Sad
The New York Times is my paper of choice, but it's hard to take to the gym.
I was jogging along on the treadmill last night, reading my (bouncing) copy of The Week, getting jolts and snippets about Mumbai, Obama's team, the recession, why Jennifer Aniston doesn't want my pity . . . so imagine my surprise when the tiny rural town where I lived for ten years suddenly jumped off the page at me:
Alas, the "punch that 'makes girls easier'" sounded all too familiar as well; sexism and homophobia were still fairly prevalent in campus culture when I left a year and a half ago--another issue faculty members raised repeatedly, also to little avail. A "boys will be boys" attitude prevailed.
Wabash College was a strange mix: immaculately professional, serious, intellectually exciting, and gender-neutral in the classroom and in settings like job talks, and wildly not-so outside those formal situations. I always saw why such a setting would appeal to 18- to 22-year-olds, but I was never sure why alumni, trustees, and administrators thought it was a good idea.
For me, as a feminist and a progressive, it was an uneasy place: both strongly supportive of my work, officially and informally, and a demoralizing place to be on a day-to-day basis. Why did I take a job there? Well, people were wonderful when I interviewed, and my job talk, which pulled no punches about a non-canonical feminist writer (who wrote about abortion in the 1930s, no less), was enthusiastically received, so I thought I'd be a good fit. It seemed like a lovely place.
It was only after I arrived there to stay--moving my family across the country, etc.--that the disturbing cracks began to show. By then, I felt committed. During my time there, I worked to get tenure, made good friends on the faculty, taught some lovely students, and worked to make positive change on campus.
But sometimes institutions don't want to change. By the time I got the call from UNL, I was emotionally exhausted and happy to move on.
According to the AP story,
I'm so sorry for the families of the two boys. As the mother of a twenty-year-old son (who's also far away at college), I can only imagine their grief and hurt. I hope Wabash uses this painful opportunity not just to disband the culpable fraternity but also to look closely at the college's whole culture.
Yes, students drink. I drank in college. Probably we all drank in college, and more than we should have.
But for an eighteen-year-old, legally unable to buy his own alcohol, to have a blood-alcohol level of .40, while his older "brothers" looked on--well, that's unconscionable.
I was jogging along on the treadmill last night, reading my (bouncing) copy of The Week, getting jolts and snippets about Mumbai, Obama's team, the recession, why Jennifer Aniston doesn't want my pity . . . so imagine my surprise when the tiny rural town where I lived for ten years suddenly jumped off the page at me:
Crawfordsville, Ind.It was sad--but, though startling, not a surprise. I taught at Wabash for ten years, and worried faculty members had been raising the issue of excessive alcohol consumption--to little effect--since I arrived on campus in 1997. Approximately 70% of the students lived in fraternities when I was there. Many of us thought the drinking situation was an accident waiting to happen.
Frat booted after death: Joining a growing national trend, Wabash College, a small men’s school in Indiana, this week disbanded a fraternity following the alcohol-poisoning death of a freshman pledge. Wabash administrators revoked the charter of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity after Johnny Smith, 18, died during a frat-house party that, its hosts boasted, featured several kegs of beer and a punch that “makes girls easier.” Smith’s blood-alcohol level was .40, more than five times Indiana’s legal limit. Fraternity members are twice as likely to binge-drink as other college students, and at least a dozen schools have banned fraternities or barred them from serving alcohol. An estimated 1,400 college students die every year of alcohol-related causes. (http://www.theweek.com/home)
Alas, the "punch that 'makes girls easier'" sounded all too familiar as well; sexism and homophobia were still fairly prevalent in campus culture when I left a year and a half ago--another issue faculty members raised repeatedly, also to little avail. A "boys will be boys" attitude prevailed.
Wabash College was a strange mix: immaculately professional, serious, intellectually exciting, and gender-neutral in the classroom and in settings like job talks, and wildly not-so outside those formal situations. I always saw why such a setting would appeal to 18- to 22-year-olds, but I was never sure why alumni, trustees, and administrators thought it was a good idea.
For me, as a feminist and a progressive, it was an uneasy place: both strongly supportive of my work, officially and informally, and a demoralizing place to be on a day-to-day basis. Why did I take a job there? Well, people were wonderful when I interviewed, and my job talk, which pulled no punches about a non-canonical feminist writer (who wrote about abortion in the 1930s, no less), was enthusiastically received, so I thought I'd be a good fit. It seemed like a lovely place.
It was only after I arrived there to stay--moving my family across the country, etc.--that the disturbing cracks began to show. By then, I felt committed. During my time there, I worked to get tenure, made good friends on the faculty, taught some lovely students, and worked to make positive change on campus.
But sometimes institutions don't want to change. By the time I got the call from UNL, I was emotionally exhausted and happy to move on.
According to the AP story,
[Johnny] Smith's death was the second in about a year at Wabash in which alcohol may have played a part. A 19-year-old Wabash freshman died in October 2007 when he slipped and fell from a roof at the campus in Crawfordsville, about 40 miles northwest of Indianapolis. Tests showed he had been drinking.Two alcohol-related deaths in two years. Not a very good ratio at a college of fewer than 900 students.
I'm so sorry for the families of the two boys. As the mother of a twenty-year-old son (who's also far away at college), I can only imagine their grief and hurt. I hope Wabash uses this painful opportunity not just to disband the culpable fraternity but also to look closely at the college's whole culture.
Yes, students drink. I drank in college. Probably we all drank in college, and more than we should have.
But for an eighteen-year-old, legally unable to buy his own alcohol, to have a blood-alcohol level of .40, while his older "brothers" looked on--well, that's unconscionable.
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