Harvard University Press Blog

Who Pays the Price for the College Party Scene?

After a five-year study of a flagship Midwestern public university, sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton found that the social and academic infrastructure of the school seemed to prioritize a particular type of affluent, socially oriented student. A “party pathway”—built around an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other—was impossible to avoid, and for students who couldn’t or wouldn’t join the fun it served as a constant reminder of their place as outsiders. Armstrong and Hamilton’s Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality exposes the unmet obligations and misplaced priorities of public universities whose students leave college with so little to show for it. Below, the authors contrast the experience of thriving on the party pathway with the far more common experience of being failed by it.

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Naomi and Karen started college the same year at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest. They lived on the same residence hall floor and shared a taste for partying. Both majored in sports broadcasting. Neither performed well academically, earning GPAs below 3.0. Yet Naomi graduated in four years, moved to New York City, and quickly secured a desirable entry-level job in a media firm. Karen, on the other hand, had changed her major to education, transferred to a regional branch campus, and was struggling to graduate within six years.

In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over the value of college, these divergent outcomes matter. In Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, we trace a dormitory floor of fifty-three women, including Naomi and Karen, from the day they arrived on campus to a year after they were slated to graduate. The women were similar in many respects; however, they came from a wide range of social class backgrounds.

Based on this research we argue that how this university—and many other large state schools—organizes the college experience systematically disadvantages all but the affluent. The university supported a robust “party pathway”—a social and academic infrastructure with a powerful Greek system at its heart, and an array of easy majors on offer. Naomi—an out-of-state student whose father owned a successful business—was well served by the party pathway. Karen—a middle-class woman from in-state—was not.

Naomi and Karen—like one third of the incoming freshman class—were assigned to a “party dorm.” Little partying took place in the heavily-policed residence halls, but party dorms served as a pipeline into the under-aged party scene housed in the Greek system, which both women joined.

Identity Construction and Cultural Madness

It sometimes seems as if each day brings a new raft of articles proclaiming yet another biological or genetic explanation for human behavior and activity. To Liah Greenfeld, that barrage is just a new bubble, and in Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, she does her best to burst it. While not entirely dismissing biological factors in mental illness, Greenfeld argues that the phenomenon that was for a long time called simply “madness”—today’s schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression—is actually a symptom of modernity, an effect of our cultural environment.

To Greenfeld, “madness” is a disease not of the brain but of the mind, of consciousness, which itself is a cultural phenomenon, the product of nationalism, a subject on which Greenfeld has now produced a trilogy. As the cultural framework of modernity, nationalism insists on the dignity, creativity, and equality of man, the value of each human life, and the right and capacity for all to construct their own destinies, to love, and to be happy. Psychotic disease, she argues, is fundamentally a malfunction of the “acting self,” experienced as a loss of the familiar self and as a loss of control over one’s physical and mental activity, a response to the cultural demands of selfhood.

From Mind, Modernity, Madness:

The reason for the dysfunction of the acting self lies in the malformation of identity. It is possible that the complexity of the original identity problem (the depth and number of inconsistencies in the relationally constituted self) contributes to the complexity of the disease; for instance, in a case of dissatisfaction with one’s nevertheless clearly experienced identity causing depression, and in a case of no clearly experienced identity, combined with numerous competing possibilities, producing schizophrenia. It is modern culture—specifically the presumed equality of all the members of the society, secularism, and choice in self-definition, implied in the national consciousness—that makes the formation of the individual identity difficult. A member of a nation can no longer learn who or what s/he is from the environment. Instead of prescribing to us our identities, as do religious and in principle nonegalitarian cultures, modern culture leaves us free to decide what to be and to make ourselves. It is this cultural laxity that is anomie—the inability of a culture to provide the individuals within it with consistent guidance (already in the beginning of the twentieth century, recognized by Durkheim as the most dangerous problem of modernity). Paradoxically, in effect placed in control over our destiny, we are far more likely to be dissatisfied with it, than would be a person deprived of any such control: not having a choice, such a person would try to do the best with what one has and enjoy it as far as possible. A truly believing person would also feel s/he has no right to find fault with the order of things created by God, much less to try and change it to one’s own liking—one’s situation in life would be perceived as both unchangeable and just. Conversely, the presence of choice, the very ability to imagine oneself in a position different from one currently occupied or that of one’s parents, and the idea that social orders in general are created by people and may be changed make one suspect that one’s current situation is not the best one can have and to strive for a better one. The more choices one has, the less secure one becomes in the choices already made (by one or for one) and making up one’s mind—literally, in the sense of constructing one’s identity—grows increasingly difficult. It is for this reason that the malformation of the mind—quite independent of any disease of the brain—becomes a mark of nations.

A Case for Irony

In one of this weekend’s more discussed bits of commentary, Christy Wampole writes against irony and its archetypal manifestation, the Millennial hipster. For Wampole, the brand of irony so dominant among middle-class Caucasians of a certain age “bespeaks a cultural numbness, resignation and defeat.” Having recognized elements of its comfort in herself, she asks what it would take to overcome the cultural pull of irony and embrace earnest sentiment:

Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values. It might also consist of an honest self-inventory.

