… are the words of wisdom you need to hear as you seek to understand what has been going on in Morgantown. From her you-are-there perch in WVU’s sociology department, Karen Weiss has written Party School, a first-hand account of what Clifford Geertz might have called “deep play” at America’s colleges. These are excerpts from an interview she gave at Inside Higher Education:

Many residential universities, such as the so-called party schools … have become so well-known for their super-charged party environments that it would be very difficult to change the culture without negatively impacting enrollments that are now dependent upon the lure of this party scene. Moreover, many of the disruptive behaviors that I document in the book (e.g., burning couches, riots) have become “traditions” for both current students and alumni. As such, traditions are very difficult to change.

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[People who live in bad neighborhoods] feel terrorized, they change their routines to avoid certain streets, they don’t leave their homes at night. In many college towns, residents are beginning to experience similar problems (albeit less life-threatening) as a result of a minority of extreme partiers who make life uninhabitable [I think Weiss is conflating two phrases here: life unendurable and neighborhoods uninhabitable.] for their neighbors.

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While it is easy to see why bar and club owners are reluctant to eliminate drink specials or other promotions – after all, they make their profits from student drinking – it is more difficult to understand why university administrators, police and local town officials have not been more effective in reducing some of the problems caused by the party subculture. In the long run, it really boils down to a rather controversial reality: the party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

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That last bit is way important. All prospective university students interested in drinking know where to go – Cal State Chico, UWV, University of Georgia, University of Texas, almost anywhere in Wisconsin – to fit in. It’s like – who doesn’t know that Key West is a better place to drink yourself silly than Salt Lake City? And just as Key West’s business model – the thing it does to attract tourist dollars – involves the provision of alcohol every five steps or so down Duval Street, so central to UWV’s business model – the thing it does to attract applicants – is the provision of alcohol five steps off campus in every direction. Many of its most high-profile traditions (Weiss cites couch burning and rioting) are about alcohol.

You expect eighteen year olds who may have chosen WVU because the joint is gin-soaked not to drink gin once they get there?

You expect UWV to change its business model?

As Weiss points out, it’s not just a business model. It’s a way of life.

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Update: DRC, a reader, updates UD on the student. He has died.

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Don’t forget: The president of West Virginia University is Gordon Gee.

… has fallen even lower. Despite plying its students with beer at the football stadium, it’s suffering a significant drop in ticket sales. Wonder why? Must be because they haven’t partied the place up enough. (UD has long recommended, given the amazing love of opioids in that state, that WVU athletics offer fans Oxycontin.)

To make matters worse, the local public radio station recently featured a professor at WVU who gave it hell for deciding to spend seventy-five million on an upgrade for its rapidly emptying stadium. WVU’s athletic director came right back at him with the following argument:

There is no argument that West Virginia University’s first responsibility is to provide the best and broadest educational experience possible for its students. It is the first part of our land-grant mission of teaching, research and service.

For many current and potential students, high-quality intercollegiate athletics are a key part of that experience.

In what way is football part – a key part – of an educational experience? Answer: It isn’t. More and more WVU students seem to realize that. But even as attendance tanks, WVU spends all its money on its football stadium.

Wretched, wretched WVU.

And, you know, just after everything that has made and continues to make West Virginia University a national laughingstock, it only makes sense for students at an equally risible school like Texas State University to urge university leaders to make WVU their model and liquor up the games.

One may argue the [Texas State] football team has not given fans something to cheer about in recent years, but part of the problem may be that a major aspect of sporting events has been absent at Bobcat Stadium — alcohol… If alcohol was sold at Bobcat Stadium, the university would surely see an increase in attendance and revenue. According to the West Virginia Gazette, West Virginia University first sold alcohol at its football games during the 2011-2012 season. The school made $520,000 from alcohol sales alone, and a total of $1.26 million in concession sales that year. Considering those figures, imagine selling alcohol at Texas State football games to a fan base and culture that embraces drinking.

A culture that embraces drinking. Such a dainty way to put it.

… West Virginia University, America’s Number One party school, where… ugh. I can’t. I’ll puke. You can read it if you want. You read it. You read it.

Regular readers know that UD has a category – Online Makeover – singling out American universities whose campus life is so sordid, so sodden, so stupid, that it is time for them to shut down their physical plants and reopen as exclusively online institutions.

West Virginia University, whose new coach (the state’s highest paid employee) appears to be a seriously obnoxious drunk, is a perennial Party School winner (it’s number four on the latest list), and is – just to top things off – likely to decide in the next few weeks to sell booze at its football games.

In short, WVA is a Purveyor of Fine Wines and Spirits, and should be allowed to spin off its course-offering component and ply its trade unimpeded.

… Blue Ridge mountains, Shenandoah River…

West Virginia University is gradually reducing itself to nothing – no foreign languages, a lot fewer professors, no grad program in math, fewer undergrad programs.

Shit, place ain’t got no money, and customers are voting with their feet.

Lotsa boohoo about all this from the liberal elites, but hold on jest a minute! Hang on jest one sec! UD ain’t crying, and she’ll tell you why.

