For a description of the actual school and its more than thirty thousand regular undergraduates, the reader must turn to publications like the Insider’s Guide: “huge lecture classes”; some “TAs can barely speak a word of English”; “difficult [for students] to get individual help”; mainly “multiple-choice tests,” and so on. In recent years, the Princeton Review has placed Michigan State near the top in its “Long lines and red tape” category, and also revealed what undergraduates do instead of fighting the MSU anti-educational system. In two categories, “Their students (almost) never study” and “Party school,” Michigan State ranked third in the entire country in 2000, earning these high finishes with a multitude of parties, even some riots, often accompanying Spartan sports events. Indeed, MSU undergraduates claim that the “Right to Party” movement of the 1990s originated at their school.
From the 1980s through the late 1990s, MSU students held tailgate parties before and after football games at Munn Field, near Spartan Stadium (“Biggie” Munn was a win-at-all-costs MSU football coach who took his teams to national prominence in the 1940s and 1950s). Because of the increasingly chaotic, sometimes violent, always drunken nature of the tailgate parties, MSU officials decided in the fall of 1997 to ban alcohol from Munn Field. This sparked student demonstrations at the time that exploded the following spring into a large-protest-rally-turned-major-riot. The MSU students rallied under the “Right to Party” movement, to the amusement of outside observers and the consternation of MSU officials.
Evoking the student protests of the 1960s, a newspaper columnist wrote that “the demonstrators weren’t agitating for a better tomorrow, they were agitating for a better Saturday afternoon.” Gary Trudeau in his “Doonesbury” comic strip mocked the MSU students, and the university president claimed that Trudeau and the rest of the media were uninformed and unfair. In fact, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Michigan State “led the nation for campus alcohol violations” the previous year; moreover, throughout the 1990s, many MSU students went to the emergency rooms of local hospitals with close to lethal doses of alcohol poisoning. Inevitably, in 1998, a MSU undergraduate died of an alcohol overdose, and to underline the horror of the story, when he passed out—but was still alive—his friends wrote “24 shots” on his body and painted his nose red.
The MSU president led a campus “Alcohol Awareness” campaign but the massive partying and drinking continued, much of it occurring before, during, and after intercollegiate athletic events. In fact, in 1999, after the men’s basketball team lost in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament, thousands of students, many of them drunk, rioted in downtown East Lansing, trashing cars and stores. Columnist Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times went to Michigan State to examine this phenomenon, particularly the connection between sports and drunken behavior (beer-and-circus). He remarked, “Sports was clearly some kind of excuse, a permission to go mad. Alcohol was a fuel, and this is the Bud Light generation to which beer, breasts, and ball games are inextricably bound.”
Without mentioning the mascot of Bud Light, Spuds MacKenzie, his entourage of “beautiful babes,” and their constant appearances in beer commercials tied to athletic events, Lipsyte connected the dots from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Possibly the young men and women rioting in the Right to Party movement had, as children, worn Spuds MacKenzie T-shirts and even played with Spuds toys. Now they had grown up, enrolled in college, many had joined fraternities and sororities, and they drank lots of Bud Light and other cheap beers.
Finally, for all of Michigan State’s promotion of its outstanding honors program, the vast majority of undergraduates at the school exist far from it, uninterested in academics and consuming their college years in beer-and-circus. A similar situation occurs at most Big-time U’s with honors divisions, and like Michigan State’s entry in The College Guide, these schools publicly promote their excellent and well-funded honors programs and never mention their deteriorating regular undergraduate education ones—as if somehow the flashy honors colleges compensate for the poverty of ordinary classes. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the enrichment of already affluent honors programs increases, and the impoverishment of regular undergraduate education also continues. This trend will prove hard to reverse.
PART THREE
BEER-AND-CIRCUS RULES
14
CHEAP BEER: THE OXYGEN OF THE GREEK SYSTEM
A cultural icon that connected 1990s undergraduates to their collegiate predecessors was the film Animal House—its hold on the imagination of many students, especially fraternity men, remaining undiminished during the final decade of the century. The film also provides a way into an examination of the contemporary collegiate subculture, particularly the infatuation with alcohol and the escalation of the drinking phenomenon known as binge drinking.
My father would always get very excited when WPIX [New York TV] would show Animal House, and would make sure that I would see it, even though [I was a child] … Now that I’m here [in college in 1997], I realize that fraternities, instead of consisting of drunk, rude womanizing morons in a decrepit, shoddy house, in fact, consist of drunk, rude, womanizing morons in cookie-cutter, antiseptic corners of university dormitories [where this school has placed them] … .
Luckily this film can be appreciated for its depiction of freewheeling, late-’50s college life … when you could go through life “fat, drunk, and stupid,” and nail random passed-out women when—well, I guess some things never change.
