Binge

Barrett Seaman

Description

In Binge, Barrett Seaman reveals what every parent, student, and educator needs to know about the college experience. Seaman spent time with students at twelve highly regarded and diverse colleges and universities across North America­. During his two years of research, he immersed himself in the lives of the students, often living in their dorms, dining with them, speaking with them on their own terms, and listening to them express their thoughts and feelings. Portraying a campus culture in which today’s best and brightest students grapple with far more than academic challenges, Binge conveys the unprecedented stresses on campus today. While sharing revealing interviews and the often dramatic stories, Seaman explores the complexities of romantic relationships and sexual relations, alcohol and drug use, anxiety and depression, class and racial boundaries, and more. Despite the disturbing trends, Seaman finds reasons for optimism and offers provocative and well-informed suggestions for improving the undergraduate experience. Sometimes alarming, always fascinating, and ultimately hopeful, Binge is an extraordinary investigative work that reveals the realities of higher education today.
Acknowledgments.

Introduction.

1 Daily Res Life.

2 Hooking Up: Sex on Campus.

3 How Hard Are Students Studying?

4 Emotional Troubles.

5 The College Alcohol Crisis.

6 The Date Rape Dilemma.

7 Is Diversity Working?

8 Fraternities and Sororities under Siege.

9 The Morphing Drug Scene.

10 College Sports and Res Life.

11 What’s the Right Drinking Age?

12 Who’s in Charge?

13 Improving the Undergraduate Experience.

Notes.

Index.

Sujets

• Substance Abuse
• Binge
• Self-help
• Addictions
• Alcohol

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 10 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781118040041
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
 
Chapter 1 - Daily Res Life
Chapter 2 - Hooking Up: Sex on Campus
Chapter 3 - How Hard Are Students Studying?
Chapter 4 - Emotional Troubles
Chapter 5 - The College Alcohol Crisis
Chapter 6 - The Date Rape Dilemma
Chapter 7 - Is Diversity Working?
Chapter 8 - Fraternities and Sororities under Siege
Chapter 9 - The Morphing Drug Scene
Chapter 10 - College Sports and Res Life
Chapter 11 - What’s the Right Drinking Age?
Chapter 12 - Who’s in Charge?
Chapter 13 - Improving the Undergraduate Experience
 
Notes
Index

Copyright © 2005 by Barrett Seaman. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data :
 
Seaman, Barrett.
Binge: what your college student won’t tell you / Barrett Seaman.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13 978-0-471-49119-4 (cloth) ISBN-10 0-471-49119-5 (cloth)
1. College students—Social conditions—United States—Case studies. 2. College students—United States—Attitudes. I. Title.
LB3605.S382 2005
378.1’98’0973—dc22
2005001252
 