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As you know, UD sees no reason why a country (Hungary) or a state (New Mexico, Nevada, West Virginia, Florida) that wants to reduce itself to an intellectual desert should be kept from doing so.

The American system is already correcting for this. Notice, for instance, how Hampshire College has stepped up to offer an easy transfer to New College students who can’t take it anymore. Nevada has always done beautifully on the dumbshit tourist trade and doesn’t need fancy theories to run casinos. Its wretched state university system should call it a day; smart young Nevadans can go to California. Same deal for other pro-ignorance states – this is a big country with oodles of good (and some supremely great) universities.

As for West Virginia. Feast your eyes on UD‘s coverage, over many years, of WVU – a hopelessly drunk and disorderly party school in a hopeless state from which those who can flee are fleeing. Morgantown runs with squalid bars in which frat boys try to kill pledges via drink. The kids riot after purty near every football game. The football and basketball coaches continue to be paid like princes. It’s a world, to be sure; a party school world which is about what a state like WV can manage if you tell it to establish a university. But you’re never gonna get the yahoos in the legislature to smarten the place up, and fact is most of its students are fine with the way things are. Those who aren’t will find good schools in driving distance: FIVE states border WV, and three of them have good schools.

A perennial Number One Party School, WVU boasts drunk, rioting, armed students (one riot featured gunfire), plus zillion dollar a year drunk coaches staggering all over Morgantown in front of the national media.

This blog has covered floridly pissed coaches and students at WVU for decades, and nothing ever changes. The school qua, well, school, never gets much money from the state, so it stays lousy; but the coaches and athletic facilities get zillions, and I guess it all goes to the coaches’ heads cuz so many of them end up, like this latest guy, the basketball coach, driving blind and endangering the lives of other drivers and pedestrians and the brave police who try to stop them.

… has just performed its first West Virginia University student riot of the year (they riot all the time at Gordon Gee’s WVU). This one featured almost a thousand students hurling beer bottles at city workers trying to plow snow from the street students had chosen for their couch burning. As WVU sociologist Karen Weiss notes in her WVU-inspired book, Party School:

[T]he party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. 

They riot so much at WVU that it’s news when they don’t, as in this headline:

NO RIOTING IN MORGANTOWN AFTER WVU LOSS

This latest riot was quite violent and quite protracted, drawing various police forces and extensive weaponry.

… comes from this Penn State student-run blog:

Grand Jury Appalled At University Marketing Of ‘Fun, Party Atmosphere’

For that’s the real story. Other news outlets are content to quote high-voltage words and terms from the “scathing” report on the lurid, protracted, public, death of frat pledge Timothy Piazza: fraternities are a cancer; Penn State showed shocking apathy in regard to large groups of sadists on its campus.

The Penn State student journalists correctly focus on the cold calculation schools like Penn State and West Virginia (read this; it tells you all you need to know about the death of Piazza) make – to market their schools as almost nothing other than places to drink and go to football games.

Quoting from Karen Weiss, a WVU sociologist, here.

[T]he party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy.

Of course, we could adopt, for the frats, the same model we adopt for university football. We could say that every year we will sacrifice the mind and body of a certain number of our players for the sake of everyone’s amusement. We could say that every year we will kill a certain number of our frat pledges for the sadistic pleasure of people who’ve chosen to attend our school in order to enjoy sadistic pleasure. Party schools could try being honest, and just saying Football’s a violent sport; some fraternities house gangs of sadists. We think a few student brain injuries and deaths each year represents a small price to pay to keep our enrollment numbers steady.

But mainly Pop Store – a rattling down-home establishment somewhere in West Virginia where behind a rotting wooden counter “Pops,” aka Gregory A. Hand, dean of the West Virginia University School of Public Health, “hands” out, if you will, all the soda pop America’s perennially top party school – and the rest of that benighted state – desires.

Eating really bad shit and then washing the shit (and your pain pills) down with Coke is a popular West Virginia tradition, and you gotta hand it to Hand: From his perch in that state’s school of public health he can do a great deal to honor and sustain the tradition.

[WVU] disclosed that Coca-Cola had provided significant funding to Dr. Hand … The company gave him $806,500 for an “energy flux” study in 2011 and $507,000 last year to establish the [Coke-funded] Global Energy Balance Network.

It is unclear how much of the [Coke] money, if any, ended up as personal income for the professors.

“As long as everybody is disclosing their potential conflicts and they’re being managed appropriately, that’s the best that you can do,” Dr. Hand said. “It makes perfect sense that companies would want the best science that they can get.”

Absolutely! Absolutely! With the understanding that definitions of “best” may vary depending on… Well, let’s just say that when a big fat multinational like Coke scours the world and finds the best science in Pop’s lab at West Virginia University…

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UD has a suggestion for Hand’s campaign in West Virginia:

OVERDOSES GO BETTER WITH COKE

All fraternities and sororities at West Virginia University were suspended Thursday after an 18-year-old freshman was found unconscious and not breathing inside a fraternity house, just a week after a different fraternity was suspended after 19 pledges got into a street brawl, university officials and police said.

