Today’s College Capers Make “Animal House” Look Tame

Review by Mike Gange

Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You

by Barrett Seaman

Wiley Books, $25.95 US, $33.99 CDN, 320 pages

Life on campus today is a lot more convoluted and complicated than it was for those who went to university a generation ago. Beer bashes and romantic interludes are only a slim part of today’s university culture; thornier issues such as eating disorders, increased suicidal attempts, and a whole array of available drugs – both prescribed and illicit – have students on campus navigating their way through problems completely unimaginable to their parents’ generation.

Barrett Seaman’s Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You is a revealing, and often disturbing, look at the pressures faced by those attending university today. Seaman is a former Time magazine reporter; he graduated from college in 1967. To research this book, he went back to campus, spending time with students at a dozen highly respected universities across North America, including Montreal’s McGill University. Seaman arranged to live in the student dorms at such notable universities as California-Berkley, Duke, Dartmouth, Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford. He found that college life is a far cry from what it used to be a generation ago, especially in college kids’ attitudes towards coupling, drinking and ethics.

Most campuses now employ four times as many counselors as they might have two or three decades ago, and they are still hard pressed to deal with the number of students suffering from depression, attempting suicide, tormented with eating disorders, or prone to anxiety attacks. These afflictions are equally spread across the student body, affecting the top of the class and the average students alike. Also, Seaman writes, university personnel today have to deal with more reported incidents of sexual assault, including the once unheard of “date rape.” Because of the often-murky circumstances surrounding these incidents, university personnel struggle to cope with situations that require sensitivity and good judgment while balancing the rights of both people involved.   

Certainly the whole mating ritual on campus has changed significantly, says Seaman. “Though some traditional dating still goes on in college, the predominant pattern for the past decade or more has been for students to go to parties or pre-parties, in packs of friends, to hang out over drinks or drinking games and small talk until late in the evening, when they hook up with someone if the conditions are right. A hook up is vaguely defined – by intention,” he writes.  

Of course, beer and alcohol are still a huge part of university life. Although most states changed the legal drinking age to 21 during the 1980’s, drinking continues to be a popular campus past time. However, fearful of the fines and repercussions of that law, underage students who drink, do so in the seclusion of their own rooms or clandestinely at off campus residences and parties, or trying to drink quickly, they glug down shots in quick succession. As a result, Seaman found incidents of alcohol abuse are twice as high as they were before the laws were changed. Many more students of this college generation are treated at hospital emergency departments for alcohol poisoning. And because it is easier to conceal a bottle of spirits than a case of beer, hard liquor is the drink of choice among university males and females. In Montreal, where the provincial drinking age is 18, Seaman found the McGill University students more open about having alcohol at a gathering, and less inclined to get drunk or abuse alcohol.

Through his conversations with college professors, Seaman learned that almost all campuses suffer from problems with “grade-flation.” Students, it seems, expect exceptional marks for mediocre work. Those with any thought of going on to grad schools know that a mark of less than ‘B’ on their transcript is the kiss of death for their dreams. Rather than defend their marks through the countless appeals available to students, the professors generally acquiesce. Seaman says students on campus often exhibit wobbly ethics; he cites a survey showing that one third of all students of this “Keyboard Generation” have used cut-and-paste plagiarism while in university.

Seaman is a fine writer, and he has learned as a good journalist to not moralize while letting the reader draw their own conclusions from his vivid examples. He repeatedly shows that while many students are ready to leave high school, they are not always ready for the consequences of living on campus. There is no question college life has changed in the past thirty or so years, and Seaman’s unasked question clearly comes through: Are universities doing enough to educate the students beyond the classrooms?

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.