For Sidney Wertimer, a model of what college teaching was and can be again
Acknowledgments
The fingerprints of many knowledgeable and thoughtful people are all over this book. Because the benchmark for all my observations about college life was my own experience, first as a student and more recently as a trustee of Hamilton College, I owe a debt to all of my colleagues on the Hamilton board as well as to the administrators and faculty members who helped steer my thinking. I am particularly grateful to Eugene M. Tobin, Hamilton’s eighteenth president, who encouraged me to tackle this complex topic and to be forthright in my opinions about it. Professor Sidney Wertimer, to whom I have dedicated this book, and his wife, Eleanor, were constant sounding boards throughout the many evenings I haunted their living room on College Hill Road over the years. And Nancy Thompson, the college’s dean of students, patiently fielded my many questions and requests.
Todd Shuster of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth was instrumental in reshaping my proposal for Binge from a linear look at contemporary student behavior into a richer examination of campus culture. Tom Miller, my editor, furthered that growth by urging me to seek out and report the more varied student voices that are heard throughout these pages. Elizabeth Sampson, Georgetown class of 2002, chased down facts and anecdotes beyond the twelve campuses I covered.
My three college-educated daughters, Kate, Maggie, and Lily, listened patiently to my theories, enriched my understanding of their generation’s experiences, and tried at least to prevent me from embarrassing myself. No one was more supportive than their mother and my wife, Laura, who patiently endured my long absences while I was off visiting campuses—and an even longer absence while I sat writing in my office under the same roof. Laura read and synopsized for me numerous books about modern parenting. She also read my manuscript with the discerning eye of the careful reader that she is.
I thank the many college administrators who not only allowed me to hang out on their campuses but also detailed for me the exigencies of modern college life from their perspective. Above all, I owe thanks to the hundreds of college students who took the time to educate a visitor to their world. So many were articulate and extraordinarily forthcoming. Some were particularly gracious in reaching out to their peers on my behalf: Claire Bourne, Middlebury class of 2004; Catherine Dale, Dartmouth class of 2004; Jessie Duncan, Stanford class of 2005; Mina Pell, Harvard class of 2004; Cory Schouten, Indiana class of 2004; and Anthony Vitarelli, Duke class of 2005 each took the time and effort to find others on their campuses who could personalize the issues I explore in this book.
Introduction
Those of us who were privileged to attend a four-year residential college tend to wear the experience like an identity badge. For better or worse, our college years helped to shape us. But our memories of them remain frozen in frames that might have been taken from an old movie about campus life. We likely missed all the changes that occurred on campus after we left and went about our adult lives, leaving us with anachronistic assumptions of what it must be like to be a student today.
My hiatus lasted nearly twenty years. In the mid-1980s, I was invited to reinvolve myself with Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, from which I had graduated in 1967. I was in Washington, D.C., by then, covering the White House for Time magazine. My reengagement rapidly escalated, and within a few years I was elected to the college’s board of trustees. I started returning to Hamilton’s picture-postcard campus. Each time I drove up College Hill Road and saw the chapel spire rising above the weathered dolomite walls of the buildings surrounding the main quadrangle, I was filled with nostalgia and a sense of deep personal identity with the place. I saw it just as it had been when I was a student.
College board meetings tend to be well-orchestrated affairs. Once a quarter, along with other trustees, many of whom were also graduates of a Hamilton that was all male prior to 1978, I returned for two days of meetings where we listened as administrators reported on the state of the college, asked probing questions, and eventually approved expenditures. The few students who joined us for meetings were invariably the campus leaders—able, articulate, and generally supportive of the administration. A couple of times a year, we were afforded opportunities to meet with larger groups of students, usually seniors, at receptions and dinners, where they spoke eloquently about what they’d learned and what they aspired to do next.
Occasionally, a student would make a caustic aside about the latest rule governing parties or the prep school atmosphere that students claimed was choking all the fun out of college life. Having spent four years at a prep school myself, I thought such comparisons seemed harsh: the Hamilton I knew was a libertarian dream compared to life at Phillips Academy-Andover. And Andover was considered one of the least restrictive of the New England prep schools.
Gradually, I began to understand how different a place Hamilton had become from the essentially uncomplicated and loosely governed community of eight hundred young men and their teachers and coaches I had known in the mid-1960s. We board members who had been on College Hill when single women were only occasional visitors found it hard to fathom how students of both sexes could comfortably share the same dorms, even the same bathrooms. Not only are women there now but also many more African Americans, Hispanics, and out and organized gays. The athletes are a lot bigger and their coaches have full-time assistants. There are also many people employed by the college who do not teach but seem more involved with the students than are the professors. They work in a division known as Residential Life, or, in the campus vernacular, Res Life.
There are people known as area coordinators who oversee more than fifty residential advisors—students paid to proctor other students in campus residence halls. In my day, there were just six seniors who kept watch over the entire freshman class in the one dorm assigned to us; thereafter, we were on our own. Now there is a full-time student activities director who assists campus clubs. I don’t recall anyone performing that function in the sixties, except professors who had a personal interest in the French club or the biology club or the Charlatans, the campus drama society. Whereas a single night watchman guarded the college then, Hamilton now has a security force of about ten officers who seem t