Party Schools Exposed

Who is guilty of date rape on today's college campuses?

I recently had a chance to testify before a state committee looking into the number of crimes committed on college campuses and how colleges were covering them up. Nothing was more controversial than the number of rapes that take place.

The same day I testified a former U.S. attorney testified that while investigating a drug ring on a local campus he found by accident a number of rapes that were never officially reported to campus authorities. I testified about the ridiculously low numbers of officially reported rapes on campuses and how colleges deliberately underreported rapes to protect their images as "crime-free" zones. Colleges rarely report more than one or two rapes per year even though rape counseling centers see a dozen victims a month.

A national survey a few months ago found that 95 percent of campus rapes were never reported.

This week, a column written by an American University student for the student newspaper created a firestorm when he suggested that a woman who gets drunk at a fraternity party and walks home with a guy has actually agreed to have sex with him and is not a victim of date rape even if she is forced to have sex. You can read a Washington Post news story about the column  and the original column here.

The controversy here is over the concept of "consent" which is what separates hooking up from rape, but the real fly in the ointment here is alcohol, which tends to make the whole idea of "consent" somewhat nebulous. In New Hampshire, where I live, an intoxicated woman is incapable of giving consent and therefore anyone who has sex with her is guilty of date rape.

Anyone familiar with a party school campus, knows that nearly half of the women are legally intoxicated at any one moment and a lot of sex takes place on and off campus. So are there hundreds, possibly even thousands of rapes taking place every weekend? Legally, I think that is the case.

But these are crimes in which neither the perpetrator nor the victim may be aware that a crime was committed.

At SUNY Albany, where I used to be a reporter, there was an effort by feminists on campus to get women to sign a written consent form before they had sex. The feminists also collected a list of women who had sex "but wished afterwards that they had not," and sent out a news release that said that thousands of students were rape victims. This attracted national attention, but was such poor public relations for the college that the public relations people forced the feminists to retract their statement.

Coming up with a solution to this problem won't be easy, particularly when colleges like Keene State and Franklin Pierce insist before the state committee that no rapes take place on campus. None. Zero. Nada. Educating students about rape and consent and alcohol would help, perhaps, but I think it will take more than that to fix this problem. But covering it all up, which is what most colleges do, helps no one and merely perpetuates the rape culture on campus where female students are victims and perpetrators know there is little chance of being caught or punished.

College considers the ultimate student perk: a brewery on campus

Readers of this blog are aware of the outrageous perks on which colleges spend millions to attract students who aren't all that thrilled about education.

There are giant hot tubs, climbing walls, indoor golf ranges, water parks, condo-like  residences, food courts and, at High Point University, a free ice cream truck and concierge services.

But when students are asked what else would make them happy, there is always one thing on the top of the list that colleges dared not even consider for fear that students' real purpose for attending a party school would be exposed. But now, that final barrier, the place where no college has gone before, the ultimate student perk, has arrived.

Louisiana State University if considering building a brewery on campus.

Read the story here.

Now how on earth will any other college compete with that? But you can see the logic. Why allow all that student money to go off campus to the townie bars when we can do it better right here? Let's cut out the middle man and allow the students to get shit faced right on campus! We can schedule classes right in the brew pub!

You can see the advertisements they have ready to go:

LSU where credit hours are happy hours!

LSU We party in our own dive!

L.S.U.  Liquor Served Universally

You can bet that if they get away with this, other colleges will be forced to follow in their footsteps and campus breweries will become as common as libraries. "Give the Students What they Want," a motto adopted by many college administrators eager to increase enrollment,  may soon become their death knell.

Thank you to BP for sending me this gem!

Higher ed critic quotes from "The Five Year Party"

Mark Bauerlein, the Emory University English professor who wrote "The Dumbest Generation" is not the kind of guy to remain silent when party school emperors parade around with no clothes. He has shown over and over that he's not afraid to speak his mind when he finds college students who would rather party than learn how to read.

When my publisher asked me for a list of readers to send advance copies of my book to, he was right up at the top of the list. It's very gratifying to find that he not only read my book, but praised it and even quoted from it in his blog.

