Sexual Citizens, page 11
But drinking-related mortality is not limited to goldfish. The CDC fact sheet that Jennifer made her older son read after a sheepish call from the emergency room in the winter of his freshman year notes that in the United States six people die every day from binge drinking, about three-quarters of them men. Binge drinking is defined for women as four or more drinks in two hours and for men as five or more drinks.9 In one large national study, about a third of college students reported at least one episode of five or more drinks in the past two weeks.10 The SHIFT survey found similar rates among Columbia students.11 Nationally, the students who binge drink are more likely to be white men from the most privileged backgrounds. This doesn’t just apply to students; wealthier men in general drink more.12 Students from this demographic are the ones most likely to have seen their own fathers drink heavily, and to associate heavy drinking with a normal transition to adulthood.
Those concerned about how young people drink today perhaps don’t realize that the average eighteen-year-old today drinks less and is less likely to use illicit drugs than one who came of age in the 1970s.13 Policies and programs have had a measurable impact on substance use among high-school-aged youth, so that students begin college today with less experience drinking than their parents likely have had. But during college, students do a lot of “catching up”—and by the time they graduate they’re drinking about the same amount as previous generations.
We could compare students not just to their parents, but to their grandparents, at least for those whose grandparents also attended college. In 1959 two deans at UCLA wrote, “Think of college and you think of flaming youth; thinking of flaming youth and you think of liquor and sex.”14 They go on to cite the heavy drinking, decades before, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s few years at college, noting that his “preoccupation with drink is second only to his preoccupation with sex,” before bemoaning similar dispositions in other college students. Studies dating back to the 1950s noted the impact of alcohol on “male aggression” in dating-courtship relations.15 However, we would be wrong to imagine that since this kind of excessive drinking has been going on for so long, there’s nothing we can do about it. Society made great strides in addressing smoking and homophobia—both of which were far more tolerated a generation ago. We have good models for how to make inroads into the problems of alcohol abuse.16
Why do people act in ways that seem dangerous, stupid, or both? The concept of social risk—the good (social) reasons we have for doing things that are bad for us, or for not doing things that would benefit our health—helps explain why people engage in behaviors with detrimental consequences, act in ways that seem illogical, or fail to take actions that could protect them.17 The idea of a social risk highlights one way that peers, organizational environments, and the broader culture shape actions that feel like individual choices. People engage in sex that can have health consequences—for example, forgoing condoms as a demonstration of trust—in part because sex isn’t a health behavior, but rather, a social behavior, laden with all kinds of meaning and influenced by our peers, our pasts, and our institutions.18 Other parts of everyday life are no different; people smoke, drink, eat too much, don’t exercise, and subject themselves to enormous amounts of stress. We are not health-maximizing beings; instead, we often prioritize all kinds of social goals over our personal and collective health.
Social risk helps us make sense of why people drink so excessively when they hate how terrible they feel the next day, when they do things they regret or can’t even remember, and when other parts of their lives that are valuable to them are negatively affected by their drinking. The drunk sex that happens after a party may be dangerous insofar as it puts students at risk of all kinds of things, including sexual assault—either being assaulted or committing assault. But in college, where party drinking is a major way people socialize, it also may feel like the best strategy to meet potential sexual partners, make new friends, or create meaningful experiences with existing ones.
Students on the same campus experience different social risks in relation to drinking. Forgoing the purchase of a fake ID can mean missing out on socializing with the “right” people, on being able to go wherever those people go. But for others, the social risks of getting that ID feel greater. For example, for people of color, the far higher likelihood of incarceration and the dangers of an encounter with a police officer at a traffic stop are well documented. And for many men, who cannot imagine themselves being sexually assaulted, and who haven’t thought about how drinking might make them more likely to commit assault, the conversation about assault and drinking feels irrelevant. Race, class, gender, and sexuality intertwine with institutional structures, peer networks, and cultural frameworks to produce different orientations to what, socially, is a risk. The stress of college, sexual shame, the legal drinking age, and the cultural and structural legacy of elite institutions of higher education as places for white men to come of age all intertwine to shape campus drinking.
