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Thank you for tuning in, and I hope you enjoy the podcast. Hi, welcome to new books and alcohol drugs and intoxicants. We're here today with Dr. Karen Wise, who is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University. And we're here today to talk about her new fascinating book, Party School, Crime Campus and Community, which examines the consequences of extreme party and drinking for students and others in the college community. So welcome, Karen. Well, thank you. Good to be here. So can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and about your intellectual and research trajectory and how you came to study where you're studying? Sure. Well, as you just mentioned, I am an associate professor at West Virginia University and I teach in the areas of crime and specifically victimization. And my research, which much of in the past has been on sexual victimization, has really been viewed recently towards campus crime and specifically alcohol-related crime. So yeah, what I've been working on for the last three or four years is really something that I call intoxication crime, which are crimes where either the offender victim or both parties are drunk or high on drugs at the time. And so really that's what I've been working on in terms of research and really where the book came into play was sort of as I was looking at the crimes that take place on the college campus and then the surrounding areas, it became very obvious to me that the majority of those crimes were really related to students drinking and drug use and so I just became very interested in sort of examining that in a much more specific way. Okay. So it is through your interest in toxicants and crime that you came to focus on the whole college community and the partying lifestyle that is inherent in the party school, so to speak. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a great environment for looking at intoxication crime because, I mean, in my estimate, just from my own research and certainly from what many people have done on college crime, if you eliminated the partying, the intoxication, you know, especially the extreme intoxication, you have very little crime on most college campuses. It really is, it's a problem that is related to alcohol and drugs primarily. Yeah. So how would you define a party university? What are some of the characteristics associated with the typical "party university?" Well, that's actually an excellent question and I do actually take a lot of time in my introductory chapters to do that because, you know, there's partying, drinking and drug use on, you know, probably a free college campus in the United States and, you know, abroad. But what I was looking at is really an extreme version of that and so a party university to me really became, I mean, the typical party university can be defined by a few characteristics. They're usually large, more than 10,000 undergraduates, they tend to be located in geographically isolated areas, they have a large proportion of their undergraduate students living either on campus or right outside of campus in so-called college towns, they also have a lot of traditional students, so these younger students right at a high school, 18 to 24. You know, very importantly, there's a very large Greek life and probably most importantly that they're usually sports oriented so they take a real lot of pride in both their sports and this drinking culture and that's really what the typical party university looks like. So really strong athletic department, yeah, in the more suburban area, more rural area. Yeah. Well, isolated. I think that's the real key, so the students come to these schools and there's very little else to do if they're living here. They're not close to urban environments and so you just tend to have when there's nothing much more to do when they have easy access to the alcohol, which is actually a very common phenomenon in these college towns where there's a lot of alcohol outlets. So it all kind of coalesces into this, what I've been calling in the book of party subculture, so this very strong cultural norm that, you know, you study during the days or you head to classes and then at night you get together and go out drinking or say in drinking and a lot of times it's a little close and so that's what ends up happening in these party universities and of course there's lists of so-called party schools that come out every year that do their own calculations of, you know, that the students self-identify is drinking a lot and using marijuana, what they call reformadness, and then they calculate it, they compare it against how much the students self-identify is studying and so they get, you know, these students who are very strong in the party lifestyle and very weak in the study and, you know, and it's all self-identified, which I think is really important because students who strongly identify with the party subculture make, you know, together make, you know, put their schools on the party school list and then it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy where they are very proud to have their school on the list and so you see the same schools on these lists, you know, year after year after year and it's really because the students themselves are really identifying that way. Yeah, I think it's fascinating that the emphasis on the whole identification part asked like of this, of how students identify with, you know, being a party animal or being at a party university, but surely not all students feel that way, right, or are proud of the fact that their school is, you know, on the list of top 10 party schools. No, not at all, in fact, there are, you know, some students who are incredibly embarrassed about it and as they get close to graduation, they're actually worried about it, you know, but sometimes it's the same students who were thrilled to come to a party school and so, you know, they loved it during their freshman's sophomore year and then there's sort of a transitional shift as they begin to realize that, you know, they're going to be in the job market pretty soon and now they have to defend, you know, their degree to some, to some extent. So there's a lot of variation, yes, and the label itself and where students feel, how they feel about, whether it's a good thing or bad thing and a lot of them actually know that it's a little of both. Mm-hmm. So like, like a mix, there's some positive aspects and also some negative aspects. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I think it's easy to forget since I wrote the book really to highlight the problems, but it's easy to forget that, I mean, they have a lot of fun, you know, it's fun to go to a party school and they have fantastic memories. They, you know, as alumni, they get together and they can laugh about these great weekends they had new crazy drinks and so, I mean, there's a lot of benefits to, you know, I mean, it's one of the reasons why these schools are so popular and they, you know, and they entice a lot of students to come because there really are some benefits for the students themselves despite the fact that there's, you know, a pretty ugly underside to sort of what's going on right now at these schools. Yeah. So I guess that's focused a little bit on the ugly side of extreme parties, since they're mentioning that right now. So what are some of the dangers and negative consequences that can define associated with the whole party subculture? Well, I, you know, I found actually quite a bit and it was, for me, it was disturbing. I think it probably would be disturbing for anybody who has children at these schools or certainly from a faculty perspective where, you know, because during the day, everything looks fantastic and students are very pleasant and polite and follow all the rules. But there's just something about this party situation, you know, the situation at night, bringing them together. And of course, there's a lot of alcohol involved, oftentimes the drugs. And so what I did was I outlined three basic carbs, the direct carbs to the users themselves. So the students who are partying, whether it's late, you know, and the late partyers really don't have too many problems. It's when they start drinking heavily after, you know, eight or more drinks and they're going out three or more nights a week and then you've got these really extreme partyers who literally barely put any effort into their academics. It's really all about the partying. And so they themselves have a lot of negative consequences. It's just the, you know, the nature of the beef that they're, they're very vulnerable when they're that drunk. And so I actually do a lot of calculations in terms of their risks with the more that they party and I will, just as a couple of examples, what I found was when I actually distinguished between the types of partiers, late, heavy and extreme, we see that the risks in almost every category of harms, including crimes, really go up considerably. So for instance, you've got only 3% of these lighter partiers that actually are injured due to accident, but it goes up to almost 20% for the heavy partiers. And then it's 34% for these extreme partiers. So, you know, a third of these students are having accidents at some point when they're drunk and then the illnesses are similar, 17% for late partiers, 32% for heavy partiers and then it's almost half for the extreme partiers and it's crazy for what they call blacking out. It's a very common phenomenon that I haven't quite gotten at, a real handle on exactly how they're defining this blacking out and then other than what generally people say, which is that you forget that you've done things and you keep, you have no memory and you've got, we've got 81% of extreme partiers, say at some point they've blacked out, which you know, to me, that's very disturbing and that happens multiple times, you know, during the course of their students' careers. So, you've got a lot of these risks to the direct users, which are a problem in and of itself from an outside perspective. Now, mind you, they don't see it as a problem, they actually think it's kind of funny, you know, it bonds them, they have something to talk about with their friends and so they really brush it off as some kind of collateral damage, you know, it just happens, stuff happens. But I spend a couple of, you know, chapters talking about are really the harms that happen to people who aren't partying from these partiers and so, you know, I call those the indirect or the second-hand harms. So, you know, we've got about a 20% of our students who don't drink at all, they don't touch drugs, they are here to learn, they're perfect for being here and they've got a lot of frustrations from their fellow party or students and so even if the students themselves aren't partying, they're around the partying and so they're, you know, some of the harms that they're experiencing are things like, you know, the massive amounts of litter from just student, you know, the student's drinking and dropping their trash that the noise from parties that last until 4 in the morning, there's a real problem with harassment, verbal harassment and sometimes it can get physical from students who just get wasted and lose all sensibility of right and wrong and so the non-partiers have really had to change their regular routines to avoid being around certain areas of town on Friday and Saturday night, sometimes they won't even go to sporting events because, you know, so many of the students in the student sections are so wasted that it becomes uncomfortable for them, so that's a real impact I think for the non-partiers and then of course everybody else in the college town is impacted so, you know, we've got to, when you're living a college town where