Dukies Gone Wild, or, on college students and college parents

Nothing warms a broadcaster's heart like having a story that has Actual Authentic Film at Eleven^tm to go along with it.

Take the complaints over student partying in Trinity Heights. It's largely been the territory of dry newspaper reports, accounting this City Council jawfest or that presentation by Messrs. Schoenfeld and Wynn to the university administration.

And every now and then, a mention pops up on the TV news -- but nothing makes the broadcast so fast as when you have real videotape to show. As ABC 11 did, with video for their story last night on student partying. And, look, a student from New Jersey, caught on tape being busted for that dastardly deed, underage drinking:

On the same night, a raid on a popular bar near campus got another student a ticket for drinking underage and she wasn't happy about it.

"Why did you arrest me?" asks the student in the video.

"Because you're under 21," an officer responds.

"The entire population is under 21. That's not fair!" she complains.

When pleading doesn't work, she gets angry and plays the Duke card.

"I'll pay your f---ing fee! I don't care! It's nothing!" she cries. "I don't care! I just don't want this on my record. You don't understand, okay! Like it doesn't matter. I don't go to f-ing Durham Tech. I don't go to Central. I go to Duke."

"I hate you guys. I hate you. You're so awful," she continues. "I don't give a f---! It's $100 dollars. I can make that like in a day!"

"Just wait until I get back home to New Jersey. I will sue you!" it went on.

Just how big a story is this? Well, it must be pretty incredible, based on ABC 11's story teaser on Twitter: "MUST SEE INVESTIGATION AT 11PM: Out of Control College Kids? See what we caught on tape. ONLY ON ABC 11."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, frankly. Media hysterics aside, I suspect that relatively few college students at Duke, or anywhere, display this level of entitlement and self-righteousness, though clearly a decent number do.

Alcohol-induced as it might have been, however, the comments seem to speak to larger issues in higher education in general, and certainly at Duke, that aren't quite as well-scripted for film-at-11 moments.

First off: the kind of it's-about-me worldview we see here isn't one that originates without influence from a broader culture -- and from home life.

The era of helicopter parents (who "hover over" their progeny, checking in daily by phone), skyrocketing tuitions, and national educational rankings have combined to create an environment at-times poisonous in higher education.

There's an attitude of rampant edu-sumerism, where parents are paranoid that Johnny or Suzy will be doomed to an average middle class life if they don't get into a top-ten school, or if their freshman year writing teacher doesn't given them an A, or if their dorm room isn't perfect.

And given that some of those families are paying tens of thousands a year, they -- the parents, as much as the students -- sometimes feel as entitled to a perfect educational experience as they do their car or their hotel stay.

In fact, if you want to know where this unpleasant-sounding Garden Stater got her 'tude, I'd suspect much of it comes back to the parents.

(Most obnoxious situation I ever had to deal with in my last job, which was in university administration in the Northeast: A parent calling incensed that their child had received a copyright violation warning from a media organization that found said child had been sharing some song or another that they owned.

Said parent was incensed -- how could the university not protect his child from getting in trouble with a copyright holder? We should be shielding his tot! His biggest concern -- I am not making this up -- is that this could, decades down the road, block his child's ability to get confirmed to a judicial appointment somewhere.)

In any event, it's an issue that goes well beyond the Gothic Wonderland, and the Duke-Durham relationship. The attitude is to be expected in an era where too many students have been acculturated to expect a consumer-product relationship with their university, where the concept of in loco parentis is increasingly lost.

Still, is the attitude more prevalent at Duke than elsewhere?

Though I don't really know first-hand, having little exposure to classroom and academic life at Duke, I'd tend to guess the answer is, probably.

In the growth stage of elite universities, Duke has all the benefits and drawbacks of a 'tweener, stuck in this case between well-respected national universities and the ranks of elite global institutions.

It's a fantastic university with top-shelf resources -- and great students.

But at the undergraduate level, at least, the very cultural problems of must-read US News rankings, and consumerist expectations of education, put Duke in a vulnerable position.

