@ahl here is an article that cites a study that concludes “binge drinking is a symbolic proxy for high status in college."
http://healthland.time.com/2012/08/20/why-college-binge-drinkers-are-happier-have-high-status/
^^That’s been the way it has been since I was a teenager in the dark days. I didn’t party in high school but I sure as heck knew who was and yes they belonged to the “in” clique to put it nicely and primarily not because they had great parties, although they did, but because they did fun things, too, and for the most part it was the wealthier kids. I saw the same thing as my boys were growing up. Not the binge drinking in my day, that feels newer to me especially with women, but the whole “drinking underage thing.” Some kids drink in high school (men and women), many kids drink in college (men and women) and most go on to lead happy, productive lives. If they seem happier it’s probably because they in general relieve their stresses or are less anxiety ridden. Lots of stress and anxiety in young people these days or so the media seems to want to tell us. I’m firmly on record that I think the pre-gamming and the seemingly heavier use of vodka and other liquor is a problem so don’t misinterpret what I’m saying please.
An open letter just released and signed by a third of the Penn Law Faculty (media.philly.com/documents/OpenLetter.pdf) (Penn must have a great law school since they’re making many of the same points that I have 
)
alh - My experience with college drinking is 30 years old at this point and I only have my personal opinions to share. But like you were saying, it did seem like binge drinking (as a campus wide cultural norm) was more of an elite school phenomenon. We flattered ourselves by saying we drank too much because we had so much more academic stress to deal with. Here are a few disconnected opinions -
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I was in school as the drinking age was raised from 18 → 21. School sponsored parties went dry when the law changed. Now, these were never the most fun parties but they were often ok because the school had lots of money to spend on bands, etc. But when they went dry they became ghost towns.
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Before, guys drank much more than girls. In particular, as a group freshmen males had the lower status on campus, so they tended to drink while freshman woman didn’t as much. People tell me this has changed. Also, we mostly drank beer and not hard alcohol or wine.
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I’m not surprised there’s so much binge-drinking if “hooking-up” rather than dating is the dominant form of sexual interaction. Whether it’s due to the double standard or not, it strikes me that people need to drink so that they can blame their hookup on the alcohol. Otherwise, how do you “agree” to have one, and how do you tell the other person afterwards that you really don’t have any feelings for them? Especially if you are friends before that. Complete separation of sex from feelings seems unhealthy to me, and IMO encourages young males to think of women as things.
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Personally, when I was in a relationship I didn’t drink very much even though we still went to parties. When I had a girlfriend I never binge drank except a few times when one of the house’s traditions called for it. Even then, it seemed like the guys in relationships stayed in control of themselves a lot more.
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I always associated true binge drinking with sexually frustrated males. The “coolest” guys didn’t do it as much after freshman year with big exceptions for pledging, etc. Again, this seems to have changed.
As I mentioned earlier, I got Paying for the Party, an ethnographic study of 53 women on a floor at a “party dorm” at Indiana University. It’s scathing, and makes Indiana sound like a horrible, ghastly place.
We’ve talked before in this thread about how parents prepare their daughters to go to college, and the book points out that families with more education and more money know how to do that better than other families. (Privilege. We don’t notice it because we’re swimming in it.)
Here we have a description of how freshman women from privileged and less privileged backgrounds fare when they’re at fraternity parties:
My book won’t arrive till Monday. I’m a pretty fast reader, though. Will we have a book group here?
adding: I have been thinking about “protection by privilege” ever since these threads started. That is why the victim blaming grates me so. It is pretty easy to feel superior if you were never in that much risk in the first place.
That’s a great idea, alh. How about you start it up when you get the book and start reading?
okay, who else is in?
I highly recommend Paying to Party. But don’t buy it if you are looking for a book about sexual assault in college. It’s about the different expectations, preferences and “pathways” for students of different social classes. The book claims that the pathway most supported at Indiana is the “party pathway,” where students fling themselves into their social lives, typically in Greek organizations, and major in fields like Communications, or Apparel Merchandising.
I thought this was interesting. I hate to say it but when you look at the legal basis upon which the fraternity is suing Wesleyan, they just may well be on firm ground.
“Supported” how? What “support” is needed to follow a major of one’s choice? How are comm studies and fashion majors “more supported”? By whom and in what ways? Do they get applause and a cookie every time they finish a midterm? I’m not following.
Decent advising, for one thing, which in their telling is absent at Indiana. The students they follow who were successful at Indiana got a lot of help and advice from savvy parents. Someone should advise a working class young woman at Indiana that she should choose a real major, not Tourism.
Also, the book indicates that Indiana doesn’t provide good ways for students to socialize with other students other than fraternity parties-- at least for the students who end up in the party dorms. That’s not a problem for the rich out-of-state women who always intended to embrace the social pathway to success, who can afford the social pathway and who intended to live in party dorms, but it’s a big problem for the students who inadvertently ended up in party dorms. They end up socially isolated, without people to help them navigate what is for them the confusing world of college.