When Nick asserted that he was “just a fucking college student,” he was drawing on a deep history of American residential higher education as providing a place where “flaming youth” safely toggle between living the life of the mind and being the life of the party. Campuses have grown ever more diverse; thus there are more and more students for whom the social risks of drinking exceed the risks of not drinking. Yet heterosexual, white, wealthy male students still wield enormous social power, because they control scarce social space, and because they can more easily enjoy the undeniable social benefits of heavy drinking—the bonding, the fun, the stress relief, the easy access to casual sex—without worrying so much about being assaulted, or arrested, or the cost of the bill from an ambulance ride. Our point is not that college drinking is the fault of wealthy white men. It’s that histories of advantage and specific kinds of masculinity have produced a particular drinking environment—an environment that intersects with the contextually specific rationale behind the heavy partying that is so typical of freshman fall. Which is exactly the period, sometimes referred to as the “red zone,” that college students are most likely to experience sexual assault.19
“YOU JUST GO TO A MORE SKETCH NEIGHBORHOOD AND WALK INTO A LIQUOR STORE.”
Today’s college freshmen were almost all born well over a decade after Congress’s passage of the 1984 Uniform Drinking Age Act, requiring states to raise the legal drinking age to 21 to qualify for receipt of federal highway funds. From a population health point of view, this is an unmitigated success, estimated to have saved half a million teenage lives.20 Yet today’s college students still drink, and enter a context in which institutional liability has pushed drinking out of campus pubs, lounges, and hallways, and behind closed doors and in dark corners (although it is worth noting that there is substantial variation in campus drinking environments, which include traditions and school culture as well as the demographic makeup of the student population, policies or laws at the institutional, community, and state level, and the enforcement of those laws).21 An unintended consequence of laws to reduce alcohol-related harms is that the easiest path to some crazy orientation-week story is to venture into spaces controlled by older students—usually men.
Freshmen arrive at college already familiar with age-based social stratification. Differences in institutional knowledge, maturity, self-confidence, and friendships deepened through time and shared experience further disadvantage younger students, with these structural inequalities amplified by the control of space on campus. Almost all traditional-aged Columbia and Barnard undergraduates live in student housing, and an unexamined fact of college life is that juniors and seniors have access to better space—either suites with a shared living room and single bedrooms, or apartment-style living. This is a critical aspect of the geography of partying on campus, promoted by the different kind of monitoring to which juniors and seniors are subject. Since seniors are often 21 or older, there is little push to enforce minimum legal drinking age laws in their dorms. Incoming students walk into a situation in which two precious sources of social currency—alcohol and space to party without getting in trouble—are unequally allocated by class year. Such stratification systems are taken for granted, with questions rarely raised about why policies provide better spaces for people who are more “senior,” even in the face of evidence that such policies may create considerable harms.
Like Prohibition, laws making 21 the legal age to buy alcohol have led to a series of social work-arounds. Institutions incur liability should they fail to enforce the law, with the result that underage students cannot drink openly in the spaces that they control—their dorm lounges, the small shared kitchens in the freshmen and sophomore dorms, or even cinder-block hallways. But students can get away with drinking in their dorm rooms if they do not to disturb their neighbors or otherwise attract an RA’s attention. If they do, students under 21—typically freshmen and sophomores—can get “written up,” as Nick was, for drinking with friends in a space they control. The take-home lessons are: don’t crank the music up, and drink quickly. In this context, pregaming—drinking rapidly with a few friends before going out, sometimes in the form of a drinking game—follows a robust logic of efficiency. Students save on the unit price; shots from a “handle” of vodka, purchased by a friend with a fake ID or an upperclassman, cost a fraction of what students would pay for a vodka soda at a local bar. They also avoid the social price. Parties get packed quickly, and as they do, students often have to run a gauntlet to gain admission. Fraternities, by rule, are not allowed to serve hard liquor. If you’re a man, getting in is tough, as brothers tend to limit access to men who are part of the house (in part to keep the gender ratio to their advantage). If you’re a woman and you don’t want to drink cheap beer, you have to subject yourself to the evaluation of some fraternity brother, who will decide whether you are cute enough to get a shot of vodka. Pregaming enables students to consume alcohol when, where, and with whom they please.