It's always in the company of the Stanfords, Yales, and Princetons of the world, but rarely perceived as being those schools' true equals.

And it shows in the so-called yield rates of the university -- the percentage of students admitted who attend. A couple of years back, the New York Times revealed that of every 100 prospective undergraduates admitted to Harvard and Duke, 97 went to Harvard. Run the same numbers on Yale, and it's 75/25 for the Eli.

For many of the students who come to Duke, I suspect, Duke is their dream school, the place they've aspired to attend since that awkward middle-school visit as a TIP student, or since that Final Four basketball game when they were kids.

But for others, it's their fifth or sixth choice. A great school, but if they'd gotten that waitlist nod from New Haven or Palo Alto, they'd have been outta here.

And that position -- as the best of the rest, the second-tier choice of first-tier students -- naturally creates a tension between student and alma mater, and between student and town, that comes to color the interactions between the two.

What's the solution? Well, in some ways, it seems that Duke's heading down the path already. You don't have to look back further than the 1980s to see a period of time when a hungry university opened its doors to as many as a hundred or so "developmental admits" a year -- students who might not have been admitted on their own merits or demerits, but whose parents were likely to pony up big donations to grow the endowment.

These days, Duke's heading down the road of being well-accessible to students from all economic backgrounds, thanks to massive financial aid fund-raising.

And to the extent Duke is able to become a university that can recruit students from truly diverse economic backgrounds, the best-and-brightest who might not otherwise have been able to afford a elite private university education, it opens the door to countering the edu-sumerism, the rankings obsessions, the students whose path to The Big U have been paved with private college admissions counseling and dozens of test-prep sessions.

Which means less New Jersey, less Long Island, less Buckhead -- more Montana, more Oakland, more Harlem.

Entitlement exists in the minds of those who have been accustomed to regularly receiving what they want; for those who've only been able to dream of the things they might someday achieve, you find a markedly different worldview.

.....

Ultimately, is it newsworthy that a student got captured on tape acting every bit so typically like a kid who's had too much to drink? Not necessarily -- but hey, if you got the video, local news has got the airtime for you.

And unfortunately, it's comments like these, widely broadcast, that reinforce the stereotypes that exist about the Duke-Durham relationship, a connection with fractures likely found broadly between cities and private universities.

The real question is, how do towns and institutions move beyond them?

An evolving student body, fueled by financial aid that affords opportunities to those who cannot, literally, afford it, is one way.

Addressing the growing competitiveness, pre-collegiate preparation, and admissions obsessiveness in higher education nationally is another.

Ultimately, it's these core problems to which incidents of drunken bawling and off-campus parties are merely the symptoms.

Comments

[Freddie]

It's funny but don't most Duke students have this ideology because they attend Duke??? It sure seems that way to my wife and I based on the ones we have met, not all but most...It's sad because her ideology on life would be alot different if she did go to NCCU or Durham Tech...She would be taught a lesson in diversity of not just race, but class as she seems to lack! What will she sue for? Getting arrested as a Duke student? Her career as a Duke graduate is OVER! LOL

[Thomas]

Truly appalling. Just another Duke student who comes to Durham for four years and uses the community as her personal party house and, ultimately, trash can.

When is the university going to step up and start taking action for its students...and not leaving to local law enforcement--and taxpayers--to clean up their messes?

Perfect example why Durham could follow Providence's lead and consider a tax on college students.

[David McMullen]

To the question "Is this attitude more prevalent at Duke than elsewhere?", I offer this answer: Try to imagine a Central student saying "You can't do this to me! I'm not a Dukie, I go to NCCU!" Personally, I can't imagine a Central student EVER trying to play that card.

[Syd]

Salient points, all, and I certainly don't like a townies vs. students attitude from either side, but when it comes right down to it, you have to remember these are really just kids. Especially undergrads.

And when you throw alcohol into the mix, you're going to get boorish behavior. Simple as that.

