Abstract
Party School: Crime, Campus and Community is an easy-to-read, insightful, and comprehensive look at how life at a “party school” is experienced by students and community members. Karen Weiss has produced a book that brings out in the open what residents of many college towns already know: Many college students are more interested in drinking, drugging, carousing, and “partying” than in anything else. These students have created a culture that prioritizes rowdiness, irresponsibility, intoxication, and breaking the rules simply because they can do so. This is a book that readers will either see as eye-opening and disturbing or simply a documentation of what residents of college towns know and live on a daily basis.
The foci of the book include the structure, culture, experiences, and consequences of college students’ lifestyles that center on alcohol, intoxication, and the party lifestyle in college. Drawing on multiple data sources, but most intensely on a comprehensive survey of students and community members and in-depth interviews, Weiss examines one university, reputed to be among the nation’s most notorious “party schools.” She presents a typology of students based on their commitment to the party lifestyle, and shows how such a lifestyle both intersects with and fuels myriad criminal events—even though partying students may not realize their actions are criminal, harmful, or even less than universally desirable and attractive.
This book is an eye-opener, certain to both enlighten and frighten readers who will no doubt wonder how such a situation could have ever come to be. Weiss has produced a book that is both an indictment of the party-at-all-costs lifestyle common among American university students and a fascinating cultural study of an in-plain-sight yet often unrecognized world that consumes, endangers, thrills, and victimizes students and communities. Readers are likely to come away from this book indignant that nothing is done to control the lawlessness and dangers that permeate the campus and town of the party school. Or, some readers may wax nostalgic for their own college experiences, seeing themselves in the lives of students who seemingly go to college for the fun of it. For all readers, however, it would be hard to believe that they would not come away thinking that “enough is enough,” and that the situation has simply gotten out of control on some campuses. The one group that should definitely not read this book is parents of college students. For them, this book is likely to have them summoning their children home and never letting them go back to campus.
Weiss provides a concise yet informative background to the issue, highlighting the literature on college student drinking and its consequences, and the relationship between alcohol and drug use and crime and victimization among college student populations. After a brief contextualizing description of Party University, located in Party Town (pseudonyms for a not too difficult to identify setting) in Chapter 3, Weiss moves into the true substance of the book. In Chapters 4 through 7, data from in-depth surveys and qualitative interviews are drawn upon to present the scope, nature, views, and consequences of a lifestyle centered on drinking. Through just enough examples to make her argument clear and convincing Weiss shows the diversity of experiences of students, yet leaves the reader knowing that even though some students may not see college as simply “one big party,” for many this is exactly what college is. Following the often frightening, and always engaging, presentation of the major findings of the study of Party University, Chapter 8 examines how the situation has reached the point it has, focusing on students’ views of ineffective law enforcement, a belief that partying and its consequences is a private matter and a cultural code that normalizes, excuses, and accepts intoxication as what should and does happen in college. A concluding chapter draws the issues together and suggests possible policy responses, although doing so with less than full confidence in such approaches chances of success.
Party School is an engaging read. For instructors looking to introduce their students to a solid piece of scholarship that is both easy to read and sure to engage students, this would be a great book for class. Not only is the topic volatile, but the class discussions generated by this book are certain to be lively, passionate, and colorful. This is a book students will want to read, and a crime problem about which they will undoubtedly have opinions that they are looking to share.