Rich kids swagger onto this landscape, with wealthy, white freshmen as the ones most likely to arrive on campus with a fake ID. Cecile, a willowy sorority girl from Atlanta, recalled deciding in ninth grade that she wanted to run with the party crowd. They got their fakes as a group, buying them from kids at a different high school. The racial codes of her description made us cringe. The fakes were good because they got them from people who knew what they were doing; she said, somewhat unbelievably to us, that they “also sold cocaine and guns”—she paused to laugh, “Like, who the hell were those kids?” Once she and her high school friends got their IDs, they quickly developed a strategy for where to use them: go to where the poor people were. “You just like go to a more sketch neighborhood and walk into a liquor store.” Without needing a paying job of her own, before she even started college Cecile had money to buy liquor, and a “good fake.” She was well dressed, with money to spend and the resources to avoid trouble—an ideal patron for a bar or club, except of course for the fact that she was underage. Parents sometimes paid attention to credit card bills. But rich kids had plenty of work-arounds, including ways to get the cash they needed to buy drugs. Charge dinner with a friend on Mom and Dad’s card and have your friend pay you back in cash. Mom and Dad probably wouldn’t notice that dinner was twice as expensive as it should have been; you can rely on assumptions about how expensive New York is. It was a hustle many wealthy students had learned in high school.
Two decades ago women like Cecile would have entered a campus landscape filled with people like her—wealthy and white, and, in Columbia’s case, mostly male. Columbia today is less than 50% white, with a sizable number of students from low-income backgrounds; nearly one in five undergraduates are the first in their families to go to college.22 Students like Cecile don’t totally rule, in part because there are now plenty of students from the “sketch” neighborhoods she referenced. As a white student, Cecile complained, there are certain things you can’t talk about—race particularly. It just gets you into trouble. And so for the most part, you learn to be quiet and keep your thoughts to yourself. Most of these rich students also learn fairly quickly not to flaunt their privilege.
The cultural and social traces of higher education’s historical role as a coming-of-age setting for white men linger in the social organization of campus drinking. Part of this involves the physical institutions—Princeton has its eating clubs; until just a few years ago Harvard had its finals clubs; and lots of schools have fraternities—where upperclassmen who are frequently white and wealthy control high-value space and access to alcohol. Drunken college hijinks are a core element of the cultural imagination of the American ruling class. Norman, explaining why a friend of his from Germany drank so heavily during his first weeks at school, pointed to Bluto of Animal House fame, and said that Franz was “just trying to go out there and be, like, college.”
Two basic principles define the relationship between institutions of higher education and fraternities: liability and loyalty. In terms of liability, who is, or should be, held responsible for hazing, sexual assaults, or harms related to binge drinking that are tied to Greek life? In terms of loyalty, how much can or should schools do to regulate, or even shut down, such social institutions, to which alumni may feel an intense devotion, and to which some current students are equally devoted? But there’s a third set of questions that might be asked, about how these quasi-independent institutions can, in the aggregate, work against institutional commitments to diversity and inclusion—not necessarily through any intention on the part of the members themselves, but solely by being places that reproduce wealthy men’s control over (party) space.
WHITENESS, MASCULINITY, WEALTH, AND POWER
Colleges and universities across the nation are struggling, in ways large and small, with their histories as predominantly white institutions—the names on buildings and statues, the financial legacy of endowments that began with profits from America’s original sin of slavery.23 The drinking culture is not generally flagged as part of this, but our work suggests that the shift to diversity and inclusion requires addressing the dominance of white cultural practices.24 Although there is not a massive literature on institutional characteristics and levels of binge drinking, it is well established that students at historically Black colleges and universities—HBCUs—drink less.25 Some of this, no doubt, is because Black Americans are surveilled far more aggressively, punished disproportionately for their transgressions, and subject to potentially lethal force when policed. Students at historically white colleges and universities experience none of these biases, and are, in critical ways, freed up to drink more.26 Even within institutions that are more racially mixed, Black students drink less than white students.27 And Greek letter organizations, often flagged as institutional sources for the reproduction of binge drinking, are actually only associated with higher rates of binge drinking when they are white men’s Greek letter organizations.28
We noted that the Mexican independence party to celebrate “el Grito,” hosted by Latina women students, took place in a fraternity. Going back at least to Peggy Reeves Sanday’s Fraternity Gang Rape, work on masculinity and campus sexual assault has examined fraternities as the institutionalization of toxic masculinity.29 Frequent and egregious examples keep this narrative alive. But our position is more nuanced. As others have also noted, fraternities are not all the same; in addition to the racial and ethnic diversity of some fraternities even on historically white campuses, some are actively involved in intentionally trying to remake masculinity, while others seem primarily focused on managing liability.30
Critically, at Columbia there’s at least as much variation in prestige between fraternities as there is between men who are involved in Greek life and those who are not. The same is true of athletics.31 Students we asked almost all reproduced the same list of the “best” fraternities and sororities, and the “hottest” men’s teams, where “best” and “hottest” mean the most exclusive, with members who are supposedly the most attractive, with the highest value as sexual partners. There was also a high degree of concurrence about the “worst” fraternities. From the point of view of the broader campus culture, the problem is not that fraternities offer a highly valued mechanism to foster connections with peers (and alumni); it’s that they reproduce an unequal allocation of access to space, alcohol, and a specific vision of college fun. The Latino men, in handing over their house to women for the “el Grito” party, suggested just how malleable that inequality could be.
