper ran an article about preparations to welcome them back. The article wasn’t about back-to-school sales or new programs or student fashions. Instead, the headline was this:
ust before the students returned for the fall 2008 semester at Keene State College in New Hampshire, the city newspaper ran an article about preparations to welcome them back. The article wasn’t about back-to-school sales or new programs or student fashions. Instead, the headline was this:
Police prepare for college
Arrests are expected to rise
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The city was set to welcome the students the way a medieval village prepared for a raid by the Vikings. Head for the hills! Lock up your daughters! The students are coming! The police chief outlined for the newspaper his strategic plan to marshal his forces and prepare to meet the onslaught. Police officers were being put on overtime. Some were preparing to go undercover in student garb to act as the point men. Officers were assigned bicycles so they could catch students who ran away when approached.
No one even suggested that any of this was an overreaction. The chief cited figures that arrests for crimes like public intoxication, assault, rape, noise, and public urination went up significantly when the students arrived. It wasn’t just the thousands of additional residents, he said, but a different
kind
of resident, much more likely to disturb the peace. During the 2006-2007 school year, he noted, there were 1,430 arrests in the quiet New England city, 359 of which, or about 25 percent, involved someone connected with the college.
kind
of resident, much more likely to disturb the peace. During the 2006-2007 school year, he noted, there were 1,430 arrests in the quiet New England city, 359 of which, or about 25 percent, involved someone connected with the college.
Just four days after the article was published, the chief’s predictions about drunken mayhem proved correct. Philip Bantz, a reporter for the
Keene Sentinel
, spent the night with undercover police officers as they patrolled the midnight party scene just outside the campus walls.
Keene Sentinel
, spent the night with undercover police officers as they patrolled the midnight party scene just outside the campus walls.
Long after the adult citizens had turned in for the night, a strange kind of vampire culture appeared on the streets. The officers told Bantz it was common to find groups of young men standing together and urinating on a lawn while young women in skimpy outfits “beat the heck out of each other in the middle of the street.” The problems begin when drunken students pour out of house parties with beer and hard liquor in their ubiquitous red plastic cups. “All of a sudden it just totally explodes,” a policeman told Bantz. “It’s like an algae bloom.” When the officers confront students, the most common thing for them to do is to run away, especially the majority of them who are younger than twenty-one.
When the officers caught a twenty-year-old student with a cup of beer, he told police that his parents would pull him out of school when they heard about his arrest. The officers were not sympathetic and the student was charged with unlawful possession of alcohol, put in handcuffs, and taken to the police station. Police used to issue appearance tickets in these kinds of situations, but now they go through a formal arrest. “If we let them go with a slap on the wrist, they’d turn around and do it again,” the policeman said. “People don’t want to see you peeing. No one wants to wake up and find beer cans all over their lawn. And when you have that many drunk people together you’re going to have fights, thefts, sexual assaults, you name it.”
Police arrested fifteen students that night for crimes that included public intoxication, resisting arrest, and open container violations. A local high school boy, age sixteen, was arrested after he had passed out from drinking on the back porch of a college student’s house. His parents were called at 4:30 A.M. and were asked to pick him up at the police station. Another student kicked out the window of a city business, lacerating a tendon in his ankle. Police found him unconscious at 2:40 A.M. lying on the ground with a shirt wrapped around his bleeding ankle. Police told Bantz that, despite those arrests, it was considered a slow night.
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During other weekends, local public safety officials told me they had had to deal with a student who had passed out from drinking on a winter night and was found frozen to the asphalt of a parking lot. On some weekends, the student parties at local houses spill out into the street, where cars and couches are set on fire and students throw rocks and bottles at police. In the fall of 2009, an eighteen-year-old student called police on her cell phone to say she was hanging from the rafters of an abandoned building after falling through the roof. After she was rescued, she told police she had gone up on the roof to watch the sunrise—at 8:20 A.M. She was arrested after police found a marijuana pipe in her pocket.
During my dozen years as a college newspaper adviser, my students wrote about attempted suicides, drug overdoses, students firing BB guns at students from their dormitory windows, students knifed at fraternity parties, and students raped in their dormitory rooms. On Sunday morning, the campus was usually littered with trash and abandoned red cups, beer cans, and liquor bottles.
Although most parents aren’t aware of it, college campuses and the communities around them are among the most dangerous places in America, rivaling inner cities in the number of crimes committed per acre. There is no mystery about why this happens. Take thousands or even tens of thousands of adolescents with limitless free time, fill them to the brim with alcohol and other drugs, take away all parental and teacher supervision, and what you get is an instant crime wave. Assaults, arsons, rapes, vandalism, hate crimes, sexual harassment, auto break-ins, burglaries, and thefts take place every week in the area around party school campuses. College administrators and local police are well aware of this problem, but parents, misled by the reassuring but totally incorrect number of crimes listed on the college’s official website, have no idea of the risks to which their children are being exposed.
