Beer and Circus

by Murray Sperber

  Binge drinking is often very competitive. Some students try to outdo each other in drinking games … . There’s also a large bragging element to it. Students constantly boast about their drinking feats: how much they drank and how fast, and how many crazy things they did while drunk, even how they passed out. They can’t wait to see their friends the next day and tell them their stories. That is a huge part of the student drinking subculture.

  Indeed, the depth of the collegiate subculture, its participants’ sense of bingeing as a game and a rite of passage, and the media’s frequent glorification of these customs create maximum undergraduate resistance to university officials attempting to stop bingeing.

  An added impediment to changing the student drinking culture is the laissez-faire attitude of many residents in the communities surrounding a university, including numerous businesspeople who profit from student alcohol consumption. When the Stepping Up program began at UI, there were 94 establishments with liquor licenses within a mile radius of the campus, and 149 in the surrounding towns of Iowa City and Coralville. Three years later, more liquor license holders exist in these areas. In 1999 and 2000, during a number of visits to the campus and the town, this writer found a drinking scene very similar to those at other beer-and-circus schools, with crowded off-campus bars, as well as apartment complexes that, according to student residents, were the “new center of the party scene.” UI president Coleman acknowledged the flourishing off-campus drinking scene to the New York Times in March 2000.

  But University of Iowa administrators keep working on the binge drinking problem. A vice-president for student services explained that, among other measures, UI had instituted a plan “to reclaim Mondays and Fridays,” specifically, to persuade faculty to treat those days as regular school days and to end the tradition of “making fewer academc demands on students on those days because students are less alert after partying,” which, at Iowa and similar schools, gains full force on Thursday night and continues through Sunday evening.

  In fact, many undergraduates are not even in class on Fridays and Mondays, particularly if the Hawkeyes are on the road that weekend. “Lots of students here,” explained a fraternity man, “consider road games as a reason to take off for the weekend and join in supporting the Hawks away from home. We do it for all football and basketball away games on weekends. But my friends at other Big Ten and Big 12 schools do the same thing.”

  The “road trip” is an old fraternity tradition, not only prompted by sports events but by other reasons “to take off” for the weekend or even during the week; for example, every year, tens of thousands of students from many schools drive to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, often journeying thousands of miles. However, for away football and weekend basketball games, the road trip usually begins Friday morning and ends in the early hours of Monday morning. Friday and Monday classes are “washed out” for road trippers, as they are for many students on campus who begin their weekends Thursday afternoon and end them late Sunday night.

  As indicated by the Iowa vice president, often faculty are complicit in the “lost weekend” tradition; indeed, many professors at research universities want to do all of their teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The College of Arts & Sciences at Indiana University requests instructors in its departments to sign up for Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes to balance the excessive faculty demand for Tuesday-Thursday, and to use classroom space more efficiently, particularly the large lecture halls.

  Iowa’s attempt to reclaim Fridays and Mondays will encounter more obstacles than the designers of this initiative contemplated. Not the least of the problems are student contempt for undergraduate courses, particularly lecture classes, and faculty disdain in return. A professor at a championship beer-and-circus school, Florida State University, remarked:

  The only time to teach a regular undergraduate class at this school is Wednesday early afternoon. Students here stretch the party weekend into Tuesdays, and begin again late Wednesday afternoon. Because they sleep late every day, the only “window of opportunity” to catch them alert is Wednesday early afternoon … . That’s when I schedule my main lectures … . But many students still fall asleep in them, and some never do show up.

  Another Iowa antidrinking proposal is university sponsorship of “more campus social activities that do not feature alcohol, such as movies, concerts, speakers, and street dances.” On paper, this seems like an excellent idea, easily implemented and potentially successful. However, it is a plan conceived by members of the academic subculture for large numbers of collegiates. The latter attend movies, but they want to see the latest hit feature at the mall, not reruns available on videotape or, least of all, serious domestic or foreign films, the kind that most schools show on campus and that mainly attract academic and some rebel students.

  As for concerts, popular musicians generate large crowds, but many undergraduates want to consume alcohol or drugs while they listen to the music. The Princeton Review received a large number of student comments about university-sponsored concerts, summing them up with: “Few students are interested in any campus-sponsored activity if they know security guards will be actively enforcing the no-drinking [and no-drugs] rules.” They veto campus “street dances” and other official “parties” for the same reason. “A UI-sponsored party is a contradiction in terms,” said an Iowa honors student. “Most of us define ‘a party’ as meaning ‘to be free, to let go.’ Whoever heard of a good party given by a school?”