—A student film reviewer’s contribution
to an Animal House web page
Throughout the 1990s, as binge drinking by college students became a national issue, many commentators referred to the late 1970s film Animal House. Editorial writers termed it “a defining moment in many Americans’ perception of college fraternities and sororities,” and even Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, representing the “common man,” invoked it in explaining his opposition to new federal tax credits for university tuition charges: “What are we asking for [with these credits], National Lampoon’s Animal House? What kid at eighteen wouldn’t say, ‘I can go to college for two years, drink beer, chase women.’ Whether he wants to go to college or not, who wouldn’t go?”
Thus Animal House, set in the pre-Vietnam era and filmed after the war, provided a bridge for the collegiate subculture, particularly its alcoholic and sexual excesses, to span the last half of the twentieth century. When the 1990s media dug into the binge-drinking story, they spotlighted scenes of contemporary collegiate life that replicated the Animal House version of the 1950s, and even echoed the drinking culture of earlier decades. The Kansas City Star examined the Big-time U’s in its region, reporting that at Missouri (Columbia), and Kansas (Lawrence), “Students brag about going to a university with a ‘party school’ reputation,” featuring many Greek houses and big-time college sports teams. According to a KU internal poll, 92 percent of undergraduates there drank, 60 percent binged, and 40 percent had passed out one or more times from overdrinking. Another publication noted that at Kansas State at Manhattan, the Greeks have their annual “Patty Murphy” bash, “a party named after a fraternity member who allegedly drank himself to death during Prohibition, which features tombstones … as decorations.”
In the 1990s, when across the country increasing numbers of college students died from alcohol poisoning, and more than fifteen students at Kansas schools died in alcohol-related incidents during the decade, the “Patty Murphy” party seemed in poor taste—yet the university never ended this collegiate tradition. In fact, with the rise to national prominence of the Kansas State football team in the 1990s, the party scene at this university accelerated, the students having more to celebrate.
Television networks and national newspapers also focused on the collegiate drinking scene. USA Today, in a front-page feature, explained the connection of the past to the present: “Epic acts of alcoholic stupidity form the basis of a rich oral history, and the most legendary excesses ar
e burnished and passed down like treasured heirlooms” by one generation of collegians to the next. The main storytellers are often alumni, and they frequently gather in their old fraternity houses to narrate the tales and, on occasion, to try to relive them. Their universities support this subculture in various ways, including large displays in campus bookstores and gift shops of beer mugs, shot glasses, and other party paraphernalia—all with the school’s logo on them—as well as T-shirts and sweatshirts commemorating famous parties, particularly annual bashes.
In addition, even as some universities, upon the advice of legal counsel, banned alcohol from student housing units on their campuses, they allowed alumni to hold tailgaters on their property, and they entertained important grads at on-campus cocktail parties. Undergraduates quickly spotted the hypocrisy, one telling USA Today, “This is supposedly a dry campus, but you see people drinking on the porch of the president’s house. The rules only apply to some people.”
A senior at the University of Mississippi noted that his school’s alumni “would go ballistic” if Ole Miss actually enforced its liquor ban. That university, enveloped in its history, maintained its drinking customs throughout the 1990s. A Greek there described an important fraternity rush custom: houses have slide shows of “what their parties are like, and how crazy they can get.” This Greek admitted, “You think, ‘I want to be that crazy. I want to be in some of these pictures next year,’” and you join to party.
The last few years, the Insider’s Guide has run a section on the University of Mississippi titled, “Party, Party, Party,” including the student boast: “We may lose a game” in intercollegiate football or basketball, “but we never lose a party.” Ole Miss Greeks organize and run the school’s party scene, and alumni often return to their fraternities for drinking weekends; an undergraduate remarked that “husbands bring their wives and you see forty-year-olds passed out on the floor! It gets a bit ridiculous.”
Similar scenes occurred at many other beer-and-circus schools and indicated the immense volume of alcohol consumed by students and alumni in the collegiate subculture. Indeed, when researchers began to study this subculture, they discovered both its vitality and the large impediments to changing it. Not only does beer-and-circus have immense historical momentum, but, in terms of fraternities and sororities, those people most responsible for the members’ behavior—alumni officials and current chapter leaders—often drank the heaviest and caroused the most wildly.
Most studies indicated that alcohol consumption by Greek organization members escalated in the 1980s and 1990s and that many students belonging to other campus subcultures joined the party. One researcher even charted the drinking games popular with undergraduates and “found that previous generations of students knew of drinking games, but did not engage in the frequency and variety of games of today’s students,” nor did past collegians consume as much alcohol as contemporary undergraduates did.
In the 1990s, The Complete Book of Beer Drinking Games became a national best-seller. The book, according to its authors, began “during a beery evening,” and grew into a publishing phenomenon, with multiple reprintings and over a half-million copies sold, as well as “scores of angry letters from college administrators, and prudish Bible-thumpers.” Most of all, the book provided readers with detailed instructions on fifty beer-drinking games, including “all the old favorites” and many newer ones. In fact, the book probably prompted the consumption of more beer than any other single media source—except possibly Spuds MacKenzie.