Besides...Kids whose parents blow smoke up their asses (love the story about the judicial nomination thing, by the way), generally end up getting smacked down by reality eventually.

It's easy to be an idiot when your parents are still paying the bills.

[Michael Bacon]

I want to comment, but my thoughts aren't reconciling themselves coherently. They go something like this:

- 90% of the Duke students don't have this attitude. But 10% of the several thousand that are there is quite enough to cause a ruckus and be a problem.

- Part of this is Duke's approach to undergraduate drinking. Nan Keohane, whose tenure looks worse and worse with every passing year, decided to solve this problem by kicking it off campus and then pretending it doesn't exist. Being honest, the real problem here is that a drinking age of 21 is pretty stupid, as it effectively demands that 3/4 of college students don't drink, but many campuses have found ways to deal with it that don't involve displacement and denial.

- This is probably just my small, liberal arts college bias coming through, but having worked at the two local Top Prestigious Institutions, and been a grad student and a TA at one, I can't help but comment on how these Top Institutions often effectively ignore their undergraduates as much as possible. Both Duke and UNC at least make some effort to recognize and encourage good teaching, but the predominant desire at all these places always seems to be do your research first, then work on training grad students, and then if you can't possibly get out of it, spend some time on the undergrads, but only as little as you can manage. Matt Yglesias once wrote about his time at Harvard that the notion seemed to be you put a bunch of academically advanced and motivated kids on a campus with great libraries, good facilities, highly trained grad students, and an elusive beast called a "professor" that if you try really hard might actually tell you something, they'll find a way to teach themselves. As he points out, this actually works surprisingly well for a lot of people, but it shouldn't be surprising that some number of kids end up frittering it away.

- All of this can be at least ameliorated if the administration makes some attempt at caring about the problems and attempting to address them honestly. There's been precious little of that from Duke over the last decade, so again, why are we surprised that this stuff keeps happening?

[Grace Huang]

First, yikes! We're not all like this, I promise!

I think the biggest problem is not so much that "Duke cats view Durham as their litterbox", it's more like Duke students, like many other college students, view Duke as their 4 year break from reality and responsibilities. Duke kind of perpetuates this by having such a lax alcohol policy on campus and protecting students from RIAA violations. To be singled out when everyone else is doing the same thing around you naturally elicits some type of indignation. The fact that this particular student happened to be quite elitist is something that made her news-worthy, not normal.

Though I definitely agree that as Duke students, we really should respect our community more, it's so very tough to build that especially when students are coming and going ever 4 years. By the time we learn that Durham isn't so bad after all, we're about to graduate.

[Dan S.]

In my undergrad experience in D.C., you could easily substitute "G.W." or "Georgetown" in place of "Duke" and "Howard", "Shaw", or "American" in place of "Durham Tech" and "Central".

Obnoxious people are obnoxious, no matter what alma mater they hail from.

[-SLN-]

I need to preface this with the fact that I think Duke students *can* be obnoxious, entitled punks. Particularly the folks in typical social fraternities/sororities, since many of them encourage the behaviors and attitudes exhibited in the video on last night's news.

With that said, while watching it, we definitely felt like some of the neighborhood residents came off as a bit like the stereotypical crotchety old person waving fists in the air at the persnickety youngsters on his lawn.

Seriously, at some point, one really ought to make concessions that these kids are still college kids, and that certain things are fairly ubiquitous to that experience. Roll your eyes at them, try to recall that you were once a ridiculous college-age kid, and move along.

[KeepDurhamDifferent!]

This Duke undergrad got into both Harvard and Stanford, but was prohibited from attending because they were "too liberal / Northeast / West Coast" in the eyes of my parents.

I also think you are ignoring the responsibilities of Durham in this situation. It reminds me of Columbia / Harlem in the 80s, or Yale / New Haven today. When the city govt. is fundamentally corrupt, the police department openly targets them for arrest based solely on their student status, and their cars get broken into by townies I'm not sure how you can expect a different outcome.