There is Greek life that is actually the opposite of boozy; it’s officially dry. Sororities can’t serve alcohol at their events; some can’t even have alcohol in their houses at all. That isn’t an informal practice; it’s a national rule to which chapters must adhere. This further concentrates the power of distributing alcohol in the hands of wealthy men in historically white institutions—and here we are talking about fraternities, not universities. It’s not that Black, Asian, and other students don’t drink, because many of them do—although notably less so in spaces that they control—but that college binge drinking is a white man’s cultural practice that other students emulate to embody the white masculinity of “the college experience.” The SHIFT survey found gender and racial-ethnic patterns of binge drinking at Columbia similar to national ones, with men, non-Hispanic whites, and Hispanics engaging in binge drinking at significantly higher rates than other students.32 Girls in high school are increasingly likely to drink excessively, closing some of the difference between how girls drink and how boys drink. There are many reasons for this, but we think that part of this is a vision of “equality” that means acting like the guys.
“MAN, I JUST WANT SOME ROSÉ WINE OR SOMETHING . . . SOMETHING EASY AND GIRLY.”
At 9 a.m. on the Saturday morning of homecoming, one of the year’s biggest drinking days, the university-assigned and -employed party monitors came in to inspect a fraternity and make sure it was following regulations—no serving booze other than beer, no kegs, food and nonalcoholic drink available, no nuisance noise. A monitor went through her checklist ritual with the fraternity’s “compliance officer”—a junior who was assigned this important leadership position. Was there soda available? Yes. How about food? Five different brothers pointed to the bagels. How loud would the music be? “Party level.” The brothers demonstrated. One of the party monitors joked, “Aw, c’mon y’all, this is not party volume, I would not come to your party.” Everyone laughed, and they turned the volume up more. The second monitor located the required soda.
Those concerned about how young people drink today perhaps don’t realize that the average eighteen-year-old today drinks less and is less likely to use illicit drugs than one who came of age in the 1970s.13 Policies and programs have had a measurable impact on substance use among high-school-aged youth, so that students begin college today with less experience drinking than their parents likely have had. But during college, students do a lot of “catching up”—and by the time they graduate they’re drinking about the same amount as previous generations.
We could compare students not just to their parents, but to their grandparents, at least for those whose grandparents also attended college. In 1959 two deans at UCLA wrote, “Think of college and you think of flaming youth; thinking of flaming youth and you think of liquor and sex.”14 They go on to cite the heavy drinking, decades before, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s few years at college, noting that his “preoccupation with drink is second only to his preoccupation with sex,” before bemoaning similar dispositions in other college students. Studies dating back to the 1950s noted the impact of alcohol on “male aggression” in dating-courtship relations.15 However, we would be wrong to imagine that since this kind of excessive drinking has been going on for so long, there’s nothing we can do about it. Society made great strides in addressing smoking and homophobia—both of which were far more tolerated a generation ago. We have good models for how to make inroads into the problems of alcohol abuse.16
Why do people act in ways that seem dangerous, stupid, or both? The concept of social risk—the good (social) reasons we have for doing things that are bad for us, or for not doing things that would benefit our health—helps explain why people engage in behaviors with detrimental consequences, act in ways that seem illogical, or fail to take actions that could protect them.17 The idea of a social risk highlights one way that peers, organizational environments, and the broader culture shape actions that feel like individual choices. People engage in sex that can have health consequences—for example, forgoing condoms as a demonstration of trust—in part because sex isn’t a health behavior, but rather, a social behavior, laden with all kinds of meaning and influenced by our peers, our pasts, and our institutions.18 Other parts of everyday life are no different; people smoke, drink, eat too much, don’t exercise, and subject themselves to enormous amounts of stress. We are not health-maximizing beings; instead, we often prioritize all kinds of social goals over our personal and collective health.