The success of The Complete Book of Beer Drinking Games generated imitators and parallel volumes, including ones with college drinking songs. The most famous of these tunes—originating well over a century ago and capturing the essence of the collegiate subculture—with the name of the fraternity or sorority inserted in the blank space is:
Bring out that old silver goblet with the ____ on it,
And we’ll open up another keg of beer,
For it ain’t for knowledge that we go to college,
But to raise hell while we’re here.
In the 1990s, not all of the songs or comments published about Greek drinking were as cheerful or mindless as the famous song. Many newspaper and magazine headlines announced:
SIGMA DIE
CAN’T FRATERNITIES EXIST
WITHOUT BINGE DRINKING?
The death of a Louisiana State University student from alcohol poisoning this week again calls attention to the irresponsible and destructive behavior long associated with many college fraternities.
—Houston Chronicle
ALCOHOL CONTRIBUTED TO DEATH
AT IU [INDIANA UNIVERSITY]
FRATERNITY
A 19-year old Indiana University student choked to death on his vomit after drinking alcohol at a party at his fraternity, a Monroe County coroner’s report said.
—Indianapolis Star
BELLYING UP TO THE BAR
Are colleges doing enough to crack down on risky drinking? The stakes are high … alcohol poisonings kill an estimated 50 students annually.
—Newsweek magazine cover story
The newspaper adage—“If it bleeds, it leads”—definitely applied to the topic of student drinking in the 1990s. The more sensational the calamities from overdrinking, the more the media focused on the issue (similarly, when the mishaps became less dramatic, media interest declined—even though student binge drinking increased). One ancillary and positive result of the 1990s media spotlight was the attention that various researchers, quietly studying the subject for many years, finally received.
Raymond A. Scroth began his work on the connection between fraternities and drinking decades ago, and he ascertained that media and public interest in the topic was cyclical, following a definite pattern: “First the horror stories, [including] death and binge drinking statistics”; “Second: impassioned defenses” by fraternity and sorority members, particularly alumni, often in the form of “angry letters-to-the-editor [that] testify to the deep friendships Greeks form, and [that] accuse journalists of persecuting the Greek system.” The defenders become especially shrill when a commentator proposes banning fraternities and sororities from specific campuses or abolishing them nationally.
Scroth described the arguments about the Greek system, and also participated in them (as an abolitionist). Like most combatants on this topic, he ignored the wider university context within which fraternities and sororities exist. Greek houses can serve a useful function at some schools, particularly mammoth Big-time U’s, by providing students with human-sized residencies and immediate friendship networks. A young woman at the University of Washington explained:
Through my sorority, I found a group of friends who became a surrogate family for me and who made the hard times I experience at college bearable. The sorority is a home where I am a name and a face and not just another social security number, the only way this school relates to me. During my years here, I have felt totally alienated by the university, the teachers, and academic things in general. All I have are my sorority sisters. This house, with its social opportunities, friendships, and fun times, is what saves college for me, definitely not my academic endeavors.
However, fraternity and sorority friendships usually come with a price tag: conformity to group demands, including participation in drinking rituals and games. Yet, as the woman at UW explained, the academic aspects of her school “totally alienated” her, whereas the collegiate subculture embraced and engrossed her.
Professor Scroth’s third and final phase of the Greek-drinking-and-media-attention cycle is a cooling-out period during which university and Greek officials make “promises of reform.” They offer:
Proposals [that] imagine that a little tinkering with the system will make fraternities a creative force compatible with a school’s intellectual and spiritual goals. Yet, radical reform is impossible because fraternities, which have no purpose outside themselves—beyond their own bonding—can survive only by reinforcing thei
r own traditions … particularly their drinking ones.
In the modern era, Greek proponents answer charges like Dr. Scroth’s with lists of their charity work and, sometimes, their “house GPAs.” In an on-going attempt to change their image and to generate positive PR, fraternities and sororities engage in highly visible philanthropy, and they also publicize their group grade point averages—if those numbers are higher than the average GPAs of students in university dorms (at many schools, fraternity GPAs are lower than the student average and go unmentioned). Similarly, some Greek altruism is real, but sometimes it consists of fund-raising events for local charities featuring great quantities of alcohol and loud music.
Thus, Dr. Scroth’s critique of fraternities is narrowly correct, but, finally, he overlooks the main purposes of Greek organizations at public Big-time U’s—institutions without “intellectual and spiritual goals” for their undergraduates. In addition to providing housing and friendship networks for a significant percentage of undergraduates, the Greek system is central to a school’s “party scene.” Cheap beer provides the oxygen that keeps the Greek system functioning, and, in turn, this subculture pumps essential blood into a Big-time U, helping it maintain its beer-and-circus heartbeat. Without this synergy between the Greeks and Big-time U’s, the party scene would expire, and research universities would lose a large percentage of their main source of income—undergraduate tuition dollars—and probably wither and die.
Beer and Circus Page 20