From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
Tales Out of School
What do college students do when they aren't studying?
College freshmen typically spend about 12 hours a week in class and, according to the 2004 National Survey of Student Engagement, an additional 13 hours a week studying. Assuming naively that these numbers are accurate (students have been known to cut classes and exaggerate their studiousness), such demands on student time still leave 143 hours unaccounted for--87 if we figure in eight hours of sleep a night. That learning makes up a small part of college life today is widely acknowledged. The question remains: What is going on the rest of the time?
"My Freshman Year" tries to answer that question but succeeds only fitfully. The book is the account of Rebekah Nathan (not her real name), an anthropology professor at AnyU (a large state university), who takes a leave from her teaching position to go back to school as an undergraduate for a year. (Using hints from the book, an enterprising reporter at the New York Sun recently identified Ms. Nathan as a professor at Northern Arizona University.)
There is a bit of Margaret Mead in Ms. Nathan's self-presentation, as if she is discovering the folkways of a mysterious tribe. But her observations are less than earth-shattering. She notes a proliferation of bulletin boards on campus and sees minority students eating at lunchroom tables with other minority students. " 'Fun' [is] one of the most ubiquitous words in college discourse," Ms. Nathan declares. No aspect of college seems to get by her.
Yet "My Freshman Year" is inadvertently revealing. Most of Ms. Nathan's young peers, for instance, choose their classes based on what best fits into their schedules. Hint: nothing early in the morning and nothing on Friday. When she asks her fellow students, during registration, which course "made a difference in their lives," she finds that three of them mention the same course. So she quickly signs up for . . . "Sexuality." Readings include two collections of erotica.
In fact, though, students don't read much. Between going to class, holding off-campus jobs, sleeping and engaging in extra-curricular activities--you can guess a few of the obvious ones--reading really isn't a priority. Ms. Nathan takes this lesson to her own classroom when she returns to teaching the next year, deciding that she must limit the length of her syllabus and "hone the [reading] assignments to those I will actually employ in my classes." Let's see if we can follow the logic: Students don't read what they are assigned, so it becomes important to assign them less reading. Talk about a race to the bottom.
In "Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You," Barrett Seaman takes another kind of look at today's campus. Much of what he discovers there Tom Wolfe portrayed in a more entertaining form in the novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (2004), but Mr. Seaman's real-life details are still instructive. His account spans 12 elite universities, including Harvard, Middlebury and the University of Virginia.
Yes, "hooking up" is common. The sex "happens furtively," writes Mr. Seaman, "behind closed doors, under blankets and piles of laundry." Despite the domesticity of the dorms--"proximate room-dwellers treat one another more like brothers and sisters than sex objects"--Mr. Seaman admits to feeling "acute anxiety" about certain aspects of residential living, like co-ed bathrooms.
And he questions other shibboleths, like the notion that diversity has been an unqualified boon to higher education. In a chapter called "Is Diversity Working?" he records his conversations with a number of students who feel that ethnic identity has been overemphasized and that administrators are to blame. Rick Turner, a dean at UVA, tells Mr. Seaman bluntly: "Everybody knows that Rick Turner is the dean of African American students, not Latinos, not whites."
Mr. Seaman is rightly skeptical of programs meant to encourage racial harmony, gender sensitivity and every other politically correct attitude. He describes a meeting at Indiana University intended to discuss a racially insensitive cartoon in the student newspaper. Like other such attempts at consciousness-raising, it deteriorated into a shouting match, with everyone storming off angrily.
But Mr. Seaman strikes at the hearts of college administrators everywhere when he questions the entire industry of "student life": the dances, the shopping field trips, the inter-dorm volleyball games. With tuition climbing ever upward, he wonders about Duke's decision to spend $58,000 for an end-of-the-year party, $30,000 of which went to a rap star. He accuses colleges of coddling students and even asks a few officials "what they thought might happen if they abandoned programming altogether and just let students fend for themselves." Their gasps are almost audible. One suggested that student life might become "more haphazard."
It is apparent from Mr. Seaman's account that aimlessness per se is not the biggest worry: Colleges hope that midnight ceramics classes and campus-wide treasure hunts will not simply keep students occupied but distract them from at least one dangerous activity. Read: drinking.
Mr. Seaman confesses that, when he attended college in the 1960s, he belonged to a fraternity that served fellow students plenty of beer. But his own experience looks like a tea party compared with what goes on today. The number of alcohol poisoning fatalities has skyrocketed. Women, as part of a bid for equality, now go shot for shot with their male classmates. Heavy drinking begins Thursday night, if not earlier in the week. Students start drinking before they even get to a party, in case a supervisor is there trying to regulate what they consume.
Mr. Seaman argues that if states lowered the legal drinking age back to 18, there would be less covert campus bingeing and more normal alcohol consumption in bars and restaurants. But maybe there is another solution. Mr. Seaman himself notes the rise of drinking and the advent of grade inflation in the past few decades. Perhaps they're connected.
Experience shows that students who regularly fall down drunk or drag themselves around campus hung over are rarely prepared for class. What if it became hard to get good grades in college without devoting, say, at least 40 hours a week to attending classes and actually studying for them? One suspects that the alcohol problem--and many problems derived from idleness--would sort themselves out. Now there is something your college student won't tell you.
Ms. Riley is The Wall Street Journal's deputy Taste page editor and the author of "God on the Quad" (St. Martin's). You can buy "My Freshman Year" and "Binge" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