there's a big party subculture, you also have to avoid, you know, certain areas of town and learn to just sort of do things that you wouldn't regularly do just because you know that there's a potential that your car could be vandalized or there's a potential that, you know, so many can walk by and vomit on your sidewalk and it's just a lot of things that people don't think about until you actually start living in these areas. And I, you know, at some point in one of the chapters I sort of thought of it and because I am a criminologist and I compared it to sort of gang with that live in a neighborhood, it's almost as if they've taken the neighborhood hostage, these extreme partiers and I, you know, there's a narrative from one of my respondents in the book about which she was describing as a drive-by egging and it was just, it was so peculiar for me to read her words from the interview, from the survey and to think about it and so yeah, of course it's not lethal, it's not gun shots but it's crazy just that as a blue, you know, when you're sitting on your porch at night and somebody drives by and throws eggs at you, out of the blue it's just that kind of thing that really has just made it a little bit uninhabitable in parts of these college towns. Yeah and it seems like as a minority of the students that actually don't participate in these kind of virtual, you know, a minority of the students are non-partiers, right? Right, only about 21% don't party at all but there are a lot of partiers who are very responsible but you know, but the numbers really are, it's about 60% are either in this heavy or extreme category so more than half of the students who are partying are doing it extensively. So what do you think differentiates between these different categories? So between, what are some of the characteristics associated with the extreme partiers versus perhaps, you know, the heavy ones versus the light ones? Well, some of the, I mean certainly and it's probably not very surprising that the extreme partier does the lowest GPAs, I mean they really are not here to learn, you know, in fact a lot of the most extreme partiers do flunk out by the end of the year or they're put on probation. I mean it's, it's probably overwhelmingly the number of students who drop out by the end of, or are kicked out by the end of the first year are because of these issues where they just get caught up in, in this lifestyle. More men than women are in the extreme category although it's interesting there's not a significant difference in the heavier party category so when you actually measure it just in terms of the frequency of how often they're drinking, when you distinguish between the amount of drugs they're using and of course when they're drinking, how many drinks they drink just between those two categories and you, and you look at the heavy which isn't the top 14% after the extreme but this, this, you know, it's more than the light partiers but, but not as much as the extreme, there's actually no difference in the women and men so a lot of women are really partying hard, they're just not to be absolute extremes as the 14%. That's primarily men. We do see slightly more of the students who are involved in Greek life who are extreme partyers and athletics which is, which actually surprised me because I think my stereotype of athletes was that they're, you know, they're busy, busy seeing athletes but the reality is that they have off time and during their off time I guess they're, they're making up for, you know, for when they're in training so we do see athletes actually more likely to be in the extreme categories as well. Yeah, and I think it's, it's disturbing to, you know, the fact that you mentioned how women and men there's really no difference in terms of how much of party but we also know that women suffer more consequences associated with that. Yeah, well in terms of illness, some, there's, in some categories there really isn't a gender difference but certainly women who are drinking the same amount as men are going to feel it more primarily just because of their size, I mean a lot of times they're just smaller and so they, you know, if they're going to drink seven drinks and so is a man who's a lot larger, yes, she would be more likely to feel the consequences in terms of illness and certainly women are more likely to be raped and sexually assaulted in that. Now on the other hand, men are more likely to get into fights and to be injured in other ways so they're, and their accident rates are, I think, slightly higher as well so but again it's probably because they are doing a little bit more in terms of the drinking and experimenting more with the drugs. So can you explain a little bit about the whole idea of the situated theory of normativity? I think that's one of the theories that you cite. Yeah, yeah sure. Well, I have to say, I mean one of, I wrote the book with three broad questions in mind. I mean one was I wanted to understand the frequency of intoxication crime and certainly look at the problems associated with it and I wanted to understand the consequences for you know the surrounding areas but one of the questions that was really quite important to me was why these negative consequences have become so normal and it really did, it fascinated me because again I see these students as a teacher you know, they seem very pleasant to me and so when I was hearing so many anecdotes about the nastiness, the, just sort of, the harassment that sometimes border the lines on real hate crimes that could happen and certainly all of the crime and the bad behavior and these students who party also are more likely to be, you know, to do criminal activities themselves to get involved, they're getting a lot of citations from you know underage drinking and public nuisance and all of these other things and so I really wanted to understand why with all of this going on and all of