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Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You ReviewAs a college professor myself, with more than thirty-five years "at university," the super title caught my eye: "Campus life in an age of disconnection and excess." What will likely grab more people is the title, "Binge." And what will sell this book to some worried parents is the subtitle, "What your college student won't tell you." Good hooks, all three of them, but the book doesn't really do justice to any of them.
Seaman is a retired Time reporter, an alum of Hamilton, and a member of their Board of Trustees. His chapters, including "Hooking up," "Emotional troubles," "Is diversity working?" and "Fraternities and sororities under siege" offer some insight that comes together in the final chapter ("Improving the undergraduate experience"), but by then it is too late to make this book of real value or substance. The dust cover blurb from Hamilton's retired president should have offered me a hint of the superficial tone of the book, as Hamilton seems to be the real touch point for Seaman, not national college life. He briefly cites Indiana's Murray Sperber, who has done a much better job of illustrating the beer-and-circus mentality of rah-rah, big-name schools. As to a personal glimpse, while Seaman tried to live out the student role (tough to do when you're almost old enough to be their grandfather), Tom Wolfe's "I am Charlotte Simmons" covers much of the same ground - sex, frats, jocks, pressures - and brings it to life much better than does Seaman.
The first weakness if not outright bias of the book is the selection of great colleges (including Harvard, Dartmouth, Indiana, Wisconsin, California-Berkeley, and Virginia), but not representative of the nation's 15 million college students. Seaman slips into some mention of "second- and third-rate colleges" with little appreciation of the role they play in American university life. There is the smug conceit that Harvard is the leader for institutional change, but Seaman's work only reminded me of the adage, "You can always tell a Harvard man, you just can't tell him much."
The second weakness stems from the selection of elite public and private schools. Seaman slips in a comment from a "third-rate" college president who notes that his students are too busy working part-time to get as drunk as the students at the elite schools. Seaman does apply some healthy skepticism to the Harvard "binge drinking" studies, but doesn't really offer useful analysis. What he seems to leave out of the equation is that these elite students have way too much time and money on their hands. The students he profiles come across as spoiled rich kids, chafing under the scourge of the twenty-one year old drinking age. Seaman does note that Hamilton's three-person student life staff from his day has been replaced by a twenty-person professional corps, but he fails to realize that these elite schools have become extended summer camp for some of these students, a pleasant four-year holiday en route to careers on Wall Street. Yes, he does show some evidence that we'd be better off with a lowered age for drinking legally, but that is not the entire solution.
Praising somewhat Middlebury's "quad" living arrangement plans only made me see that this has all been done before. What Middlebury seems to be considering is exactly what my alma mater did thirty-five years ago. Again, the problem is that Seaman and others look to and expect leadership and innovation to come from these elite schools, when there is an even better argument for the opposite: small, troubled, financially stretched schools are more likely to be the most creative.
In the end, there is little about binge drinking or other excessive lifestyles in this book, and there is little here that a student is likely to hide from his or her parents. And, in fact, this may be the most "connected" student cohort we've ever had, given the plethora of technology on campus (again, another topic given some but not much attention here), but connected to what is the real question. Or, perhaps a better question: What are these parents who pay $40,000 a year for this holiday camp really think that their sons and daughters are learning? And do they really care? "Helicopter" parents or not, there are still too many parents who cough up the cash and then act surprised when they find that students slouch sleepily in 2000-seat lecture hall classes, sleep until noon, get arrested for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, and never have a conversation with a professor. The disconnection appears to be between parents and well-publicized college realities.
"Binge" may bring back some memories for aging alums and startle some naïve parents, but, like Oakland, there is not much "there" there.
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