According to the book, the university is doing a bad job helping students who are not from wealthy backgrounds integrate into college. Four or five of the less wealthy students followed in the book ended up transferring from Indiana to regional campuses, which turned out to be better environments for students from their background. That’s an indictment of Indiana’s flagship school: it costs a lot more but it’s worse for those students.
The message of the book is: don’t send your kid to a party school. Not every kid blooms where they are planted. A lot of kids need the right environment, and mostly a party school is not it.
@al2simon, thanks for posting the Penn Law School letter. Along with the Harvard law professors’s letter, this letter is an important and thoughtful position statement, one that I believe will be echoed by other law schools and eventually by college administrations as well. I hope it doesn’t get lost in this fraternity/drinking focused thread.
I think the Penn professors’ conclusion is in keeping with the conclusions that many of us came to when delving into the Title IX mechanisms on the various other threads: that many of the rules mandated by the OCR are unfair, illogical, and impractical. In trying to fix one problem, the OCR has caused many others.
I agree fully that the DE’s OCR overstepped its authority in mandating how colleges must adjudicate sexual assault cases. The OCR has used its financial power to withhold funding to coerce the colleges to go against their better judgment and common sense resulting in complainant biased decisions.
I’m pretty well informed about the workings of our government and issues facing colleges, but before the Jackie/Rolling Stone debacle I have to admit I was totally ignorant of the power that the OCR had seized under the Title IX umbrella. I think if more Americans fully understood that these tribunals operate outside of our legal system’s respect for due process rights, they would, like me, be shocked by the overarching unfairness.
@Harvestmoon1, I think Wesleyan has painted themselves into a corner with this too cute by half policy. I wonder why they didn’t just give the frats the heave-ho as many other liberal arts colleges in their cohort have done.
But how do you reconcile this from the Penn letter:
with this from post your post above:
Perhaps softer language in the Penn letter but still implying that complainants somehow need some extra assistance, and a tacit acknowledgment that they have been shunned by the judicial system in the past. So when the criminal justice system becomes more “accessible” and “supportive” of the complainants, will we then have yet more cries of “biased decisions?”
Also do not overlook the fact that Janet Halley’s commentary deals with the “hard” cases. She acknowledges that. Let’s face it, the “hard” cases are going to be difficult no matter what forum they are adjudicated in. So let’s not pretend that by changing the rules or the forum that we will have some magical solution to these types of cases. And despite her indictment of the university tribunal system, which we all acknowledge has flaws, what solutions does she offer?
Halley talks about the difficulty in drawing the line between impaired by alcohol but still able to consent, and incapacitated by alcohol and unable to consent. To be sure, that’s a difficult line to draw. But states draw it in different places. So why we should object to colleges drawing it in different places? Why are we expecting consistency from colleges when we don’t demand it among staes?
I don’t see making the process of reporting sexual misconduct to the police less painful and humiliating to accusers, as being the same as victim-bias. I would like to see more alleged victims get to the point of being plaintiffs in courts of law, and I’d like to see them get sound legal advice in order to prove their cases, either from their colleges’ advocates or from outside counsel.
How is this unreconcilable with objecting to OCR coercion? Basically, I don’t think the OCR or the colleges should be in the business of adjudicating felony sexual assault. Any one who wants to know why I feel this way can read through the other threads on the UVA and Columbia cases.
I’m bowing out of this thread now. I only engaged to acknowledge the Penn letter, which I think is persuasive.
@momrath
It’s the DKE national that has painted itself into a corner by not allowing its Middletown local to accept women. Co-ed Greek or “literary” societies have been relatively successful at Wesleyan and it would be a shame to throw all the babies out with the bath water simply because of one house. This is all about parity of resources. DKE has one of the biggest social spaces on campus. It has to give up the house or go out of business.
I hope I am not supposed ti be impressed with what Janey Hailey wrote.
Guys lied in the Hobart and Smith case. Lied.
Hailey twisted the meaning of what happens to some victims.
Hailey looked at the most difficult cases.
Wesleyan has had some major issues with frats. The school is fed up…
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6249890
I believe there was a $10 million law suit in one of these cases.
Here is a case…
Halley is talking precisely about the difficult cases, which is what has occupied over a hundred pages of discussion on this and other similar threads. What do you mean by
Are you referring to the memory issues resulting from excessive, voluntary, drinking?
I thought her article, the Penn law professor’s letter and the previous Harvard law professor’s letter, were all interesting and informative in laying out the issues that colleges are facing and how the OCR has fallen short in considering all the implications. The Penn letter’s point about required comment periods in rule making is an important one. Generally, regulations require publication and public comment periods before being enacted.
If the government wants to implement Title IX for sexual assault across the board, then there should be a level of consistency in defining incapacitation. How do you draw the line if, in most such encounters, a women can be inebriated and chooses to engage in sexual activity and is fine with it, but another women, at the same level of inebriation, later decides she could not consent? How is the guy supposed to figure that out if there is not a clear definition in the school Rules? Halley specifically says in these cases she is talking about voluntary consumption by a women who appears capable of making a coherent decision and clearly consents.
All of these discussion come back to the need to better control binge drinking and drug use among college students.
College Confidential Book Club? I love it!