these consequences, why it had become so normal and why so many of the students just see it as a normal way of college life and so what I started to think about was this idea of situational normativity which is when you, certain behaviors that could be incredibly deviant and everybody would agree are crimes in certain situations where all of a sudden when you maneuver them into a very specific situation they, you know, the values around them change and so things like the whole, you know, urinating and somebody's rose bushes and things that seem so silly and you kind of go, well, you know, most people know that's wrong but somehow in the party situation which, you know, I sort of defined the party situation as very specific, it's almost always nighttime except for the, with the exception of one of the games, a football game day is a different type of party situation and that's during the day often but for the most part the party situation is at night, you know, maybe after 11 p.m. it's usually around certain areas of the college town either in their own student-oriented neighborhood, certainly near bars at these fraternity parties or house parties, you know, it has a lot to do with who's in the audience so they're usually, you know, groups of them together, almost everybody is drunk and, and they, you know, the norms just encourage bad behavior so the same bad behavior that if you take it out of that situation everybody would agree is wrong, just becomes normal when it's in the party situation and this is called the normalization around being wasted and having, you know, intoxication excuse bad behavior so that's really what I started delving into and asked a lot of questions that tried to get at what they were thinking in terms of why certain behaviors were okay when they were drunk and I tried to explain it with their rationales and, you know, how they were justifying it and, you know, I have to say I'm so little baffled but, you know, again, from their perspective it's just, it's okay when they're drunk, it just, it, it, it changes the rule book a bit. Yeah, so something that even though they probably know it's, it can be really serious, I'm thinking especially with the whole maybe sexual assault or something or social victimization on women but it seems like even the women are able to just brush it off, you know, or blame themselves. Well, yeah, I mean, a lot, well, a lot of times the, again, because everybody is sort of wasted and they begin to quite use it to victim themselves with my question whether or not it really happened or if it happened the way they remember it happened and then of course you get into issues where they can't, they don't feel comfortable telling anyone you're reporting it because they don't want to be considered, you know, that snitch or disloyal to their peers or even making too much out of it, you know, and so, yeah, they're almost convinced that, yeah, you're right, they're, they're also convinced in some degree that it's sort of normal and that at the risk they have to take to be a part of the, you know, this party lifestyle because very few students are willing to really say I will not be a part of this because if they are, they're marginalized, they don't have much of a life here, it's such a strong culture that they just feel like they're not a part of the school if they're not, you know, willing to drink and make light of all of these things because then they become almost scapegoated as these complainers, so what are they doing here anyhow if they don't like the party, they shouldn't be here and that's really what I, you know, I've heard a lot in the survey responses. Yeah, so this idea of blaming the victims too, yeah, yeah, being, I think you mentioned the holistic ignorance how a lot of times even when they see harm being done to the fellow student, a lot of times they wouldn't intervene. Yeah, well, yeah, again, it's, you know, there's a lot of literature on bystander response and this idea that you've got a group norm where people don't intervene, I mean, it don't get me wrong, there is a line where somebody will obviously say, well, nothing's enough, you know, but it's a very gray line and if you look around and want to do something but nobody else seems to care and they're all watching in fact entertained to some degree then you do feel like you're putting yourself out on the whim to be the only one who actually wants to intervene and that's, yeah, unfortunately what ends up happening a lot of times is not just, you know, the worst case scenario is seeing a sexual assault, but just fighting students will, you know, stand around and find that very entertaining and just watch and see what happens and sometimes students who are so unbelievably drunk to the point where they almost, you know, could die that kind of severe intoxication and students don't really know how to react and of course they also don't want to necessarily bring the police to the situation because of course everybody's drunk and you know and there is probably there's drugs around and then that's, you know, a problem with self-congrimination and, you know, getting themselves into trouble. Yeah, so there's this whole idea, first of all, they don't want to betray their, you know, other students that don't want to be ostracized and then there's also the second component where they don't want to kind of get themselves in trouble, especially if they're underage, which, you know, we all know that they drink, you know. Well, yeah, the, yeah, I mean, students don't turn 21 and so, you know, sometimes late in their junior year and so we know a lot of freshmen, sophomores are drinking and, you know, we, even in the, in the survey statistics that, in the, in the book, the, it doesn't really, there's very little difference in terms of age and who goes to bars surprisingly considering our laws but, you know, we've got a lot of college towns have these types