The Five-Year Party (18 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
Police, however, were monitoring the internet site and knew about the students’ plans ahead of time. They blocked the college entrances with patrol cars; officers, armed with mace, tear gas, Tasers, and even live ammunition, formed a line around the campus. Alcohol was, of course, the main fuel for the riot, which lasted less than an hour. Estimates of the cost to repair the damage and reimburse the police for overtime were more than $100,000, all of which was billed to the college and ultimately came out of tuition money.
Many of my more responsible students were appalled by this behavior. A columnist for the student newspaper wrote: “How exactly does lighting stuff on fire, littering and smashing car windows constitute celebration?” He called the rioters “moronic,” and said it was simply the outlet for something else, “anger and rage fueled by the pent up angst and frustration felt by an entire generation against an establishment that doesn’t listen to them.”
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Many of these sports-based college riots grow out of tailgate parties in the parking lots of sports arenas right under the eyes of campus police, who stand by while thousands of underage students drink out of funnels. At Indiana’s three largest public universities, for example, the schools ban alcohol all week, but on game day administrators look the other way, allowing pickup trucks full of beer to drive into the parking lots, a flagrant conflict with the message of moderation that they preach the rest of the time. Some of these students get so drunk in the parking lots that they never make it to the game. Drinking starts at sunrise and lasts late into the afternoon.
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A party organized on Facebook in East Lansing, Michigan, near the campus of Michigan State, attracted four thousand students in April 2008. Police in riot gear arrested more than fifty-two people and had to use tear gas to reestablish order. What started with heavy drinking ended with four fires, thrown beer bottles, and arrests for everything from disorderly conduct to felony counts of inciting a riot.
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Like many of these kinds of riots, there were student film crews on hand to capture the festivities for YouTube.
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Like many of these kinds of riots, there were student film crews on hand to capture the festivities for YouTube.
Partygoers threw beer cans and bottles, women flashed their breasts to the crowd, and signs were torn down. When police arrived, students began to shout “Tear gas us!” But police used smoke grenades and devices that make loud noises and emit bright flashes before they finally granted the students’ wishes and used tear gas. Some students said the party was an attempt to revive Cedar Fest, an annual riot that had been banned for twenty years. When the riot was finally quelled just after 3:00 A.M., the streets were covered in broken glass and trampled lawns were covered in beer.
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On the night of April 25, 2009, there were separate riots going on at the same time near college campuses in two states, further demonstrating that these parties are planned events. At Kent State in Ohio, the annual College Fest ended in furniture-fed street fires and police in full riot gear. Witnesses said there were fires fifteen feet high in the middle of the street and students hanging upside down from trees nearby. Police in riot gear used nightsticks and rubber bullet guns to disperse the crowd. After the first fire was put out by firemen, students started three more nearby with two-by-fours torn from interior walls, doors from buildings, and mattresses.
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At exactly the same time, students were rioting in Dinkytown, the student ghetto adjacent to the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Students tore down tree limbs and set them on fire in the middle of the street. When students began tipping over parked cars, the police arrived wearing gas masks and spraying pepper spray.
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Although students dismiss this kind of behavior as “ just letting off a little steam,” there is a potential for disaster when thousands of intoxicated students confront armed police in the presence of local property owners who are terrified by what is happening. Party school administrators have to walk a fine line, defending students’ rights to have a good time to protect their marketing position and not getting a reputation for being unfriendly to binge drinkers. A common policy is to step in only when the riots spill out into the community and get covered by the news media.
This kind of consequence- and responsibility-free culture can have particularly damaging effects on students with behavioral and psychological problems. When they are in high school, these students are required to undergo extensive counseling supervised by parents and school officials who are updated on the students’ progress and current state in order to best help them in life and in school. But when they reach the age of eighteen, they are left entirely on their own to manage their own care. Not surprisingly, many of them simply stop taking care of themselves, endangering themselves and those with whom they come in contact.
“Many colleges appear to be more cauldrons of mental perturbation and emotional turmoil than legendary ivory towers,” according to an article in
Psychiatric News
. Mark Reed, director of counseling at Dartmouth, said the most common complaint from students was mood disorders, followed by relationship issues involving romantic and family issues. There are also many cases of anxiety disorders, social phobias, eating disorders, and substance abuse. Many of the students he saw had more than one disorder and at his college alone there were fifty students a year taking a leave of absence for psychiatric reasons. As recently as 1996 the number was only eighteen.
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Psychiatric News
. Mark Reed, director of counseling at Dartmouth, said the most common complaint from students was mood disorders, followed by relationship issues involving romantic and family issues. There are also many cases of anxiety disorders, social phobias, eating disorders, and substance abuse. Many of the students he saw had more than one disorder and at his college alone there were fifty students a year taking a leave of absence for psychiatric reasons. As recently as 1996 the number was only eighteen.
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Jackie Ayers, director of mental health services at the University of Florida, said the most common disorders there were depression, stress, anxiety, learning disabilities, and psychological trauma as a result of sexual assault.
The National College Health Assessment, published in the spring of 2000, interviewed more than sixteen thousand students at twenty-eight colleges. It found that 10 percent of students had been diagnosed with depression. The U.S. Department of Education reported that between 1999 and 2000, arrests for substance abuse on campus increased by 4 percent, drug arrests were up 10 percent, and murders were up 45 percent.
The number of students with major depression or anxiety disorders has increased sharply during the past five years, according to the October 3, 2001, issue of the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
Morton Silverman, director of student mental health services at the University of Chicago, said most of the mental problems he treated were brought to the college and did not originate while the students were in college.