As Durham becomes more gentrified (and the vestiges of Keohane's policies are removed) this situation will fix itself.

[Steve]

Wow, someone hail Reyn Bowman. If "Durham: where great things happen" ever needs replacing, "Durham isn't so bad after all" sounds like a winner to me.

[Silent Trinity Park Resident]

If someone can find a college town that has no problems with noise or underage drinking I would love to hear about it. The fact is that Durham residents love to bite the hand that makes Durham, well Durham, and not some formerly prosperous city with no future. Without Duke, there would be no high tech/biotech jobs and Durham would be another former city full of slums and bad neighborhoods. The same Duke neighbors who love what RTP brings to durham, an educated population, Duke's cultural offerings and the running trails around the Washington Duke and East Campus complain relentlessly about the realities of living in a college town. There is certainly a trade-off, but nobody is making anyone live in Durham or next to to campus.

[GreenLantern]

There are no college towns without noise or underage drinking, because the media is pretty good about finding out about it and sensationalizing the story.

I don't know if you really are a "silent Trinity Park resident", but it's finally good to hear from someone else that Durham and its people tend to take Duke for granted. Duke never can seem to do enough to please everyone, and if that's your intention, bad town/gown policy usually follows. It still bothers me that for the most part, neighborhood organizations and liberals in this town failed to stand up and give the lacrosse players benefit of the doubt when it came time to be fair and just. The whole controversy came at a time when the TPA and others had Duke over a barrel with regards to partying, so it's easy to understand their silence on the issue. Duke's president, the mayor and city council, a DA with political ambitions, the liberal media, neighborhood associations around Duke, all found it quite comforting to align themselves with folks on the warpath like Lavonia Allison just to get their interests served...never mind the futures of three young innocent men.

...and why I don't believe for one minute, the majority around Duke thought the accuser was telling the truth, their silence or lack of strong defense of their neighboring student population was deafening to the point one could not help believe there were ulterior motives.

[Kevin Davis]

"If someone can find a college town that has no problems with noise or underage drinking I would love to hear about it."

@Silent TP Resident: Maybe it was a bubble, but in nine years in Cambridge, Mass., I never once experienced a loud or unruly off-campus student party.

Then again, the vast majority of students at Harvard -- well over 95% -- lived on campus. The situation may certainly have been different around MIT, particularly in Boston's Back Bay, where many MIT frats were located. (Paging Dave Rollins?)

(And not that Cantabs didn't go far in trying to restrict campus residential life even without the scourge of party houses; but that's another story.)

But I think it's worth keeping in mind that the raucous parties, when they occur, are usually part and parcel of a more serious issue: abuse of alcohol.

There's a difference between underage drinking and out-of-control use of alcohol. The former, in a social context exhibiting responsible use of the substance, is fairly innocuous -- and likely occurs around many dinner tables at the holidays, say, with 16-20 Y/Os.

But binge drinking or drinking until one loses control is probably pretty highly associated with out-of-control off-campus behavior as well ... and isn't any better if you're 19 than if you're 40.

Which brings back, I think, one of the points often raised in the issue: a campus' choice on whether to provide on-campus space for frats and sororities versus seeing these organizations move off-campus.

To my mind, when campuses don't create an integrated residential environment to serve all students, they lose the opportunity to make students' time outside of class a learning and growth opportunity. Learning how to use a substance like alcohol responsibly, as opposed to in binge-drinking fashion, is to my mind one thing you should learn in college.

If it's not obvious, by the way, I'm a big believer in the idea that part of the benefit of a college experience is learning to be an adult. Colleges have every responsibility to teach their students to be productive, capable, responsible citizens.

The fact that too many students, and parents, seem to embrace the "shut up and teach" mantra that would say the college's business in a student's life ends at the classroom door is, to my mind, part and parcel of the "edu-sumerism" problem I'm talking about in this post.

Sorry, but in my book, going to college isn't about getting your diploma so you can score the best job or get into the best grad school. It's about growing into a more complete person who is ready to give back to and contribute to society.

