<p>“If there’s a problem, it is no worse at Dartmouth than anywhere else.”</p>
<p>I don’t agree with this, either. It’s different, and worse, at Dartmouth than it is (for example) at Columbia. A dedicated student who wants to get wasted and puke on any given night can do so on either campus, but that does not mean that the culture and the social alternatives are the same.</p>
<p>You wouldn’t see students at Columbia or Harvard using “Keggy the Keg” as a joke mascot for their school, because it wouldn’t be funny, except in a Dada sort of way. The relative lack of frat life is a genuine cultural difference. Even assuming that frats at all campuses haze equally (which they don’t), a campus with 80% frat participation would have a much bigger problem than one with 10% participation.</p>
<p>I remember back in the mid-90’s, they were trying to transform Dartmouth into a more academic school and curb the frat influence. I guess they are still fighting that fight.</p>
<p>One good thing at Dartmouth is at least they aren’t trying to brainwash the freshmen into thinking they won’t be as successful in medicine or business unless they join a frat. At least people know the purpose of the frats are to get trashed…</p>
<p>Rubbish–and made me laugh! I don’t blame President Kim…he had such great plans for Dartmouth and Dartmouth students, but was derailed by the gigantic financial deficits and the inability to change the frat culture. </p>
<p>Agree with other posters…Dartmouth, as good as it is, could be much better. But I think that the only way to get rid of the frat culture would be to go cold turkey like Williams did. </p>
<p>The other thing that could happen is for the town to get really tough on underage drinking and holding the frats accountable for it.</p>
<p>"Where is the list of binge drinking rates, mini? "</p>
<p>Virtually every school has them (either having participated in the Harvard School of Public Health survey or the SIU Core Survey; or sometimes they do it themselves. The alcohol/drug coordinator on every campus (often a dean) has them, and has to release them on request. Often they are published in the campus newspaper, or as part of social marketing campaigns on campus. At other campuses, they are difficult to get.</p>
<p>I have learned over time, however, that you really don’t need the actual numbers. You can take the Monitoring the Future numbers (44% binge in previous two weeks), and add 20% or so (of that 44%) to it (for technical reasons, MTF is an underestimate.) Then you can look at the published known factors (9 of them) for heavy campus alcohol use. Dartmouth, as it turns out, has all nine. So you can be pretty sure (actually, very sure - I’ve never seen an exception in my decade in the field) that they are at the very, very high end. On the campus itself, it will be higher for whites, males, athletes, and fraternity/sorority members. When one does this, and accounts for the 15-20% who are likely to be total abstainers, one quickly discovers that there are almost no moderate drinkers (relatively speaking).</p>
<p>Binge drinking itself is not directly linked to later alcohol problems. Heavy drinking (three or more binges in two weeks or near daily drinking of minimum of two drinks) is. Roughly 55-60% of binge drinkers are likely to be heavy drinkers, and, of those, about 60% will have a serious diagnosable alcohol problem and/or alcoholism later in life. It won’t be prevent them from becoming doctors, lawyers, or business executives. Alcoholics are not stupid; just alcoholic.</p>
<p>No dog in any Dartmouth fight, but I don’t think wild partying is necessarily inconsistent with or incongruent with high academic achievement. And people do crazy things when they want to be part of a group. I don’t disbelieve that academically smart kids might also engage in this kind of thing. Disclosure - my H and I were in the Greek system and our son (with our blessing) joined a frat, so I’m not anti-Greek at all. I just don’t buy that the “smarter kids” are immune to this type of thing.</p>
<p>Mini’s myopic views are unfortunately typical of the stodgy academic killjoy. Double-secret probation, anyone? Sure frat people like to have fun, but critics forget the frat’s secret weapon against alcoholism–risk management!</p>
<p>For those not in the know, a staple of risk management of frats is a Matt Foley-type character who gets up in front of a bunch of frat kids to forewarn them against the perils of Johnny Barleycorn… After you experience a motivational speech from one of these guys in all of their portly plaid glory, you will never be the same…</p>
<p>Sorry collegealum- and I’m speaking as the parent of a frat Risk Manager-- if you are the parent of a daughter who has been raped at a frat party, or the parent of a 14 year old who is paralyzed after being hit by the car driven by a drunken frat member heading off to a party after “pre-gaming” at the house, the presence of the Risk Manager as a butt-covering exercise by the insurance company is very small comfort.</p>
<p>Now that my kids are done with college and grad school at a variety of institutions, I have a new take on all of this. The only message the frats understand is financial. The national organizations are quick to expel or yank the charter of a fraternity whose activities are too expensive to insure. That’s the only place they are vulnerable. Obligation to society? Disgusting activities? Illegal activities? Snore. But hit a couple of the national organizations with expensive and potentially ruinous lawsuits?</p>