When they are in high school, students are constantly and carefully supervised by parents and teachers. Students who misbehave are grounded, sent to detention, or called into a meeting with their parents to discuss their patterns of behavior. But once they are safely behind the college gates, students enter a supervision vacuum. The policy at most colleges is that students are eighteen and therefore legally adults, capable of making their own decisions. But at party schools, the vast majority of students are adults in name only. Psychologically and developmentally, most of these students are still immature adolescents desperately in need of someone in authority to set limits on their behavior. With no one watching over them, most college students simply run wild and repeatedly damage themselves and each other. Students with medical problems suddenly stop taking their medications. They stay up all night and sleep all day, missing their classes. When they are bored, they pull the fire alarm to drum up some excitement. They brutally attack each other physically and sexually and have to be rushed to the hospital following overdoses of alcohol and drugs. None of this is the kind of behavior you would expect from mature adults. College campuses are among the few places in America where this kind of behavior is openly tolerated.
Most college students remain dangerously immature and unable to make the most basic choices about whether to attend classes, do their homework, study for tests, use drugs, engage in unsafe sex, or drink themselves into unconsciousness. Parents are seriously uninformed about this. They mistakenly think that party school administrators will call them as soon as there is any sign of a problem, just as high school administrators did. Parents are deliberately kept in the dark about their children’s misbehavior until the problem becomes a catastrophe. The hands-off policy on student behavior allows party school administrators to avoid any blame when things go wrong. Most colleges and universities have a policy of not even informing parents if students are arrested, attacked, attempt suicide, or receive treatment for alcohol or drug abuse.
Administrators claim this policy is to protect the students’ privacy, but the real reason is that allowing students to have the time of their lives at college is part of the prime mission of party schools: retention, retention, retention of happy, tuition-paying customers. Set too many restrictive rules and the customers will take their business elsewhere. Administrators know that students consider calling parents a form of “snitchin’,” which they find very uncool.
The centerpiece of party school life is drinking. It’s difficult to overestimate how important drinking is in the life of a party school student. It’s not just what they do when they are sitting down with friends at a party or watching television or playing music or video games. It is an activity unto itself, an essential part of everyday life and the dating ritual, the basic lubricant that fuels interactions with other people, and an escape route from boredom, stress, conflict, or emotional distress. Beer and hard liquor are available everywhere twenty-four hours a day on campus and off campus, even though it is illegal even to possess it for the 85 percent of college students who are under the age of twenty-one.
“With so few hours filled with learning, boredom sets in and students have to find something to pass the time. Instead of learning, they drink,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke professor and author of books on grade inflation.
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The five-year party starts even before the first members of the freshman class set foot on campus at the end of the summer. During their senior year at high school, local students attend the nightly parties in the student ghettos and fraternity houses around the campuses. The high school students usually have to go home long before the party ends because their parents are waiting up for them, but they begin to count the days until they too can fully participate in the college party scene.
In 2008, my students showed me Facebook pages with the name of my college and “Class of 2009” next to it. This was where high school seniors planned their futures as party school binge drinkers. A main point of discussion on the page was whether dress-up parties were appropriate during any weekend or only at Halloween. They were already planning their first parties for the night of move-in day, over a year ahead of time. Nowhere on these pages was there any mention of academics or classes or majors or professors. It was all about the party.
Freshman orientation programs have also become initiations into the party school lifestyle. At the University of New Hampshire, a student-run camp set up to welcome new students to campus was put on probation in 2004 after upperclassmen gave beer to the underage incoming freshmen. The camp continued to operate until 2008, when the college shut it down permanently after reports of lewd skits, including public nudity. One student deliberately urinated on herself and other female students lifted up their shirts to display their breasts for first-year students.
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This kind of freshmen orientation only makes sense once you understand that it’s all part of the way party schools market themselves to high school students. Although they can’t advertise it directly, they get the message out to high school students that college is where you go to drink yourself into oblivion for five years. Classes don’t matter. No one expects you to learn anything. Friends will help you get by with a minimum amount of work and help you choose the classes and professors who won’t require any work. You can borrow as much money as you need to pay your bills. The important thing is to have a good time and don’t let anything get in the way of the five-year party.
Drinking has become a part of the mating ritual for college students looking to “hook up” or “shack” with another student. Students, both male and female, said drinking “loosened them up” and made them more social and less intimidated during the sometimes awkward process of sorting out who is going home with whom after a night at a bar or a party. Because buying enough drinks at a bar to become intoxicated can be expensive, many students said they indulged in “pre-party,” which involves drinking at home to the point of intoxication and then going out to the local bar to meet people. This easing of the barriers, however, comes dangerously close to the definition of date rape.
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When I talk with parents of college students about binge drinking, their immediate reaction is to dismiss it. They think that the news media is exaggerating the problem. “What’s so bad if the kids want to have a beer while they’re watching football on TV or have a drink with their friends? What’s wrong with having a drink? Why don’t they just lighten up and let the kids have a good time?” is a typical response.
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When I talk with parents of college students about binge drinking, their immediate reaction is to dismiss it. They think that the news media is exaggerating the problem. “What’s so bad if the kids want to have a beer while they’re watching football on TV or have a drink with their friends? What’s wrong with having a drink? Why don’t they just lighten up and let the kids have a good time?” is a typical response.
But binge drinking has nothing to do with sipping a beer in a dorm room. Binge drinking is when a student kneels down on the floor and places a rubber hose in his mouth; the hose is attached at the other end to a funnel, which is filled by another student from a beer keg or a vodka bottle. This apparatus allows the alcohol to bypass the swallowing reflex and pass directly into the stomach to be absorbed by the bloodstream. It’s not just an attempt to get as drunk as possible in the shortest amount of time; it’s a dangerous form of physical abuse that allows students to pass through the intoxicated stage directly into unconsciousness.
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