<p>"I'm sorry to hear about such an awful incident at your alma mater, Mini."</p>
<p>Would only if it were just one! (It's been going on for years now - concrete brick through the President's house window?) Note - there are NO fraternities at #1, and haven't been since the early 1960s.</p>
<p>I think the issue isn't that there aren't lots of wonderful, sane, warm-hearted, very intelligent people at my alma mater, because there are! Many of them! (hey, remember, it is #1!) Rather, as in "Charlotte Simmons", the culture of the place to a significant extent has been taken over by bizarre, aberrant, and profoundly misogynist behavioral and cultural norms with which the trustees are now wrestling mightily.</p>
<p>I can't honestly say that I wish my d. were there, #1 or not. Others will feel differently.</p>
<p>Now we have Wolfe's latest, I Am Charlotte Simmons, a surprisingly thin story in a big fat package about a Carolina mountain girl's freshman year on scholarship at a big fancy eastern eilte university, here called DuPont but more or less modeled on Duke. </p>
<p>Charlotte is the stand-out earnest achiever of her high school class in a backwater of NASCAR provincialism. She grows up in a trailer. Her family is intact, loving, upright, but woefully country-lumpen. Her mentor is her chubby spinster high school French teacher. So off Charlotte goes, for the great adventure of an elite education -- only to learn that DuPont is a fetid swamp of privileged moral depravity, where the rich preppie coeds act like whores, the frat boys plow through them like Turks in a seraglio . . .
<p>Wolfe shows us that Charlotte is beaten down or molded by the campus culture despite her purity, he desire to do right to live the life of the mind - she is changed by the extraordinarily negative forces on campus, as all of our children would be changed by this type of campus atmosphere and activities. At the end, Charlotte takes pride in being JoJo's girl - she has achieved campus status in one of the few ways that women can achieve status in this atmosphere - by being an athlete's girlfriend. She arrived on campus wishing to live the life of the mind but she had no pathway for that - she learned something she couldn't learn in her small town - that college students, don't go to college just to study anymore! The forces were against her - I think Wolfe is trying to tell us that society is running amok on campus and that some realignment is needed.</p>
<p>"At the end, Charlotte takes pride in being JoJo's girl - she has achieved campus status in one of the few ways that women can achieve status in this atmosphere - by being an athlete's girlfriend."</p>
<p>This is where I got really offended by the book. Maybe "Dupont" is that much different from other campuses, but I can't imagine my D, her college friends, or the women my S knows in college thinking that their only mode of success is being an athlete's girlfriend. High school, possibly, but college?</p>
<p>Even Charlotte started out with plenty other paths toward success, but she chose the status one instead (note her early contempt for the unpopular girls in her dorm.)</p>
<p>What happens to Charlotte is awful, and unfortunately all too common on many campuses. But who she is, what her character is, according to Wolfe, is a separate issue. Her search for a shallow type of status is disappointing, with all she has going for her.</p>
<p>I found the book to be pretty anti-woman, despite its ostensible message. It sure doesn't reflect the lives of any of the independent young women I know.</p>
<p>Not only does she dislike her preppy roommate and the gauntlet of girls who man the hallway, in the end she abandons the 2 women who were her friends most of the year.</p>