  As for attending speeches, even those given by famous speakers: most undergraduates so despise their lecture courses that they have minimal interest in hearing a university-sponsored speaker. Again, administrators belonging to the academic subculture conceived of this diversion for collegiates, and as a result, these talks attract few regular students. An Iowa official disputed this point, indicating that, for example, Bob Knight, the Indiana University men’s basketball coach, gives an annual public lecture at his school that attracts thousands of undergraduates. In fact, this is not an exception to the students-won’t-attend-speeches rule: for Indiana undergraduates, Knight represents big-time college basketball, a major part of their collegiate subculture, and they revere him even more than they do the Budweiser Frogs—whom they also would turn out to see.

  A Los Angeles Times health reporter visited Iowa City and investigated the effect of the school’s Stepping Up program. She listened patiently to the official explanations but then did her own inquiries, concluding, in part:

  It’s even hard to know whether students—many of whom have moved their parties to residences off-campus-are paying attention to the efforts going on around them. Dormitory literature making students aware of their rights to a clean, quiet, alcohol-free dorm seems to have stirred little interest or opposition.

  The comment about student life in the dorms connects to a phenomenon that this writer frequently encountered at Iowa and elsewhere: when administrators were asked how often they had been inside a student dormitory or a Greek housing unit in the last year, a majority admitted that they had not done so within that time frame or, in fact, in many years. (When faculty at research universities were asked the same question, most admitted that they had never visited a student housing unit—including professors who had taught at the same university for decades.) When administrators and faculty were asked whether they had ever been inside an off-campus student apartment, almost all acknowledged that they had not. Finally, when asked how far their own homes were from their school’s student dorms, Greek houses, and off-campus apartment complexes, most administrators and professors said that they resided in the “faculty ghetto,” an older residential area in the college town or, more often, in the new suburban tracts far from the university.

  The conclusion is obvious: For all of their talk about transforming undergraduate culture, particularly the drinking aspects, most university officials and almost all faculty do not possess a clue about how—and sometimes even where—their students live. When administrators est
ablish policies intended to change student behavior, they imitate blind people attempting to describe and then lead the proverbial elephant.

  Signs outside Bobby Dodd Stadium at Georgia Tech say, “No alcohol.”

  Inside, students drink Cokes spiked with smuggled liquor, and lustily sing the school’s “Ramblin’ Wreck” fight song [which includes] … the words, “I drink my whiskey clear.”

  When the band strikes up a favorite tune in the second half of Tech’s homecoming football game … they [the students] loudly join the chorus, “When you say Budweiser, you’ve said it all.”

  The divide between stated policy and reality points out the mixed messages about alcohol at Tech and other college campuses. Even with the drinking age at 21, stricter school policies regulating consumption, and more attention on the issue, drinking is still a favorite college pastime.

  The Atlanta Constitution investigated the late-1990s drinking scene at Georgia Tech and confirmed what the national studies had reported about similar schools: at this university, massive student alcohol consumption connected to a strong Greek system and big-time college sports. Moreover, at Tech, drinking was so deeply embedded within the collegiate subculture that it was essentially immovable. Students described how they snuck liquor into games—tying a flask to a shoestring and hanging it inside a pants leg was especially popular—and they bragged that their fraternities served all drinkers, including underage ones. Furthermore, the off-campus bar scene was huge and vast—it included hundreds of establishments all over Atlanta and neighboring Buckhead.

  In the 1990s, Georgia Tech put a substantial amount of money into its intercollegiate athletics program, upgrading its facilities and also paying its football and men’s basketball coaches enormous sums to turn out championship teams (on occasion, they succeeded or came close). And successful college teams produced large crowds, including students with flasks and other drinking devices. Yet the school officially banned alcohol in undergraduate housing units, and sometimes campus police enforced the prohibition. But student drinking at Georgia Tech, including bingeing, did not diminish.

  The Princeton Review edition of 2000 commented on this phenomenon nationally:

  We’d like to add an editorial comment based on numerous essays from angry students: CAMPUS WIDE DRINKING PROHIBITIONS DON’T WORK!

  The bottom line is clear: many Big-time U administrators want to have it all ways—big-time college sports and no beer—but that is an oxymoron. University officials welcome the circus, but now they wish to keep the beer wagons away; however, the collegiate subculture, aided and abetted by the alcohol beverage industry and the people who run college sports, demands beer. Whether college presidents and their hordes of assistants like it or not, beer-and-circus is a done deal, as permanent a part of their campuses as their Collegiate Gothic-style buildings. Whatever policies they conceive to combat alcohol consumption will only work in the most limited manner; indeed, more often they will trigger the law of unintended consequences. For example, if administrators force the drinking far enough off-campus, the number of drunk-driving accidents, even deaths, involving their students will increase.