So let me step aside and surrender the podium to Professor Bauerlein while I sit on the sidelines blushing modestly while you read his blog post "Another Source of Disengagement" here.

College president files fraudulent expense reports -- for 10 years

Readers of this blog should not be surprised that college administrators often get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. After all, their quarter-million-dollar salaries and free housing makes it hard for them to make ends meet. Besides they can always just jack up the tuition price whenever they need some extra cash.

But Karen Pletz seems to be in a category all her own.  

The former president of the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, who was fired last year under mysterious circumstances, is now being sued by the college for fraud and making millions of dollars worth of false claims on her expense account.

The college is asking Pletz to return millions of dollars of fraudulent claims, many for meals with people that she never shared with anyone. This includes $10 lunches at McDonalds all the way up to expensive eateries.  About 70 percent of her claims over the past decade were found to be fraudulent.

You can read the full story in the Kansas City Star.

The reason this happens over and over again is that too many people think college administrators are essentially altruistic individuals who put their personal integrity above personal gain. Unfortunately as colleges turned themselves into businesses, the CEOs transformed themselves into Gordon Gekko. "Greed is Good" is the new college motto.

Unfortunately, no one is keeping an eye on these crooks and they get away with robbing the store year after year. States need to step in and audit the books of colleges and their administrators. But part of the blame also goes to the members of the press, who seem to have taken higher education off their lists of things to check. Instead of "keeping them honest" as Anderson Cooper likes to say, newspapers have declined to do even the most basic reporting about how much college administrators get paid and how the numbers of administrative jobs  skyrocket each year.

Penn State, top party school, considers less student-centered policies

You have to feel sorry for Graham Spanier, president of America's top party school.

When Princeton Review named his school at the top of the list, it created a lot of publicity, but not the kind colleges crave. Students looking for a great place to party flocked to the place and that was good for admissions, but it hardly helps to attract the best qualified professors and administrators. Serious students also tended to stay away.

And like other top party schools from Florida to Arizona to UMass, Penn State is working overtime to prove to the world that it can do something else besides making Jello shots and taking unconscious students to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped.

Lots of people are offering him some assistance with his task, including Jeff Kern, a local columnist who offered this bit of advice.

Making colleges more "student-friendly" has been a tremendous disaster in the field of higher education. It's not that it's difficult to do. It's not. Dumb down the classes. Inflate the grades. Move the add / drop deadline to the end of the semester, fire teachers who want to maintain high standards, ignore any kind of alcohol rules, build a lot of water parks, climbing walls, luxury condos and gourmet dining courts. What you end up with isn't really a college any more but a kind of adolescent theme park. Exactly the kind of place that slackers want to stay for six years or so.

Bringing back 8 a.m. classes, requiring attendance, tossing out the binge drinkers, giving students the grades they really deserve, requiring students to go to class on Fridays instead of beginning the weekend on Thursday afternoon would piss students off to no end.

But in the end that may be exactly what we are going to have to do if colleges are ever going to be able to take themselves seriously again.

Student covered in toilet paper, set on fire at frat house

To the long list of hazards to be avoided on party school campuses we can now add the danger of being covered in toilet paper and set on fire.

Such was the fate of a student at the University of Kentucky last weekend. You can read the full story here.

One fraternity brother has been charged by police with arson and another has been charged with assault after slugging a cop and yelling "fuck you!" at him. This second student, it turns out, was the son of a federal judge.

As they say, today's college students are the leaders of tomorrow.

So what are the consequences of this little prank? The fraternity. Sigma Alpha Epsilon, has been suspended by its national affiliate and the fraternity house has been closed (yea!) but only temporarily. (boo!) The student perps are back attending classes and the college has made no move to discipline them in any way.

Why not? Hey, these are paying customers and we need their tuition. If we expelled them they would just go to another college where their pyrotechnical experiments would be welcome as long as they keep their tuitions paid.

So how serious was this little prank?  Well, according to the police chief it was a narrowly averted tragedy.