Yet far too many colleges are too consumed with parental satisfaction and positive scores on student exit surveys -- and the much-hoped-for future philanthropy -- to try to shape the whole student.

Back on subject: I'd be curious what others' college-town experiences were like. How does Palo Alto handle it? Hanover? Ithaca?

[Durhamite]

I just have to say that I love the fact there is real discussion going on about this and other issues in Durham. The comments on this blog are often as insightful and worth reading as the original post. Very few blogs can say that.

[Keep Durham Different!]

Dave Rollins here (thanks for the shoutout Kev): MIT frats were indeed a problem in the Back Bay, though this was mitigated by the fact that it was an urban atmosphere where people don't drive and are somewhat inured to loud / drunken foot traffic and honking horns. Also, the areas around Harvard and MIT are expensive enough to discourage the type of "student ghetto" that developed in 1990s Trinity Park and (lately) Walltown / Trinity Heights.

I've always wondered what OND does about student parties, since it's pretty convenient to campus (paging John Schelp!).

[Keep Durham Different!]

oops, meant to say OWD (Old West Durham).

[B]

As far as I can recall, in Tucson (home to 35,000 Univ. of AZ students, many of whom live off campus) off-campus parties are completely handled by the Tucson PD. Because they are, you know, *off campus*. Noise complaints come up a lot in certain neighborhoods, and parties are routinely shut down if they get out of hand. The first noise complaint usually ends up with a warning and a "red tag" which is a notice posted on your front window stating that if any noise complaints come up in the next 6 months, the occupants of the house are going to get fined big time.

Net result: your worst-case party house throws a rager about every 6 months. And no one thinks it's the University's fault or responsibility to deal with it.

[fletchfoto]

Having lived in many heavily student occupied neighborhoods around Boston over ten years (including the BU "student ghettos" of Allston and Brighton), I never called The Man about out of hand parties up there. I have for Duke parties in Durham, and I don't even live in TP.

[Michael Bacon]

STPR: Many of us are grateful for Duke (how many times do we have to say this?), but Duke ought to be grateful for Durham too. Why? Duke didn't build Durham (although it certainly radically shapes it today). Durham built Duke, and Durham's former prosperity is largely what funded Duke's growth into a national university. I'm very grateful for a lot of things that Duke brings to the community, but treating it like it arrived, deus ex machina, into a dying town just to save us all ignores history. Rather, when Durham was a thriving industrial center, many of its most successful businessmen invested heavily in Duke, and it's paid huge dividends for the town as tobacco disappeared.

Rollins: How do we deal with this in OWD? Frankly, exactly the way that the Trinity Heights and Walltown residents deal with it, except that nobody's surprised. I have to concede that OWD's houses are smaller than those in TH, so we don't tend to get the big group houses, but we do have a large number of Duke students running around. However, because the community 13 years ago decided it wasn't going to take any more crap, nobody's surprised when the cops get called on loud parties, people object to public urination and vomiting on lawns, and most of our property managers (which heavily tilt towards Apple Realty and Dick Patton) don't put up with this crap in their properties. As such, those who try to have the worst of the parties either never come or get shut down before it becomes a big issue. This is a problem in TH and Walltown because for a while, the students COULD set up and throw big parties.

All: Yes, I was a college student once, yes I lived off campus, and yes, I did some colossally stupid things. But as Christine Westfall says in the video, I never barfed in someone else's yard. And when I did get caught doing something illegal or inconsiderate or stupid, I sure as hell didn't claim I was being "targeted" or throw the kinds of tantrums the Duke students are throwing. When the cops showed up at a party, we shut the hell up. When campus security busted a party, you bitched about it, but didn't claim it was some kind of great injustice. I was one of 5,000 college students in a town of about 10,000 people, and yes, we had problems like this, and yes, the two colleges took responsibility for the problems and put a lot of work into maintaining good relations with its neighbors, including revoking off-campus privileges for violators.

This problem isn't unique to Durham, but it's also not this bad in the majority of college towns.