<p>Find a plaintiff who has been hurt; sue the university for allowing illegal activities on its campus; sue the local police for dereliction of duty by ignoring underage drinking; get the State to yank the liquor license of the store which sold a keg to a minor… etc.</p>
<p>The frats will be selling girl scout cookies and running tag sales once their ability to acquire and serve liquor has been squelched.</p>
<p>You need a Plaintiff and a lawyer who is not afraid.</p>
<p>When I was a student in Hanover, a friend of mine fell over the 2nd floor stairwell railing at his frat (while inebriated, it’s perhaps worth mentioning). He broke his neck and spent the next four-six months (not sure of the exact duration) in a “halo” device, with the bolts in his skull, to prevent a full displacement of the vertebrae. He never took another drink and told everyone he knew how lucky he was to be given a second chance. I always respected him for his efforts to illuminate for his peers the perils of binge drinking. I don’t think an appreciable number of them were listening.</p>
<p>Blossom, my last post was totally sarcastic/tongue-in-cheek. I went to one these risk management meetings, and I swear the guy was exactly like Chris Fahrley’s “down-by-the-river” guy on Saturday Night Live. It was a joke…</p>
<p>A few years ago, a kid at the state flagship fell asleep (he was inebriated, of course) on the roof of his frat house and rolled off. He hit his head and died. This U seems to lose a student or two almost every year in some sort of drinking related incident.</p>
<p>My sister was raped at a frat party (early 80’s) resulting in that frat being banned. I have no trouble at all believing the allegations of sexual assault in Dartmouth frats.</p>
<p>We’re tapping into some dark pools – and it’s easy to take a slice of anything and loose the big picture. </p>
<p>I’m starting to see the hazing/freshmen bingeing stuff as similar to hoarding behaviors. Practically everyone has a junk drawer that could use cleaning and organizing – but there are those situations that escalate into decades of accumulation and severe mental illness. </p>
<p>College social life can swing from loud silliness to death – from team building and companionship to humiliation and abusive behaviors. What works to steer the canoes down the river of life? </p>
<p>It’s not just colleges facing these situations. We’re down the road from Joint Base Lewis McChord, home of the infamous Sgt. Gibbs (convicted of murdering Iraqi citizens) and of Sgt Bales (under investigation for acts in Afghanistan). What level of supervision/structure keeps things on course without descending into a police state?</p>
<p>I’m hoping that Dartmouth alums, admins and current Greeks will use the crisis to move to a healthier status. There’s an opportunity here to lead the nation.</p>
<p>Students choose the kinds of schools they like. I can’t see that the current row at Dartmouth is going to hurt their reputation much with many of the potential students they attract. (The same, by the way, is true of my alma mater.) Since schools are NOT all the same (or even close) , there’s a wide array of choices open to students and their parents. </p>
<p>From what I see from the aggregate national data that I track (which is part of what I do for a living), I didn’t see much that was surprising either in the article or in the responses to it. I really don’t blame the students - if the college administration is comfortable hosting a four-year party like this for its paying customers, and feels that the costs of change are greater than costs of maintaining things as they are, it’s hard to fault the students. As long as people know what they are buying when they do so, it’s a free country.</p>
<p>Olymom, yes, just like the junk drawer. Except that real people get hurt and maimed. Nobody has yet spent a year in a wheelchair (or dead) from trying to find a roll of scotch tape in my kitchen.</p>
<p>Olymom, if you are trying to make an analogy between something and vigilanteism in Afghanistan, you want the Zimmerman-Martin thread in the PC. </p>
<p>Again, no dog in the Dartmouth fight, and no real opinion whether the situation there is “crisis” or much-ado-over-nothing, but I’m hardpressed to understand how D alums/admins/Greeks will “lead the nation.” Whatever D does or doesn’t do to reform or make changes isn’t really going to have any impact beyond D. I mean, apparently Williams got rid of their frats per mini but who outside of Williams really cared? Specific college cultures aren’t terribly affected by what goes on at other colleges, IMO.</p>
<p>What Olymom might be trying to say is that colleges (along with their sports programs) and our local JBLM can descend into a situation that in D1 sports is called “lack of institutional control”. It’s not one specific infraction, say letting a recruit run through the smoke machine to see how it feels, but a whole series of questionable things which together indicate an environment that could tip the wrong direction. In the JBLM example, there have been several other recent things - and underage girl and drugs incident, some missing night vision goggles and others. Each one alone wasn’t earth shattering for a facility with that many young adult men present. Taken together, along with one honest to goodness crisis which had roots in some of the smaller issues, it becomes a much larger structural problem. I don’t know anything about the D issue except what I read in the news. But I do know that some schools do have lack of institutional control on campus which can tip the wrong way in a hurry.</p>