Social risk helps us make sense of why people drink so excessively when they hate how terrible they feel the next day, when they do things they regret or can’t even remember, and when other parts of their lives that are valuable to them are negatively affected by their drinking. The drunk sex that happens after a party may be dangerous insofar as it puts students at risk of all kinds of things, including sexual assault—either being assaulted or committing assault. But in college, where party drinking is a major way people socialize, it also may feel like the best strategy to meet potential sexual partners, make new friends, or create meaningful experiences with existing ones.
Students on the same campus experience different social risks in relation to drinking. Forgoing the purchase of a fake ID can mean missing out on socializing with the “right” people, on being able to go wherever those people go. But for others, the social risks of getting that ID feel greater. For example, for people of color, the far higher likelihood of incarceration and the dangers of an encounter with a police officer at a traffic stop are well documented. And for many men, who cannot imagine themselves being sexually assaulted, and who haven’t thought about how drinking might make them more likely to commit assault, the conversation about assault and drinking feels irrelevant. Race, class, gender, and sexuality intertwine with institutional structures, peer networks, and cultural frameworks to produce different orientations to what, socially, is a risk. The stress of college, sexual shame, the legal drinking age, and the cultural and structural legacy of elite institutions of higher education as places for white men to come of age all intertwine to shape campus drinking.
When Nick asserted that he was “just a fucking college student,” he was drawing on a deep history of American residential higher education as providing a place where “flaming youth” safely toggle between living the life of the mind and being the life of the party. Campuses have grown ever more diverse; thus there are more and more students for whom the social risks of drinking exceed the risks of not drinking. Yet heterosexual, white, wealthy male students still wield enormous social power, because they control scarce social space, and because they can more easily enjoy the undeniable social benefits of heavy drinking—the bonding, the fun, the stress relief, the easy access to casual sex—without worrying so much about being assaulted, or arrested, or the cost of the bill from an ambulance ride. Our point is not that college drinking is the fault of wealthy white men. It’s that histories of advantage and specific kinds of masculinity have produced a particular drinking environment—an environment that intersects with the contextually specific rationale behind the heavy partying that is so typical of freshman fall. Which is exactly the period, sometimes referred to as the “red zone,” that college students are most likely to experience sexual assault.19
“YOU JUST GO TO A MORE SKETCH NEIGHBORHOOD AND WALK INTO A LIQUOR STORE.”
Today’s college freshmen were almost all born well over a decade after Congress’s passage of the 1984 Uniform Drinking Age Act, requiring states to raise the legal drinking age to 21 to qualify for receipt of federal highway funds. From a population health point of view, this is an unmitigated success, estimated to have saved half a million teenage lives.20 Yet today’s college students still drink, and enter a context in which institutional liability has pushed drinking out of campus pubs, lounges, and hallways, and behind closed doors and in dark corners (although it is worth noting that there is substantial variation in campus drinking environments, which include traditions and school culture as well as the demographic makeup of the student population, policies or laws at the institutional, community, and state level, and the enforcement of those laws).21 An unintended consequence of laws to reduce alcohol-related harms is that the easiest path to some crazy orientation-week story is to venture into spaces controlled by older students—usually men.
Freshmen arrive at college already familiar with age-based social stratification. Differences in institutional knowledge, maturity, self-confidence, and friendships deepened through time and shared experience further disadvantage younger students, with these structural inequalities amplified by the control of space on campus. Almost all traditional-aged Columbia and Barnard undergraduates live in student housing, and an unexamined fact of college life is that juniors and seniors have access to better space—either suites with a shared living room and single bedrooms, or apartment-style living. This is a critical aspect of the geography of partying on campus, promoted by the different kind of monitoring to which juniors and seniors are subject. Since seniors are often 21 or older, there is little push to enforce minimum legal drinking age laws in their dorms. Incoming students walk into a situation in which two precious sources of social currency—alcohol and space to party without getting in trouble—are unequally allocated by class year. Such stratification systems are taken for granted, with questions rarely raised about why policies provide better spaces for people who are more “senior,” even in the face of evidence that such policies may create considerable harms.
