Penn State students binge-drink for the same reason dogs lick their private parts: because they can.
That is, they can drink late into the night because they don’t have to get up early for class and because their classes aren’t all that demanding.
Therefore, one way to curtail the drunkenness that disturbs the peace, stresses law enforcement and emergency medical personnel and busts the borough’s budget is for the university to demand as much dedication from full-time students as employers demand from full-time employees.
Last week I wrote in favor of early classes and a university-wide compulsory attendance policy. This week I’ll address grading and workload.
Let me concede right off that I do not know whether courses across the university have gotten easier over time – whether students are doing less work for higher grades. But judging from all the “playing” I see in my neighborhood at all hours of the day and night and from the quality of the work I get from my students, my sense is that Penn State students do not spend a lot of time on schoolwork.
They’ll dispute this, of course. When my own students complain about a grade that should have been much lower, they sometimes voice their dismay by telling me how hard they worked on the travesty in question. I want to ask, “What does working hard even mean to you?” because I suspect the honest answer is something like “20 minutes of sustained effort” (while texting and iPodding, of course). They’re automatic writers most of them. First thought, best thought, as Allen Ginsberg said. Revise? Proofread? Nah, good enough. If only their first thoughts were as good as Ginsberg’s.
Perhaps you’re thinking, well, if the work’s that bad, flunk ‘em. Ah, but if we gave Fs to every assignment we thought deserved an F, I’m telling you, we’d be flunking students left and right. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we started giving students the grades we thought they deserved, but frankly I don’t think most of us have the guts.
Two things discourage university instructors from being as rigorous as we should be. One is that the more work we give our students, the more work we make for ourselves. Ask anyone on the faculty and he or she will tell you: The worst part of the job by far is grading papers. Ask them if they would rather spend 10 hours grading essay questions or 10 minutes grading multiple-choice questions and the other 9 hours and 50 minutes on their own research and it’s a no-brainer.
Then there are the dreaded SRTEs – the student evaluations. Though students are asked to judge the quality of a course, it stands to reason that many will feel more kindly disposed toward an instructor who didn’t make them work too hard. In my own case I’ve always been amused by complaints that a class was too long or that there was too much reading. As far as I can tell, all classes are too long if the standard is not having to attend at all, and any reading is too much reading.
For tenure-track faculty in particular, whose case for keeping their jobs rests in part on how their students rate them, it makes way more sense to be “nice” and easy than it does to be a drill sergeant. (To be fair, in my role as a member of the promotion and tenure committee, I have seen comments from students who express their appreciation for how much the instructor pushed them to do their best work.)
In short, assigning less work and giving high grades allows instructors more time for their own research or creative work, yields fewer complaints from disgruntled students, and results in higher numbers on the student evaluation forms. And so the dumbing down proceeds apace.
As for playing, I have the same thought whenever I see the games of wiffleball and touch football and horseshoes, the float-building for Homecoming, the rehearsals for Greek Sing: This isn’t college. It’s camp. When, I wonder, do they do their work?
Obviously, greater academic rigor alone won’t put the kibosh on the destructive and inconsiderate behavior that often accompanies binge drinking. For one thing, no matter how much we pile on the work, they’re still going to cut loose on Friday and Saturday nights. Indeed, increased weekday pressure might produce a concomitant amount of release on the weekends – a scary thought.
And we’re still going to want the cops to patrol the streets and the courts to impose fines and the university to eject serial lawbreakers. And we still want the college experience to include Homecoming and Greek Sing and all that other fun stuff.
But if we’re serious about reducing the student drinking problem, the best place to start is by getting students to take school more seriously.
