Caitlin Flanagan, in The Atlantic, launches an angry, rather incoherent attack on Duke University, a sort of I Am Charlotte Simmons without the laughs.
Though the piece begins as an attack on Duke’s reduction (as Flanagan sees it) to a distinctively money-obsessed institution (it’s no more money-obsessed than Brown, Northwestern, Boston University, and plenty of other – what do they call them? – basket schools), it quickly shifts to a merciless attack on Ms Sex Thesis herself, Karen Owen (background here and here). Flanagan calls this Duke senior (she was a senior when she researched and wrote the sex thesis; she has now graduated) “one of the most pitiable women to emerge on the cultural scene in quite a while,” onaccounta she got roughed up a bit, sexually and emotionally, by her research subjects, thirteen male Duke athletes, each of whom she sampled in bed and then wrote up in terms of performance.
Flanagan’s piece is an exercise in male bashing and female self-pity. It paints a world of sharp lines between rapacious men and victimized women. And it attacks Duke University as unusually – by the standards of American universities – complicit in this picture.
While UD doesn’t characterize Owen – as some commentators do – as an exemplary feminist for doing what she did (using men, rating them sexually the way men rate women sexually, etc.), neither does she regard Owen as a puling confused little drunkard, her heart broken again and again by the big bad boys. Flanagan doesn’t quote the repeated descriptions of very pleasant sex indeed in the Owen sex thesis — sex that does sometimes get a little rough, but pleasantly so – if “pleasant,” in sexual terms, means that Owen scored an orgasm. Nor does Flanagan quote several rather moving descriptions (at least UD found them so) of research subjects whose quietly intense sexual excitement in response to Owen’s beauty Owen found – as well she might – both humanly and physically gratifying.
None of this is to deny what Flanagan argues at the end of her essay – men are more powerful than women, and women ought not get drunk and stupid. It is merely to say that all the shadings of sex, the complications of compulsion and desire and delight and abasement among adults, are absent from Flanagan’s angry fleshless world.
A letter in the University of Georgia newspaper.
The incident that led to the resignation of The Red & Black’s editor-in-chief is not particularly surprising, given the extraordinary emphasis placed on alcohol and partying in your paper this fall.
The relentless “No. 1 Party School”-themed articles and link on The Red & Black’s website speak volumes — volumes of vodka, as it turns out.
Since 2004 I have contributed 85 published columns to The Red & Black.
But this fall I chose not to submit anything at all, primarily because of my disappointment with the direction of the paper.
I hope the forced shake-up in leadership is a turning point for The Red & Black, which in past years has been the best newspaper in Athens.
John Knox
Assistant professor Athens
Geography
Best comment so far about the yawn heard ’round the world (background here) comes from an Inside Higher Ed comment thread:
Treated like cattle, students will occasionally respond inappropriately.
A hacker has broadcast a message to wired classrooms across Washington State University. Here is some of what he said:
[Why have you come to this university] merely to eat, drink, and breathe? [Unserious people have] infiltrated our once-astute university. [They] run wild in a state of perpetual inebriation [and have] no outward enthusiasm for the fantastic academic culture this university used to have.
The entire video is here. Scroll down.
Très pomo.
And definitely creepy.
Not all the details are in yet, but it looks as though a good and dedicated teacher there may have allowed students traveling with him on a field trip to drink on the chartered bus taking them back to Lubbock. One of the students got outrageously drunk, and, once back in her own car, plowed into another vehicle and killed one of its passengers.
[The student] was arrested October 22nd and charged with intoxicated manslaughter, intoxicated assault, and aggravated assault. According to the police report, [she] states that a professor allowed the students to drink on the field trip. She says in the report that she had five beers and a shot of alcohol.
Here we are. Flashlights on!
Point them at the front of the room.
There’s the prince of darkness, ruler of this domain. He strides from side to side, declaiming many things in front of six hundred followers.
Point your flashlight at the followers.
Note that instead of six hundred, there are two hundred in attendance. The entire course is taught out of a textbook; the prince merely copies, from the same textbook’s test bank, the test on which class grades are based.
He is after all a prince — not the sort to write his own tests.
Since there is no point in attending lectures, many students do not. This angers the prince.
What angers him even more is that a third of the students cheated on this semester’s midterm. Even though the New York Times recently featured his university’s expensive, pervasive, student surveillance cameras as a model for the nation, his business class still cheated.
Humiliated and enraged, he storms. The video of his storming is – like the test he takes out of the textbook – online for anyone to see.
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Here’s what seems to have happened.
[S]tudents [found] a version of the test and the grade key on line. Where is the security system for test banks, and how was it so easily obtained? Locally, they are saying that no security breaches happened and the answer key was simply found on line. Shame on the professor and the university. [Scroll down to comments at the link.]