Like Prohibition, laws making 21 the legal age to buy alcohol have led to a series of social work-arounds. Institutions incur liability should they fail to enforce the law, with the result that underage students cannot drink openly in the spaces that they control—their dorm lounges, the small shared kitchens in the freshmen and sophomore dorms, or even cinder-block hallways. But students can get away with drinking in their dorm rooms if they do not to disturb their neighbors or otherwise attract an RA’s attention. If they do, students under 21—typically freshmen and sophomores—can get “written up,” as Nick was, for drinking with friends in a space they control. The take-home lessons are: don’t crank the music up, and drink quickly. In this context, pregaming—drinking rapidly with a few friends before going out, sometimes in the form of a drinking game—follows a robust logic of efficiency. Students save on the unit price; shots from a “handle” of vodka, purchased by a friend with a fake ID or an upperclassman, cost a fraction of what students would pay for a vodka soda at a local bar. They also avoid the social price. Parties get packed quickly, and as they do, students often have to run a gauntlet to gain admission. Fraternities, by rule, are not allowed to serve hard liquor. If you’re a man, getting in is tough, as brothers tend to limit access to men who are part of the house (in part to keep the gender ratio to their advantage). If you’re a woman and you don’t want to drink cheap beer, you have to subject yourself to the evaluation of some fraternity brother, who will decide whether you are cute enough to get a shot of vodka. Pregaming enables students to consume alcohol when, where, and with whom they please.
Rich kids swagger onto this landscape, with wealthy, white freshmen as the ones most likely to arrive on campus with a fake ID. Cecile, a willowy sorority girl from Atlanta, recalled deciding in ninth grade that she wanted to run with the party crowd. They got their fakes as a group, buying them from kids at a different high school. The racial codes of her description made us cringe. The fakes were good because they got them from people who knew what they were doing; she said, somewhat unbelievably to us, that they “also sold cocaine and guns”—she paused to laugh, “Like, who the hell were those kids?” Once she and her high school friends got their IDs, they quickly developed a strategy for where to use them: go to where the poor people were. “You just like go to a more sketch neighborhood and walk into a liquor store.” Without needing a paying job of her own, before she even started college Cecile had money to buy liquor, and a “good fake.” She was well dressed, with money to spend and the resources to avoid trouble—an ideal patron for a bar or club, except of course for the fact that she was underage. Parents sometimes paid attention to credit card bills. But rich kids had plenty of work-arounds, including ways to get the cash they needed to buy drugs. Charge dinner with a friend on Mom and Dad’s card and have your friend pay you back in cash. Mom and Dad probably wouldn’t notice that dinner was twice as expensive as it should have been; you can rely on assumptions about how expensive New York is. It was a hustle many wealthy students had learned in high school.
Two decades ago women like Cecile would have entered a campus landscape filled with people like her—wealthy and white, and, in Columbia’s case, mostly male. Columbia today is less than 50% white, with a sizable number of students from low-income backgrounds; nearly one in five undergraduates are the first in their families to go to college.22 Students like Cecile don’t totally rule, in part because there are now plenty of students from the “sketch” neighborhoods she referenced. As a white student, Cecile complained, there are certain things you can’t talk about—race particularly. It just gets you into trouble. And so for the most part, you learn to be quiet and keep your thoughts to yourself. Most of these rich students also learn fairly quickly not to flaunt their privilege.
The cultural and social traces of higher education’s historical role as a coming-of-age setting for white men linger in the social organization of campus drinking. Part of this involves the physical institutions—Princeton has its eating clubs; until just a few years ago Harvard had its finals clubs; and lots of schools have fraternities—where upperclassmen who are frequently white and wealthy control high-value space and access to alcohol. Drunken college hijinks are a core element of the cultural imagination of the American ruling class. Norman, explaining why a friend of his from Germany drank so heavily during his first weeks at school, pointed to Bluto of Animal House fame, and said that Franz was “just trying to go out there and be, like, college.”
Two basic principles define the relationship between institutions of higher education and fraternities: liability and loyalty. In terms of liability, who is, or should be, held responsible for hazing, sexual assaults, or harms related to binge drinking that are tied to Greek life? In terms of loyalty, how much can or should schools do to regulate, or even shut down, such social institutions, to which alumni may feel an intense devotion, and to which some current students are equally devoted? But there’s a third set of questions that might be asked, about how these quasi-independent institutions can, in the aggregate, work against institutional commitments to diversity and inclusion—not necessarily through any intention on the part of the members themselves, but solely by being places that reproduce wealthy men’s control over (party) space.