And of course there was the matter of that massive, massively destructive student riot last month. Etc. Etc. Do a “West Virginia University” search on this blog if you have a lot of time and a strong stomach. It’s cute to call a university a “party school,” but at perennial top-ten party school WVU what it really means is huge numbers of permanently pissed, violent students (and, in some cases, pissed coaches) who end up torching Morgantown and fucking up freshmen whose bodies haven’t adjusted to prevailing blood alcohol levels.

Still. It’s interesting to see that even WVU has a tipping point.

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But don’t get too excited. A temporary cease-fire has been negotiated between the two primary factions – the university and the fraternities. Left out of negotiations so far are both the government and citizenry of Morgantown, which will have to be included in any future agreement.

Further, there are very likely to be conflicts within Morgantown, for instance between business interests (large numbers of students with near-fatal addictions to alcohol attract large numbers of bars) and public safety advocates. Any attempted crackdown on alcohol will also mean a very unhappy sports program, which understandably fears a falling-off in game attendance if students are no longer allowed to get drunk enough to burn down Morgantown.

On top of all of this, the numbers crunchers at WVA will have to be consulted, since they can provide crucially important estimates not only of riot-preparedness costs, but settlement expenses arising from wrongful death suits filed by parents. It will be the money managers’ job, moreover, to remind the university (see Penn State and Chapel Hill) that public relations firms tasked with the almost-impossible job of making squalid universities smell like roses do not come cheap.

… possibility of parole.”

With Mr Football – the inescapable Gordon Gee – as president, with a drunk coach, with more liquor outlets in town than you can shake a couch-burning matchstick at, and with all its money spent on the stadium and a new “inspiration” room for the team (There’s too much West Virginia University filth on this blog for individual links: You’ll have to put West Virginia University in my search engine and settle in for the night.), WVU is jest about America’s trashiest school. Nestled in the heart of pillbilly country, WVU’s got something to offer every dead-head town-trasher in the nation.

West Virginia University: After you drink your way through football games, it’s time to hit the streets and set fire to Morgantown.

… as she read (and listened to) this visiting law professor at way-past-hopeless West Virginia University complain about the school spending $75 million to upgrade its football stadium. As another WVU professor explains:

[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

The important part of that statement is the beginning: In America today, the party school is a business, and WVU is America’s number one party school.

Anyone trying to introduce changes to that business model is excuse me but kind of a fool.

The only thing that changes this business model is un p’tit peu too much rape and pillage, and then things only change for as long as it takes to clean up the lawsuits and probations and all. Then it starts up again.

So who is this Michael Blumenthal who gets on the local airwaves and says

I have to admit that I hold to the now antiquated belief that universities are for education, not sports; that the most important people on a university campus are the students, not the football players, and that the main purpose of large amounts of spare change is to do things for those who need it most, and have it least.

He can’t be the poet Michael Blumenthal, because he’s a poet and not a law professor…

OTOH, the poet Blumenthal is also notorious — for having written another futile protest, this one against the love me do ethos of many creative writing programs. In a 2001 letter to his students at Santa Clara University (he was there for a visiting gig), he wrote that often their writing instructors simply flattered them in order to get good course evaluations:

You have been neither loved nor nurtured. You have, rather, been lied to and betrayed. Though the mother’s milk that flows from such breasts may temporarily satisfy your ravenous appetites for praise (and its donors’ hunger for tenure), it is not, I assure you, a very nourishing brew. You have been told that the not good is good, that the unworthy is the worthy.

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… But yes! Turns out the WVU Blumenthal is the Santa Clara Blumenthal. This restless, interdisciplinary man has taught all over the world and has lately landed in one of the weirdest campuses in America, a truly anti-intellectual funhouse.

UD admires Blumenthal’s willingness to open himself to hostility, incomprehension, and indifference; but surely he knows no one’s listening.

… the nation’s number one party school last year (this year it’s number two), the school that has over the decades hired more drunks and debauchees as coaches and athletics directors than any other, the school… oh, read UD’s many posts about WVU if you have a taste for the sordid – put West Virginia University in my search engine… Anyway, it should come as no surprise that the coach at the center of the Oklahoma State allegations has moved on to… West Virginia University! Joe DeForest will be soberly scrutinized by head coach Dana Holgorsen, himself a man of unimpeachable self-control.

A fascinating letter exchange is going on in the pages of the Roanoke Times about America’s Number Four party school.

It started innocently enough, with a caution to Virginia Tech fans as football season starts up.

West Virginia University has done nothing to curb the violent behavior of their fans and Virginia Tech has been warned of the violence.

Now UD has proposed that West Virginia University – smack dab in the heart of pillbilly territory – stop serving alcohol in the stadium and start unloading Lortabs. But so far no one in Morgantown is listening, so they’ve still got this violence problem.

Anyway, here’s the cascade of refutations. VT’s just as bad. VT fans wear VT gear to WVU games so they’re asking for it. It happens, it’s part of the game I think it makes the game fun (quoting this post’s headline).

It continues, more or less along the same lines, here. Violence, violence, everywhere.

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The War Room. Eat Your Enemies. I mean – hyuk! – don’t take no genius to know why this shit’s happening.