Oy oy oy. Security systems again! First you gotta buy zillions of cameras and train them on the students while they take their exams so the classroom looks like a Vegas casino. THEN you gotta lock security into the exams your princes pick out of textbooks. It’s incredibly expensive, and you’re a public university in Florida, where expenditures for universities are in the cellar.
What to do?
The vast University of Central Florida is essentially an online university. It should drop its physical campus pretense.
Yes, a large percentage of online students cheat. But no one finds out.
… UD‘s George Washington University begins to ask whether 4 Loko makes you 2 Fucko’d.
Drinking… fits comfortably with what some see as a just-regular-folks, anti-elitist strain in Wisconsin’s character. You know, the kind of people who would take an insult from Illinoisans – “cheesehead” – and turn it into a symbol of pride.
… Part of the anti-elitist attitude, [one observer says,] is a sense that we exemplify a true folk culture, and that “real people do these real things like getting drunk.”
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Last night, to toast her friend Courtney’s next stage in life (naval officer), UD sat at the bar at Sushi Damo in Rockville and hoisted an Asian Pear Martini. (Courtney had a Margarita.)
As an elitist, UD felt comfortable limiting herself to one low horsepower drink for the evening.
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Here is a long article (part of a series!) about why the state of Wisconsin leads the nation in drinking. (What does this have to do with universities? Hold on a minute!) It features a tidy paragraph of Reasons:
Climate. Ethnicity. The historical importance of the brewing industry. The interpersonal dynamics that govern how people learn to live comfortably in a group. The social nature of most drinking. A relative lack of newcomers who might foster change. The premium many here place on being just a regular person. The need for identity.
A shivery clannish German-derived person in search of identity… How can you stop being this and start being a temperate cosmopolitan solitude-seeking Jewish-derived person who puts a premium on being irregular?
Well, you can’t. You can’t make yourself over like that. Nor would you want to. You like being what you are just as much as UD likes being what she is.
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But when one of your state’s universities loses seven students in two years to alcohol, you have a problem. Administrators at the University of Wisconsin Stout are cracking down this way and that in an effort to save lives, keep students out of jail, and generally reduce mayhem and injury. They’re doing all the things universities do when they try to get out of the alcohol mess: Upping penalties for underage students in possession, and for riotous partying; begging some of the hundreds of bars just off campus to shut down or at least stop offering insanely cheap drinks; mandating alcohol education courses; increasing Friday classes…
But when even that high a body count has many Stout students taking to Facebook rebellion…
Perrone’s family home is valued at $826,000, Smith’s at $1.2 million.
Background of the Georgetown University lab guys.
(Mr UD: “You can see how it happened. Those houses used to be worth twice that.”)
… sent her this.
And just now, her sister-in-law, Joanna Soltan, sent her this.
It’s a good series.
Whether ’tis wiser to dump this guy before he does something else (besides expose himself plus get arrested on alcohol violations), or seek to avoid the disruption of student government impeachment hearings…
Two (three?) freshmen at Washington’s Jesuit university make meth in their dorm room.
Police discovered a methamphetamine lab inside a freshman residence hall on the Georgetown University campus early Saturday.
Everyone evacuated. (Meth labs have a tendency to explode.) Police are interviewing the meth makers.
You’ll recall that UD featured the same story not long ago, this time at the University of Central Florida.
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Some cross-town rivalry in the comments section of Vox Populi:
A meth lab? Who’s trashy now?
Love,
GWU
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God never closes a door without opening a window: Because of this story, UD has discovered the GW Ratchet.
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This one, back in ’05, was discovered via security camera. He was making meth in the San Diego State chem lab.
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Some background from Inside Higher Ed.
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In case you think there might be one in your dorm.
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Meth meet and greet. (Photo of evacuated Georgetown University students.)
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If you really can’t get enough of this.
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Update on the Georgetown University story: The drug lab seems not to have been making meth; instead, it manufactured DMT, a hallucinogen.
If UD‘s experience with these sorts of stories is anything to go by, however, police will find more than one drug being made or sold in the dorm room. The cookers (I learned this word from the Frontline documentary I just watched) usually offer a larger menu.
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Regaining a sense of perspective: From a Georgetown University comment thread:
At least DMT is a safe highbrow drug suitable for use by educated elites, unlike the crude trailer trash stimulants originally suggested.
… surfing in the morning before class is killed by a shark.
University Diaries has already looked at Four Loko, which everyone calls blackout in a can, so I guess we have to as well. It’s the bière de choix at increasing numbers of campuses, and so there are increasing blackouts.
One school – Ramapo College – has now banned Four Loko, and a bunch of states, plus the FDA, are investigating the marketing (usually targeted at young people) of all cheap “caffeinated alcoholic beverages.”