WHITENESS, MASCULINITY, WEALTH, AND POWER
Colleges and universities across the nation are struggling, in ways large and small, with their histories as predominantly white institutions—the names on buildings and statues, the financial legacy of endowments that began with profits from America’s original sin of slavery.23 The drinking culture is not generally flagged as part of this, but our work suggests that the shift to diversity and inclusion requires addressing the dominance of white cultural practices.24 Although there is not a massive literature on institutional characteristics and levels of binge drinking, it is well established that students at historically Black colleges and universities—HBCUs—drink less.25 Some of this, no doubt, is because Black Americans are surveilled far more aggressively, punished disproportionately for their transgressions, and subject to potentially lethal force when policed. Students at historically white colleges and universities experience none of these biases, and are, in critical ways, freed up to drink more.26 Even within institutions that are more racially mixed, Black students drink less than white students.27 And Greek letter organizations, often flagged as institutional sources for the reproduction of binge drinking, are actually only associated with higher rates of binge drinking when they are white men’s Greek letter organizations.28
We noted that the Mexican independence party to celebrate “el Grito,” hosted by Latina women students, took place in a fraternity. Going back at least to Peggy Reeves Sanday’s Fraternity Gang Rape, work on masculinity and campus sexual assault has examined fraternities as the institutionalization of toxic masculinity.29 Frequent and egregious examples keep this narrative alive. But our position is more nuanced. As others have also noted, fraternities are not all the same; in addition to the racial and ethnic diversity of some fraternities even on historically white campuses, some are actively involved in intentionally trying to remake masculinity, while others seem primarily focused on managing liability.30
Critically, at Columbia there’s at least as much variation in prestige between fraternities as there is between men who are involved in Greek life and those who are not. The same is true of athletics.31 Students we asked almost all reproduced the same list of the “best” fraternities and sororities, and the “hottest” men’s teams, where “best” and “hottest” mean the most exclusive, with members who are supposedly the most attractive, with the highest value as sexual partners. There was also a high degree of concurrence about the “worst” fraternities. From the point of view of the broader campus culture, the problem is not that fraternities offer a highly valued mechanism to foster connections with peers (and alumni); it’s that they reproduce an unequal allocation of access to space, alcohol, and a specific vision of college fun. The Latino men, in handing over their house to women for the “el Grito” party, suggested just how malleable that inequality could be.
There is Greek life that is actually the opposite of boozy; it’s officially dry. Sororities can’t serve alcohol at their events; some can’t even have alcohol in their houses at all. That isn’t an informal practice; it’s a national rule to which chapters must adhere. This further concentrates the power of distributing alcohol in the hands of wealthy men in historically white institutions—and here we are talking about fraternities, not universities. It’s not that Black, Asian, and other students don’t drink, because many of them do—although notably less so in spaces that they control—but that college binge drinking is a white man’s cultural practice that other students emulate to embody the white masculinity of “the college experience.” The SHIFT survey found gender and racial-ethnic patterns of binge drinking at Columbia similar to national ones, with men, non-Hispanic whites, and Hispanics engaging in binge drinking at significantly higher rates than other students.32 Girls in high school are increasingly likely to drink excessively, closing some of the difference between how girls drink and how boys drink. There are many reasons for this, but we think that part of this is a vision of “equality” that means acting like the guys.
“MAN, I JUST WANT SOME ROSÉ WINE OR SOMETHING . . . SOMETHING EASY AND GIRLY.”
At 9 a.m. on the Saturday morning of homecoming, one of the year’s biggest drinking days, the university-assigned and -employed party monitors came in to inspect a fraternity and make sure it was following regulations—no serving booze other than beer, no kegs, food and nonalcoholic drink available, no nuisance noise. A monitor went through her checklist ritual with the fraternity’s “compliance officer”—a junior who was assigned this important leadership position. Was there soda available? Yes. How about food? Five different brothers pointed to the bagels. How loud would the music be? “Party level.” The brothers demonstrated. One of the party monitors joked, “Aw, c’mon y’all, this is not party volume, I would not come to your party.” Everyone laughed, and they turned the volume up more. The second monitor located the required soda.