of bars where you can go in 18 with the, with the assumption you're not going to drink which is ludicrous during the bar, you're going to figure out a way to drink. So, yeah, the laws of the actual drinking age does not stop. I mean, I think everybody kind of knows that they really do very little to curb drinking before the age of 21, for sure. But it does not stop but it does impact the willingness to bring the belief into a situation where really, you know, if there's a fighter, if there's something going on where 911 really should be called and there's a, there's a hesitancy to do that because of this fear of getting into trouble. It does create quite a, quite a problem. Yeah, so what do you think the police and the university are not going to do about this? Can they do about it? Well, other efforts have been pretty much useless. Well, you know, the police, the police really try. They're in such a, I think I say they're damn, just they do, damn, just they don't at some point in the building because, you know, the students don't like them interfering when they're doing their jobs, right, to get them off the streets and do, but, you know, and then you have the non-partiers don't think they do half enough. And, of course, the non-student residents who really don't think the police do enough, but there's just so much, I mean, there's so much bad behavior going on at night, especially during the weekend, that they just need 5,000 on the police force to control it all. So, yes, we could, I think, part of the solution really would be to step up enforcement if we had the ability to, you know, the resources for schools to do that. I just don't think that's possible. You know, it's something that schools are doing and I think it's an easy fix at least in terms of the safety is our passing these medical amnesty policies, which is basically to give the students a peace of mind that they're not going to get into trouble if they actually do pick up the phone and dial 911. And I mean, I think that's a fantastic policy. I know there's critics that don't like that because they're suggesting that then the school was endorsing, you know, the partying, but, you know, the reality is the party and the ability going on. So, I think in terms of harm reduction, it probably is very smart that at least the students can get themselves help without getting into trouble if they need to call 911. And then, of course, what the schools can do, you know, unfortunately, a lot of schools aren't doing anything for a variety of reasons. And, you know, the party image works for a lot of these schools. And so, I don't know if they really want to necessarily change that. I mean, I think they do obviously want to keep their students safe. But it's a little precarious for them to start really going after drinking and drug use because I think they're a little concerned that that might impact sort of this, you know, come to our school to have a great time kind of image. But, you know, schools around the country have been trying different things. You know, there's sort of laws passed about parties and, you know, and so they're enforcing the noise issues. And some of the schools are really cracking down at any kind of bad behavior from students. And just, you know, the sanctions have increased in that kind of thing. But I think in the long run, one of the best ways to handle the situation is probably from who these schools admit. And sometimes it's impossible to know who you're admitting. But, you know, the issue is in the students themselves say this in my own survey, they really would like the school, you know, these schools to be a little bit more selective. Because the thinking is that if you only allow in students with incredibly high GPA, that in fact, they are going to be less inclined to party, you know, incessantly. And those are the ones who are causing the problems. So, you know, I don't think anybody wants to completely get rid of having a good time at college. It's just to curb the extreme version of that where people are actually getting hurt in the process. So, you know, whether that's going to happen either, you know, but I do know that some schools are actually trying to do that as well. So, you know, they're trying. I don't -- I'm not highly confident that anything will help in the near future, but I do think something needs to change within the subculture itself. Because it's hard to -- it's hard to change a subculture. You know, there's so much tradition involved. You know, the students themselves don't even see things like, you know, burning couches. They don't get that that's arson, or, you know, malicious burning. I mean, it's a felony in a lot of areas. And the students don't see it that way because it's been passed down from generation to generation as a tradition at their schools. So, that's the hardest part is to change a subculture that really has become so entrenched in tradition. Yeah. Do you think it's actually possible to do that, to actually change the students' motivations and the whole ingrained rituals, the party? So extreme? I'm not sure. I make a few suggestions in the conclusion of the book. And what I -- I think the only way you can do that is to -- you have to really reverse the norms that are in place. So, right now, some of these students are elevated in their status by being like a troublemaker, by, you know, doing these crazy things. And all of a sudden, they're like, talked about, they're what, you know, they're heroes within the subculture and they're rewarded and all of the bad behaviors reinforced. And there's, you know, deviant admiration and the students are entertained. But you have to literally create an environment where now you're -- where students who do anything bad are shamed. They're embarrassed. They're humiliated. You know, their peers won't talk to them. I don't know how to get there, but that's really how you would have to do