  One of the arguments that the Princeton Review offers against the new campus-wide drinking prohibitions is that “students resent what they consider the school’s intrusion into their personal lives.” As noted, college administrators rarely speak to undergraduates about this problem; instead, they talk to so-called “student leaders,” but often these leaders have no followers, and generally they try to please administrators, not inform them of unpleasant, often brutal truths. The isolation of administrators is not only cultural—often they come from the academic subculture, and they have to deal with their natural antagonists, the collegiates—but also self-imposed. They refuse to closely examine the collegians on their campuses.

  At this point in this chapter, it seems best to listen at length to students themselves, particularly their comments in interviews, and their responses to the questionnaire for this book.

  Everything this school [Purdue University] does socially revolves around football and basketball games. To tell you the truth, I know very little about the rules and regulations of those games. They are purely an outlet for social functions with friends for me … . I guess that I have been taught and socialized to use college athletics as an excuse to party with friends.

  —A Purdue University senior female

  Queries probing the connection between beer and circus on the questionnaire and in interviews for this book prompted this comment from a Purdue senior, and statements from many other students, as well as some revealing numerical results. To the question: “At this school, college sports events are central to the party scene,” males and females responded in almost identical numbers: 64 percent “strongly agree” or “agree”; 10 percent “neither agree or disagree”; and 26 percent “disagree or strongly disagree.” When respondents were divided according to whether they attended a NCAA Division I or Division III institution—the standard separation between schools running big-time college sports programs, and those conducting low-profile, nonathletic scholarship ones—the Division III respondents accounted for almost all of the neutral and “disagree” answers.

  In their written responses, undergraduates at NCAA Division III schools provided such comments as, “Only the actual players and their friends party after games,” and “People here wouldn’t know how to tailgate if you gave them a demonstration in the stadium parking lot. Then again, we don’t have a stadium or a vast parking lot.”

  At big-time college sports schools, the written responses from men and women differed, the latter often offering comments similar to the Purdue senior’s. A University of Texas female explained,

  UT men are ultraserious about college sports and about drinking, but women here tend to take them at face value. We enjoy the thrill and hype associated with big games, but we view sports more as a social opportunity, as a reason to party, not as the center of your life, like my boyfriend and his fraternity brothers do.

  A Clemson woman remarked: “Sororities attend football games for the simple pleasures of drinking and tailgating. It seems to be more of an image thing than enjoying the football games themselves.” An Oregon State sophomore woman commented that “it all begins for female students here their freshmen year. They get caught up in the pre-, the during, and the postgame partying involving college sports games, with alcohol lowering their inhibitions, making it easier for them to meet people and socialize.”

  A senior female at North Carolina State distinguished between male and female students at her school: “Women like the party atmosphere around college sports games, but the men are totally into the sports and into the booze. If you write a book from this poll about how men love college sports, you should call it Big-time College Sports: A Tradition of Boozing and Brawling.”

  Male respondents explained themselves somewhat differently than did the females. An Indiana University male senior commented:

  B-ball games here are always sold out, and students often cannot come up with tickets … . But many prefer to watch the games in one of the B-town [Bloomington] bars rather than “the alcohol-free arena.” … Drinking with your [fraternity] brothers is a big part of watching a game and a whole lot better than cheering when dumb-ass cheerleaders tell you to.

  For away men’s basketball games, often scheduled on weekday nights, large numbers of students pack the bars at Indiana and other big-time college sports schools. A University of Iowa male remarked, “When the Hawks are on the road, the whole [fraternity] house goes down to the Sports Column [a local bar]. An away game during the week is a great time to party. If UI loses, then we drink to forget the loss. If we win, then we sometimes celebrate all night.”

  Even at some NCAA Division I schools without powerhouse men’s basketball teams, students go to bars to watch college sports events. An Ohio University male junior wrote, “Why go to OU basketball games when we can make the bar scene and watch a re
al college game on ESPN.” Another Ohio U student made a similar remark about not attending OU football games, but instead going to the bars in Athens and “catching top teams and staying warm and drinking with your [fraternity] brothers.”

  Some of the male respondents detailed their game-watching rituals, an Iowa senior noting that “if there is an away basketball game, my fraternity brothers and I usually arrive at Mondo’s [an Iowa City bar] at least two hours before the game. This assures us of a seat. Then we watch the game, and this translates into another three or four hours of drinking. This does not take into account the amount of partying that goes on long after the game, ’specially if the Hawks win.”

  Other students noted the amount of time spent drinking on football weekends, a Washington State senior commenting: “The day of a football game here is at least a fifteen-hour day of partying—usually until you drop.” However, a more systematic way of assessing the amount of time undergraduates at beer-and-circus schools spend partying is to calculate the totals from the queries on this subject on the questionnaire for this book.

  Question 15

  On average, during the school year, how many hours a week do you spend partying—at private functions and in bars—in conjunction with college sports events (include time spent arranging the party, traveling to and from the party, and at the party). Try to calculate your daily totals and then add on your weekend total. Mark the appropriate weekly amount.