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Monday, August 30, 2004
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NUMBER ONE PARTY NATION
All universities dread the Number One Party School ranking. This year’s honoree, SUNY Albany, has been besieged by the media. Last year’s - scandal-heavy University of Colorado - was so upset that it decided to name its new anti-alcohol program “We’re Not Number One.” The American Medical Association has demanded that The Princeton Review abolish the party school category, since it “fuels the false notion that alcohol is central to the college experience.” Walk with UD a little here as we move away from hysteria and toward a calmer understanding of this significant aspect of the contemporary American university. Despite the efforts of films like Animal House, most Americans continue in a vague way to picture undergraduate colleges as quiet places set apart for serious reflection about the world. Yes, college students are thinking about their careers; yes, there’s fucking and football about. But the distinctive, expensive, rigorous, and auspicious characteristic of the university, people figure, is its sober intellectuality. The university’s distinction is that it offers extended, rationalized study of important things…. …like… gambling, surfing, scuba, spas, cartoons, and catering. These are a few of the subjects you can major in at respectable four-year colleges in the United States. “It’s disgusting,” a New York politician comments about the new casino degrees being offered by a number of colleges in party-school Albany’s public university system: “I think it’s inappropriate for the state to become a vehicle by which people are in increasing numbers addicted. To have that policy reinforced through a curriculum in a public university is reprehensible.” A SUNY trustee agrees: “It saddens me that SUNY is involved in such a cynical and insidious process, one that fuels anti-social gambling pathologies while subordinating and suborning its basic institutional mission: education, not training.” These two are defending a model of the undergraduate college much like the one many other Americans vaguely picture, in which vocational training is put off until graduate school in order to establish for each student a foundation of scientific, ethical, and cultural knowledge; in which the curriculum’s subject matter is, uh, you know… real deep, real valuable, real worth knowing, central to, um, our society and what we hold dear, and for sure about understanding the big bad world all around us too… I mean, it’s hard to get precise here, but, well, some shit’s trivial and some shit’s real real important. Like what? Like say what’s in the Constitution, what it means to be a democracy. That should be a requirement, a course like that! And, well, courses in how to cater parties, well, that’s trivial! That shouldn’t be in the undergraduate curriculum! What UD’s groping toward here is the suggestion that most human beings sense there’s a distinction to be made in life between ideas and actions that are important, and ideas and actions that are trivial. But this sense is inchoate, and having a kid at a university and spending $30,000 a year to keep her there remains insufficient incentive for people to be less inchoate. These are matters for curriculum committees. Yet some colleges have no curriculum at all - no requirements, no established courses, no course sequences. Others claim they have requirements, courses that touch on those real important things; but in reality they have distribution requirements - essentially a broad range of courses to choose from (many of them trivial) that will satisfy a particular requirement. Very few colleges have serious curricula requiring serious study of serious things. UD’s next point: Why should they? Why shouldn’t a lot of American colleges be a bit more about drinking than about thinking? America is an insanely rich and successful country. Thousands of American college students come from affluent homes and will themselves be affluent, college or not. They will go into the family business; they will inherit money; their well-connected parents will connect them up with something; they will marry wealthy people like themselves. All of this will likely happen, UD repeats, whether they go to college or not. Whether they go to a respectable college or not. Whether they fail to graduate from college or not. Virtually all of these people will of course go to college, but many will go for social, not intellectual, reasons. They will go because everyone else they know is going, and they want to maintain contact with their world. