Abstract
As they find that students often show a tangential interest in the education they deliver, universities and colleges spend their time worrying about the harm their charges might do to themselves and each other through binge drinking, among other behaviors. Thomas Vander Ven undertook extensive research in a Midwest university, drawing on participant observation, diary journals and interviews with students about the extreme intoxication scene. He has produced a very clearly written, thought-provoking and insightful account of student drinking worlds.
He takes the reader through the history of college drinking in the United States and the attempts by authorities to regulate student behavior and morals. He digs up a telling nugget: fraternity house drinking represented a bounded and controllable problem for university authorities, in contrast to the politically rebellious student movements of the 1960s which represented an uncontrollable challenge to university authority. Universities in the West are no longer seen as sites of political danger, but are more presented as places of personal risk. Students are written off as being vulnerable to rape, to harmful words, to intoxication related troubles, and to serious social embarrassment.
In contrast, Vander Ven highlights extreme intoxication as a social and sociable process in which students exercise their agency and autonomy. He presents long, welcome excerpts from his data, which gives the reader a sense of the complexity and richness of his research and the texture of the different drinking occasions. The reader is taken into these settings, the student presenting a fake ID at a bar and waking up with a furry-mouthed hangover, the walk of shame following a disastrous party, the carefree exhibitionism, the excitement of the illicit. He takes us through the multiple and sometimes fleeting relationships that form around drinking. There is an extraordinary amount of detail here.
For his respondents, college means drinking. Vander Ven examines the process of reaching extreme intoxication, though the multiple occasions that mean drinking is in order, and the always-breakable rules such as not drinking the night before a test. As he points out, “peer pressure” does not really exist as a motivating factor. Students choose to join a peer culture around alcohol and all participate in putting pressure on themselves. Drinking games and pre-gaming rituals provide the means to intoxication. As he shows, intoxication rituals also limit drunkenness. Students “buzz check” to see that they and their friends are drunk but not dangerously so. Responsibility is shared at both ends. He describes the drunken selves attained through intoxication, the permissions given for sexual and bodily pleasure and transgression.
A particular highlight is the chapter on the morning after, where students must deal with the various psychological, physical and reputational damage they may have incurred or inflicted. The growing awareness that a terrible hangover is in the post, or the slow recollection of serious discretions, brings a dawning awareness that repair work will be necessary. Vander Ven describes the responses, whether brushing off, or brushing under the carpet, and it is this section that shows most the differential gender effect of the consequences of bad behavior under the influence. Women are exposed to shaming in a way that men are not. Men tend to have their behavior validated, rather than judged, by peers.
Vander Ven goes into great depth on the fallout from heavy drinking. Here he identifies a key difference in social memory and memorialization between student drinkers and those who fret over them. This may help to explain the gulf between the experience of drinking and the outside attempts to control it. Even the most chaotic and vile of drinking experiences can within a short space of time be remembered as heroic and legendary. “Do you remember the time when…” “You were so drunk you snogged X.” Administrative memories do not change in the way that individual recall does. For college administrators, each problem case piles upon each other. They live in administrative memory where they may fade or be re-evaluated in personal memorialization. In my view, universities are also complicit in encouraging students to think of their college as primarily a depoliticized social space. No university would swap its party culture for a reputation as being the home of nerds and abstainers. The emphasis on selling the student experience means that the culture of partying hard is one with no end in sight.