"Just a couple more minutes, and the student could have been seriously injured or the fire spread ... It could have been a tragedy."  There are 50 people who live in the building and fire inspectors found numerous fire code violations including blocking of the fire detectors. In other words, a few more seconds and the headline would have been "50 dead in college arson."

Fraternity hazing pranks tend to be repeated by copy cat frat boys, so perhaps the next time somebody will be successful in burning down the house. College administrators who turn their backs on this kind of thing need to share the blame.

Keene Party School Anthem: "Livin' up your college dream...NOT!"

For nearly two years now I've been attempting to describe in this blog what life is like for students on a party school campus, and now two freshmen have done it in just four minutes! This is definitely a must see for anyone considering sending children to a subprime party school. Check it out:

Keene Anthem by Lauren Foley and Dylan Welch freshmen at Keene State College in New Hampshire.

Lauren and Dylan are obviously creative and talented young people who need a little guidance about libel and invasion of privacy, but the tune is catchy and the lyrics are spot on in describing the empty lives of students at a party school campus where students spend their time "runnin' around that party scene" that consists of frat parties, chicken patties, anonymous sexual hookups, drugs, "drink all night" and professors that get drunk with their students.

The repeating chorus is:

"Keene, you know what I mean, runnin' around that party scene,

Keene, you know what I mean, living up your college dream....NOT."

And what do they have to say about classes, which their parents think are the reason they are there?

"Yo it's Keene State, time for class,

You gotta be retarded if you can't pass."

Then goes on to say the writer has straight A grades without doing any work. In other words, as I said, spot on.  Since they are freshmen, however, they probably do not yet understand that spending five years at this anti-intellectual adolescent resort can leave them $25,000 in debt and unable to get a job using their party school diplomas, which employers understand are worthless pieces of paper.

Just a couple of weeks ago I met one of my former students named Mallory in the Keene Friendly's Restaurant. The waitress job was her second job. She was also employed as an "executive assistant" (secretary) and was working to pay off her college loans. I nearly choked when she told me she owed $30,000! I tried to calculate how many tips she would need to raise that amount of cash. She said she chose Keene State because it was a party school, even though she was accepted at other colleges. Bad idea.

So what we have here is a simple bait and switch.  The college administrators lure these kids to the five-year party so they can participate in the lifestyle described in the video and set them up with predatory lenders. They tell the kids they can "be anything you want to be" and give them the loan application forms. Then, after graduation, they get to work at Friendly's for 30 years paying back the loans. Instead of being anything they can be they get to be the one thing colleges like this prepare them for...a life of poverty.

But Lauren and Dylan don't know about that part yet.

Ironically, this video is likely to attract thousands of applicants to Keene State. There are tens of thousands of high school students who can't wait to sign up for the five-year party. The college may have to hire some additional admissions people to handle the onslaught. But admitting even more party students, as profitable as that is, will only increase the college's well-earned reputation as a place where education is only a side show.

Two years ago the college hired a consultant to try to eliminate the number of hits received by a student-produced video about campus riots after the aRed Sox won the World Series. The college taped interviews with students and posted them on You Tube. But Dylan and Lauren have already trumped that effort. Their video has been up less than a month and already has nearly 2,000 hits and the previous audio-only version has nearly 2,000 more. Time to hire another consultant or just throw in the towel and admit that hell yes, we supply the party. Show up and have the time of your life!

If you know someone who is considering sending a child to a party school, please send them this video. You can also ask them to take a look at the 2005 PBS video called "Declining by Degrees," which deals with the same problems without the music. You will be doing them a tremendous favor and save them tens of thousands of dollars.

Glossary for people who are not from Keene:

DC - the dining commons

Wilson Street - the "student ghetto" just outside the campus

Randall - the dormitory where freshmen live

dmb - The Dave Matthews Band

Mailcruiser - the college-run e-mail system, which students hate

PMD - the campus fraternity that most resembles Animal House

Lloyd's - a campus eatery

Roids - steroids

Camp Co - Campus Convenience - a store just off campus

Blackboard - a college computer program used to communicate with students who don't go to classes.