- Share This Post
- submit
- 6
-
Sparkle (0)
Trash strewn throughout neighborhoods, young men uprooting stop signs, people peeing in front yards, drunken brawls, people breaking into strangers' homes and falling asleep there, men punching pizza delivery drivers, and women vandalizing police cars. No, it's not Skid Row, a gang-infested community, or a post-apocalyptic landscape. Rather, it's 1 a.m. in a relatively upscale professorial neighborhood of State College, Pennsylvania. The National Public Radio show This American Life recently profiled the city and Pennsylvania State University, which was recently ranked the #1 "party school" by the Princeton Review.
Here's a snippet from early in the episode:
There are three girls in mini skirts, under a streetlight, fully visible. . . One girl hikes up her skirt. "They're peeing in my yard. . . That's my car, OK, and three feet back is a girl's white ass, peeing. . . You know that might be why the plants grow really really well in that spot, I'm just realizing." Sarah's caught other groups of girls peeing in that same spot. Once she heard a girl say, "This is a good place. I go here all the time."
Host Ira Glass reports researchers have found that Penn State and State College exhibit several key factors that tend to coalesce into an epidemic of irresponsible undergraduate drinking. Among these are a large undergraduate population, a big fraternity system, a successful football team, and relative geographic isolation. He cites a sobering statistic: 1700 U.S. college students die each year from alcohol-related injuries.
At the risk of sounding like a total killjoy, what I heard in the Penn State episode of This American Life is profoundly disturbing and is, I believe, a primary symptom of a larger problem inflected in university life--and particularly life at major public universities--in much of the U.S.: Universities are now serving as a conduit for the extension of adolescence rather than as a place for students to grow intellectually and emotionally.
I'm not buying the argument made by some of the people Glass interviews that young adults need this time to be wild so that they can (a) enjoy their lives while they're still young because once they're in the working world, they won't have as many opportunities to get plastered and (b) getting drunk and making horrible mistakes is an important learning experience that is key to growing up.
The first college I attended used to have very strict rules about men and women being in one another's dorm rooms--ones that I saw mirrored at conservative Christian colleges, even though it is a public college. As an 18-year-old who was 3,000 miles from home and experiencing horrible homesickness, the last thing on my mind was how easily I might have sex in my dorm room. But by the time I had transferred to my third college, I had matured significantly and understood that college was a time and place where I would enjoy a good deal of independence. I appreciated, therefore, that Grinnell had a policy of not acting in loco parentis; the college trusted us to make reasonable choices as students, as residents of the town, and as young citizens of the world. In fact, the college trusted its students so much that it allowed the student government to use funds provided by the college to serve free beer at sponsored parties on campus.
But Grinnell students apparently--OK, obviously--are quite different from those at Penn State or at other universities I've attended or visited. As anecdotes and statistics about rape, drunken sex, public urination, more serious crime, injuries, and alcoholism on college campuses and in college towns attest, many public university students aren't ready to assume the responsibility that comes with consuming alcohol. Both out of consideration for the neighbors and for the sake of students' health, universities need to be held more accountable for their students' behavior and more responsible for rigorous programs that help students make good decisions about drinking.
Historiann recently wrote that widespread undergraduate drinking is a symptom of an "impoverished undergraduate vision of adulthood":
I understand the feeling that college is a special time in life–it most certainly is. What’s more disturbing is the impoverished vision of adulthood this belief implies. Instead of seeing graduation from college as an exciting beginning of their lives as free adults who can explore the world, establish themselves in their chosen fields, and/or engage in creative projects, it’s just the first blow of the work whistle they’ll be waking up to for the rest of their lives. For example: it’s striking to me how