Chronicle of Higher Education.
Morton Silverman, director of student mental health services at the University of Chicago, said most of the mental problems he treated were brought to the college and did not originate while the students were in college.
Richard Kadison, director of mental health services at Harvard, said, “I think there is a general sense that we are seeing much sicker people in college now. We are hospitalizing more people and people are demanding more attentive psychotherapy services.”
Incoming freshmen are increasingly arriving at college with bipolar disorders that require five or six medications to keep them stable enough to function, but with no one around to make sure they take their medications, students sometimes forget or take themselves off their meds, resulting in campus incidents that endanger innocent students.
Once again, the law that assumes that anyone who reaches the age of eighteen is an adult vastly overestimates the maturity of college students. Students who depended on their parents to make sure they took their medications and to look after every aspect of their lives were often helpless without them. College policies designed to protect privacy prevent the college from contacting parents or teachers, who have no idea which of the students in class are a potential risk to themselves and others.
Keeping a psychiatric disorder under control in the all-night drinking and partying environment of a college campus can be a challenge for even the most motivated students. Separation from parents, which is difficult for many students, can be much harder for these students.
In some cases, the environment appears to exacerbate, or even actually cause, psychiatric problems. In Alan R. DeSantis’s 2007 study of Greek life, he found the interesting phenomenon of women starving themselves and taking laxatives to get smaller, while men took steroids and exercised compulsively to get bigger. He found women who took up cigarette smoking as a way of curbing their appetites and who routinely pressed their fingers down their throats to throw up their lunches and dinners. Sorority sisters described how they would stuff themselves at a Chinese buffet, then go into the bathroom together and throw it all up. Then they would head out to the bars.
Eating disorders are among the most common complaints dealt with by college mental health clinics. With access to all of that gourmet food in the dining commons, freshmen women often find themselves gaining fifteen pounds or more and then struggle to get rid of it. Men who are unhappy with the results gained from lifting weights find they can easily obtain steroids and human growth hormone from dealers on campus.
Suicide rates are another ever-growing issue. A study of thirteen thousand Kansas State University students treated at the university counseling center from 1989 to 2001 showed that the number of students suffering from depression had doubled to 41 percent. The percentage of students who were considered suicidal also doubled to 9 percent. A study of students at Big Ten campuses found that the overall suicide rate was 7.5 per 100,000 students, about twice the rate of non-students in the same age group.
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The American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment, which interviewed ninety-five thousand students at 117 campuses, found that 9 percent of students had seriously considered suicide and one in one hundred attempted it.
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The American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment, which interviewed ninety-five thousand students at 117 campuses, found that 9 percent of students had seriously considered suicide and one in one hundred attempted it.
I encountered students who had used a razor blade to cut themselves along their arms; when I suggested that they should go to the counseling center, they told me to mind my own business. I also met students who had inserted metal objects such as paperclips and pins under their skins. When I inquired about this practice at the college’s counseling center, I was told there was a name for this: self-embedding disorder. Although all colleges have counseling centers, disturbed students can’t be compelled to seek treatment. Some schools do have required treatment sessions. At the University of Missouri, for example, if a student attempts suicide, the college mandates four counseling sessions. However, at my school and many others, it is entirely voluntary and many students refuse, endangering not only themselves but their fellow students.
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Some students are able to negotiate their way through the party school minefield for five years without becoming victims—or perpetrators. Many do not. Administrators are aware of all these problems but do nothing because cracking down on irresponsible behavior might anger the party students they need to pay the bills. Even when students die of alcohol abuse, the party goes on, endangering not just the binge drinkers but every student on campus.
Covering up student misbehavior is a major preoccupation of party school administrators. Allowing students to do whatever they want for five years would not be tolerated by parents or the public if they knew what was taking place, so colleges make sure that they don’t find out. The next chapter will detail the drastic steps that party school administrators take to make sure the public stays in the dark about what really goes on behind the college gates.
5
An Obsession with Secrecy
W
hen Jay Wren sent his nineteen-year-old son Jason off to the University of Kansas in August 2008, it was with some mixed emotions. Although he was proud that his son, a popular honor student and defensive back on the Arapahoe High School football team, had been admitted to his college of first choice, he was also worried about his son’s safety. Jason’s pattern of binge drinking in his hometown of Littleton, Colorado, had led to run-ins with the police and his father was worried that because of its reputation as a party school, KU might turn out to be a dangerous place to send his son.
hen Jay Wren sent his nineteen-year-old son Jason off to the University of Kansas in August 2008, it was with some mixed emotions. Although he was proud that his son, a popular honor student and defensive back on the Arapahoe High School football team, had been admitted to his college of first choice, he was also worried about his son’s safety. Jason’s pattern of binge drinking in his hometown of Littleton, Colorado, had led to run-ins with the police and his father was worried that because of its reputation as a party school, KU might turn out to be a dangerous place to send his son.
Jay Wren called the college regularly that fall, seeking assurances that his son was not drinking or getting into trouble. His calls were passed around from office to office, but the answer to his question was always the same. Student disciplinary records are protected by a federal privacy law, he was told. “We’d like to tell you,” he was told by college officials, “but our hands are tied. We could lose our federal funding if we broke the law and told you.” Jay Wren carefully explained his concerns with each college official he spoke with. All he wanted, he said, was a yes or no answer. Was his son getting into trouble? The only response he received was silence.
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