Party School

After midnight the tragic consequences of being the number one party school appear, girls get raped, boys fall down stairwells. Only a fraction of the stories make their way into the newspapers, many more are hushed up, told years later in church basements or the next day to close friends and the occasional therapist. The accidental death of eighteen-year old Joseph Dado after leaving a party at 3am is the only the latest awful case.

Central PA has had a long drinking history. The Whiskey Rebellion did not start here for nothing. All those apple orchards planted two hundred years ago were not intended for baking pies. Hard cider kept the locals going through the winter, so much so that Europeans visiting in the nineteenth-century marveled at how falling down drunk rural Americans got after dinner. I have sat in archives reading the letters of nineteenth century college students, every other one promises mother or father that they won't drink this semester.

But it's not just the isolation, not just that there's nothing to do out here at night. The sudden opportunity to indulge, the encouragement provided by fraternities and football, this makes boys and girls binge like they never would around adults.

The suggestion by a group of university presidents that the drinking age be lowered spoke directly to the problem that kids have no experience and then suddenly too much. Still the public response was so muted that the story dropped from the media within a day of its appearance.

We are too invested in the contradictions of prohibition and consumption. You cannot do it until you are old enough to over do it. The university tries to teach students not to drink while it builds a public image around football. The contradictions are obvious to every freshman: just don't get caught is the bottom line. The problem is that too many kids cannot handle that double edged maneuver.