it. And my suggestion was, you know, you take the most, you know, the big superstars, like athletes who, you know, people really admire at a sports-oriented school, like the biggest athletes or the coaches, and you get them to start the normship. And you get those people to make announcements and say, listen, when you behave its way at our games, you're embarrassing us. And, I mean, that might be a start. But I know for right now, a lot of students who come to a party school are incredibly amused by their own bad behavior. And if you take, like, a sports event, it's actually televised. And, you know, I've heard comments from students who kind of think it's awesome, you know, in their own mood. It was awesome that they caught us, you know, in a big brawl after the game. You know, they think that's actually funny and that it elevates their status as this party's school. And so until you can change, is that the reward system, and you go back to the basics where students actually are proud to get 4.0, or to, you know, to do something that's academically challenging and that kind of thing. I mean, until you can do that, you're always going to have, you're going to be competing with the rewards that students get from the party subculture. Yeah, the social rewards. Yeah, do you think maybe perhaps if students are more, if they have more responsibilities or commitments, that that might perhaps decrease the chance of partying so irresponsibly? Actually, yeah. And I think you make a good point because certainly, you know, what we call a social bond theory would suggest that, yeah, if you're more involved with conventional activity, so academic organizations, or if that matter, working, you know, I'm working at a job where there's promotion, you know, not just, you know, you're doing 4 hours behind account more than McDonald's, that kind of a job, but a job where you really care about it and you want to grow and prove yourself and that kind of thing. Sure, there's a less time to party and you also get your rewards elsewhere. So, I mean, it would certainly make sense that, you know, and one of the things that I said was one of the criteria of a typical party university is these traditional students. You do have a lot of students at school that have, you know, big culture of partying that, really, they're not working as they may do a few hours in part-time jobs, but they're not working. They don't have children. They're not married. They have little responsibility outside of having to show up for classes. And so, yeah, I think that it gives them a lot more leisure time and, you know, in this creation of, you know, the social group that, you know, then have all of these internal rewards systems based on the amount they can drink. And again, all the crazy things that they do when they're drinking, it sounds, it's strange to outsiders that that would elevate somebody's status, but it really does when, you know, when you don't really have all that much else to be rewarded by. You, you know, you take your parking very seriously and it becomes something you're successful at. Yeah, it's a commitment to partying. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a sense of self-identity. And I think it's definitely a really important issue, too. I think not only in isolated colleges, I think even in urban areas, too. You know, there's -- students are always going to be partying. That's part of the college culture, as well. Well, absolutely. I do. I couldn't imagine there's too many schools where you don't have an element of drinking and, you know, a bit of the drug use. But it becomes just so much more pervasive when you've got these schools that are isolated where so many of the students live here, and they have very few alternatives for what to do on weekends. So it really just -- it just exacerbates any kind of problem, you know, just given the isolation issue, but you're absolutely right. Every school has an element to this. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely a very interesting question. I think I feel -- even myself, I feel very torn about it, because I went to UIC, which is kind of a -- I would just kind of a big party school. And I do remember, you know, it was really fun to party back in the day. But, yeah, I do -- you know, these consequences are very sobering and very disturbing. Well, but it's interesting that you say what you did because this is the reality is that most students come into schools, and they graduate, and they go on with their lives, and nothing bad. You know, like, extensively bad happened to them. I mean, yeah, along the way, maybe they had some scrapes and bruises and -- and black alts and whatever, and a lot of hangovers, I'm sure. But nothing, you know, tragic happens. And so they really don't see, you know, what the problem is. They don't see any of it as a problem. And so, you know, I think that is why it's perpetuated, because until you actually see what it's feeling to be outside of the group, because when you're partying yourself, you're taking the risk. You know, you're voluntarily saying, listen, you know, what the few scrapes and bruises, because I'm having a fantastic time. It's the other people who live around you that aren't following, you know, partying, and yet they are also taking on these risks. But it is -- I mean, I see that a lot is sort of the normalization of all of this, because really in the long run, most people come out okay. The ones who have managed to get beyond their freshman year, and I think it's learning the balance. You know, you need the students who are successful in terms of graduating, who are also partied along the way. Learn eventually that you can only party, you know, this much -- this many hours, and still study this many hours in order to actually pass classes. And it's a learning curve. It's a learning process. Yeah. Yeah. But I think even that notion can be a little bit dangerous, because I think when students learn how to balance it, you know, maybe the increase of tolerance, or whatever, for alcohol, they might, you know, be less likely to stop, because you know, they might think that, you know, I've got all under control, even though they might not be. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. That's actually a good point I never thought about. But you might be right that it can increase. Once they figure it out, then they actually can party a little bit more. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting when I actually looked at, you know, with the assumption that most people would party more their early years and their latter years. There seems to be a last hurrah in the senior year, at least from my survey responses, where they kind of -- what I think they were thinking was that it's sort of their last chance about to graduate. Let's, you know, get it one more, you know, one more -- Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So it's kind of the junior year that they seem to lay the lowest, and really try and do well in their classes, and then right before graduation, it seems to pick up a little bit more. Yeah, it's interesting because you know, you could hear about all these issues surrounding how higher education, you know, the costs associated with that are so high right now and that it's really hard to get into these colleges. So you would think that students would be more worried about doing well in school, you know, with all these added pressures and how no one is getting a job outside of college from today's times, you know, so you would think that it would actually decrease that perhaps all these expectations and all these pressures would make them a little bit more responsible. But it seems like the rates of partying, you know, it's not really slimmed down. No, not at all. And, you know, and partying has been around forever. I mean, it's probably because the origins of colleges, certainly students, have released tension on weekends with alcohol and whatever drugs were, you know, fashionable. How boring they're trying. But what probably, I mean, again, in my research, I think what's becoming a little bit more prevalent is the pervasiveness of it because we've got so many more schools that are letting in students that probably never used to go to college. So, you know, it's, again, it goes back to this idea of who schools are admitting. And when you just have a lot of disproportionate number of students who really are in college to learn, which is the general premise of what a college is. I mean, yes, you're trained for a specific career and that kind of thing. But if you really, I think more and more students are going to college not to learn, but simply because it's just what you do. And so they're just, they're not really sure why they're in college. And so they're making choices of where to go to college based on a place where they're going to have a good time versus a place where they're really going to be trained for a career or where they're going to learn a craft or whatever, you know, the decision-making processes. But there are really more and more of these types of schools that seem to be disproportionately students who are coming in that just really want to party. Yeah, but perhaps they haven't really found a way or a purpose and why they're, you know, in school for longer. Yeah, it makes sense. So I'm interested in knowing whatever students we action upon reading the book, because I know for some of your classes, I think they're required to read the book, right? Yeah, well, last semester I did actually put it first. Well, I mean, the book hasn't been out that long, but I introduced the book in a criminology course and we did a section on, you know, campus crime and intoxication crimes. And you know, I think everything is bad about it. They didn't say, "Oh, what are you kidding me?" I mean, so everything sort of was, I think they saw themselves to some degree in parts of the book. But I don't really, again, because they've normalized everything, I'm not sure if they really get why there's an entire book on it. I just think it's just so nor, it's so plausible to them that they're not quite sure why anybody's talking about it. Yeah, the facts are in front of you and they see, you know, I mean, your descriptions of all these events, some of them are really quite disturbing, you know? Yeah, yeah, well, again, to outside, people outside of the parties of culture, they seem disturbing, they certainly seem disturbing to me. But, you know, if anything else, because I would share with them a lot of the narratives, you know, one of my favorites is the students who describe what I think is going, I'm piring where students get together and on each side and just sweet, you know, it slams somebody into a wall and the kids fill out off a balcony, you know, it's pretty crazy. And, you know, I would share that with them and they just thought it was hysterical. You know, I just, yeah, it's hard. I don't, I, I think that this will, there's, there are too, there are too much in it right now. Like, there are so much a part of a party subculture that it's probably harder to actually think about it theoretically, or to understand, you know, I mean, I think on the surface, they understand the idea of the situational normativity. But, I don't know, I mean, I have mixed, mixed review about how they really thought of what they thought about the book and whether they really were engaged with the ideas that I was trying to lay out in terms of the theories. Yeah, perhaps, you know, maybe later on when they can actually step back and book up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would, I would hope that maybe someday, but again, you know, they may say what, what typically ends up happening, which is you, you look back with very fond memories and you think that those are some crazy days. You know, that, that is really what ends up happening. I mean, assuming that they don't, you know, something tragic doesn't happen in the process. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I think that's part of the, the difficult thing about this. You know, I mean, you know, obviously college really is a wonderful time for a lot of people and there are a lot of really fun and great memories. You know, but I think it's found some act between how can we keep not only ourselves safe, but everyone else around us. Like you said, the community safe, as well by the same time, still have a really good time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The response ability issue, I think, and maybe that's why I'm hesitant to, to talk about how they responded, because I do spend a lot of time on secondhand harms. And I think that's, that's the problem they, they seem to grasp. Or the issue they, they had trouble grasping is that what they do when they consider so much fun, it's really not so much fun to the other people living in the town. And I think that's what they don't quite get. And that might be a maturity level or, or maybe that does just require time. And someday when they're, when they own a house and when they're raising kids, and they realize that, you know, the party going on next door at four in the morning really isn't much fun. Or, you know, having to clean up the vomit on your driveway the next day and all of these other issues that are really just impacting quality of life. Yeah. In the town. I mean, that's probably now that, now that we're talking this through, that's probably, I think, why they were a little mixed in their reactions is because I don't think they quite get yet. What the, the negative impact is that this, this subculture is having on the community. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, everywhere they look, the peers are doing exactly the same thing, you know. So I guess it's hard for them to really see how I might impact another member of the community. Yeah. And, you know, and they come here and they feel very entitled. They are here to party, you know. And so if you try and tell them to turn their music off at two in the morning, they're, why, you know, I'm not doing it. So in their mind, they're not doing anything wrong. You're the one who's doing something wrong because you're, you know, you should be partying. If you don't want to be partying, why are you here? Yeah, I get a party prefer. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, I think that that is probably something you just have to grow out of, you know. And I do talk about aging out of the party and in the book, because a lot of the students who, when we actually ask point blank and we say, you know, would you want to raise a family here and they're like, hell no. Yeah. You know, they know. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, this is a place where you party and then you graduate and then you go. You, you move on towards the real world because this really isn't there. This isn't a real world for them. This is, this is some make believe, like interim place where they can be crazy. And, and, and I mean, literally act, act poorly. And there's little consequences for them here. And I think they do realize that someday there will be consequences. But it's not yet. Yeah, not right now. Yeah. Great. Well, um, do you have any, I guess, main message or main concluding remark that you want our listeners to take away from your book? Oh, well, I, you know, I'm, I'm not sure about the, the main message other than, you know, that, I mean, because I think I sort of lay out most everything that, you know, this is happening. I do, I do know that I struggled trying to make some grand conclusions and policy recommendations. And I will say this, I am working on a second book with a colleague and we are actually addressing all of those issues in terms of the structural issues that sort of connect to the culture. And we're, we're doing a broader perspective on the actual conflicts in college towns and the communities and, and basing it more on, on structure and looking at policies. So, so yeah, I mean, hopefully I can connect it better in, in this future book. And then we'll say, because I do know that a lot of people really would like, to know what to do. But you know, I don't, I unfortunately don't have the answers, but we'll, we'll see if I can come up with a few more in the future. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. It sounds great. You have to let me know when that book comes out. I will certainly do that. Well, I think, you know, we've taken up a lot of your time. So thank you so much for being here and talking to us. I would thank you. It was, it was, it was great to talk about the book. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in. And I hope you enjoyed the show. For more information about this podcast, please go to new books and alcohol drugs and toxicants.com. And please feel free to rate us on iTunes. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
In this episode, I sit down with Karen G. Weiss, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University, to talk about her book, Party School: Crime, Campus, and Community (Northeastern University Press, 2013). We discuss the subculture of the “party university,” and how such an environment normalizes and encourages extreme binge drinking and reckless partying. We talk about how extreme partying harms students as well as the larger community, and why students willingly put themselves (and others) at risk for victimization. We discuss why the party subculture appears so resistant to change, and why efforts from university personnel and law enforcement often appear futile. We also explore possible ways to transform the party subculture and address the problems it causes.
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