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s parents spent huge sums so that she could graduate from Boston University and become a saleswoman at Calvin Klein. Did they kick themselves for having wasted all that money on a college education for a saleswoman? No, because college, like psychotherapy and weekends abroad, is something they couldn’t imagine their children not doing. For a glimpse at this pretty wide swath of the American college population, look at an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s forthcoming novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28; due out in November): From the moment he founded Dupont University 115 years ago, Charles Dupont, no kin of the du Ponts of Delaware and much more aesthetically inclined, had envisioned an actual grove of academe through which scholars young and old might take contemplative strolls.,,, Dupont! [thinks a representative student] Science -- Nobel winners - whole stacks of them! . . . although he couldn't exactly remember any names. . . . Athletes -- giants! National basketball champions! Top five in football and lacrosse! . . . although he found it a bit dorky to go to games and cheer a lot. . . . Scholars - legendary! . . . even though they were sort of spectral geeks who floated around the edges of collegiate life. . . . Traditions -- the greatest! -- mischievous oddities passed from generation to generation of . . . the best people! A small cloud formed. . . . the rising number of academic geeks, book humpers, homosexuals, flute prodigies and other diversoids who were now being admitted . . . Nevertheless! There's their Dupont, which is just a diploma with Dupont written on it . . . and there's the real Dupont -- which is ours!… About ten years ago a flood from a bathroom up above had ruined [his fraternity‘s] library's aged and promiscuous accumulation of books, and the once-elegant walnut shelves, which had the remains of fine Victorian moldings along all the edges, now held dead beer cans and pizza-delivery boxes for the most part. The library's one trove of mankind's accumulated knowledge at this moment in history was the TV set…. Everywhere you looked at this university there were people knocking "the frats" and the frat boys. . . . the Administration, which blamed them for the evils of alcohol, pot, Ecstasy . . . the dorks, GPA geeks, lesbos, homobos, bi-bos, S&Mbos, blackbos, Latinos, Indians, from India and the Reservation, and other whining diversoids, who blamed them for racism, sexism, classism, whatever the fuck that was, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, fringe-rightism, homophobia . . . The only value ingrained at this institution was a weepy tolerance for losers. . . . For this mindless legacy student and many others, a great American university is like a fully loaded Jaguar driven twelve times a year to the post office by an elderly woman. There it sits purring away in the garage, its awesome intellectual power idle… See why so many serious American professors prefer to teach graduate students?… And the vast number of American colleges which are vocational schools in all but name don’t bother with the intellectual machinery at all. Why shouldn’t a lot of American colleges be a bit more about piffle than about profundity? Many Americans spend hours of leisure every day entertaining themselves with iPods (distributed free to students at Duke), tv, film, video games, sports, long baths, social gatherings, and vacations; many foreigners spend hours and hours watching American-made entertainments. These pursuits represent billions of dollars in business, and many college graduates will devote their professional lives to them, writing scripts for tv shows, publicizing movies, developing golf courses. The Cartoon Network has established a “trendy corps of college students enlisted to market the network‘s ‘Adult Swim’ cartoons on campuses nationwide,” reports The Miami Herald: They come from 30 campuses to the network’s Atlanta headquarters each August for some cartoon-marketing training before the start of their fall-semester classes. These students are culled for being business-savvy …Their job: Making cartoons cool for peers… Now, three years after they started, “Adult Swim” cartoons are often ranked No. 1 in their basic cable time period - Saturdays through Thursdays, 11 p.m. - 5 a.m. EDT - among both adults aged 18-34 and men aged 18-24. Shows such as “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” - about a talking meatball, milkshake, and box of fries - regularly beat network late-night comedy shows in the ratings among young people. Alcohol awareness? Hysteria over party school rankings? The Herald continues: Cartoon Network executives say the college marketing program, mostly made up of sponsored drinking parties at hot college bars ... is creating buzz for the quirky…cartoons. … “It is soooo much fun,” said Barrett Darnell, a 20-year-old Washington State University student who’s starting his second year as an ‘Adult Swim’ marketer. Last year he threw viewing parties and got some cartoon T-shirts thrown from the stage at a campus Cypress Hill concert. This year’s plans include a pub crawl and poster giveaways. ‘We give out so much free stuff. Everyone loves it.’” Stop thinking about campus drinking as it was in the innocent Animal House days - this is about serious marketing. You can get all moralistic about this (Neil Postman wrote a book a few years ago called Amusing Ourselves to Death), or you can accept that America is the entertainment capital of the world and that people are going to act accordingly. |