And what’s at stake?

The ironic life is certainly a provisional answer to the problems of too much comfort, too much history and too many choices, but it is my firm conviction that this mode of living is not viable and conceals within it many social and political risks. For such a large segment of the population to forfeit its civic voice through the pattern of negation I’ve described is to siphon energy from the cultural reserves of the community at large. People may choose to continue hiding behind the ironic mantle, but this choice equals a surrender to commercial and political entities more than happy to act as parents for a self-infantilizing citizenry.

Of course, by now there’ve been several iterative cycles of these prominently published assaults on the urban hipster, which itself proves to be a surprisingly resilient species despite having evolved a coat of bulls-eyes. And while Wampole’s piece is a nice addition, we’d submit, following Jonathan Lear, that irony can serve a particular function that’s as revelatory and life changing as Wampole’s is distancing.

In A Case for Irony, Lear describes ironic disruption as a kind of uncanniness, an “unheimlich maneuver”:

The life and identity that I have hitherto taken as familiar have suddenly become unfamiliar. However, there is this difference: in an ordinary experience of the uncanny, there is mere disruption: the familiar is suddenly and disruptively experienced as unfamiliar. What is peculiar to irony is that it manifests passion for a certain direction.

In near-direct conversation with the objections Wampole presents, Lear notes the commonplace assumption that irony is merely a form of detachment, a lack of commitment or seriousness. In contrast, Lear argues that irony can function to shock one out of the comfort of an assumed practical identity. It’s irony that can best strike human beings with the realization that we’re perhaps not what we’ve always thought we were and, in so doing, force us to become.

This is what makes irony compelling. It is the mirror image of an oracle. An oracle begins with an outside source telling a person who he is in terms he at first finds alien and enigmatic. Then there is an unsettling process of familiarization: the person comes to understand what the oracle means as he comes to recognize that he is its embodiment. And, of course, the recognition of the meaning of the oracle represents more than an increase in propositional knowledge—for example, that I am the one who murdered his father and married his mother. It is the occasion for a more or less massive disruption of my sense of who I am; and a disorientation in a world that, until now, had been familiar. With this robust form of irony, the movement is in the opposite direction: a person gives a familiar designation to himself. He takes on a practical identity. As the irony unfolds, not only does the designation become weirdly unfamiliar; one suddenly experiences oneself as called to one-knows-not-what, though one would use the same language as before…

So, I may identify as X, and be certain of what that means. If, though, I’m exposed to another way of being X, which I’d never imagined but immediately recognize to be the X for which I should strive, I’ve thus had my self-designation rendered unfamiliar but, should I aim to become this newly revealed X, my existence may fundamentally change while requiring no new self-definition. I may become what I didn’t know I wasn’t, and end up quite different yet finally what I thought I was.

Lear’s irony isn’t incompatible with Wampole’s, because for Lear the function of irony is as a disruption, not a way of life. In fact, much of what drove Lear’s analysis was a sense that contemporary culture has misunderstood irony and its importance. But Lear’s work should help us to understand the condition’s ubiquity, and perhaps better script a way out. To Walpole, irony is a means of hiding from the demands of modern life, and one can, with little effort, shake it off and face the world in earnest. But if we conceive of our ironic age as a prolonged disruption, a stalled shock of the uncanny, the way out isn’t to force ourselves to again embrace what we’d once thought of as X; it’s to become what we now know X to be. If your definition of responsible modern adulthood is just not wearing Justin Bieber t-shirts, then you just change your clothes. But if that definition strikes you as inadequate, you may not yet be certain of what to wear next.

Earlier this year Lear discussed A Case for Irony with Alasdair MacIntyre. You can read an adaptation of their public conversation on our website.

The Permanent Militarization of America

The popularization of the term “military-industrial complex” is commonly traced to Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 address upon leaving the presidency. Despite our knowledge of the term’s roots therein, argues Aaron B. O’Connell, few people remember the actual content of Eisenhower’s message. O’Connell, the author of Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps, reminds us in an NYT opinion piece that what Eisenhower cautioned against was a permanent militarization of America, an unyielding state of preparation for and engagement in war that threatened to become a dominant feature of modern American life.

Despite Eisenhower’s warning, that’s essentially where we’ve arrived, led by civilians and politicians who project and protect the sanctity of American military institutions. From O’Connell’s piece:

From lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas. Of course, veterans should be thanked for serving their country, as should police officers, emergency workers and teachers. But no institution — particularly one financed by the taxpayers — should be immune from thoughtful criticism.

“That which is left unexamined eventually becomes invisible,” he continues, “and as a result, few Americans today are giving sufficient consideration to the full range of violent activities the government undertakes in their names.”

As O’Connell explains in Underdogs, the Marines in particular have excelled at catapulting themselves to these heights of popular esteem. They’ve managed to become a force in American culture, he argues, largely by way of their own culture of force. O’Connell, himself a Marine reserve officer and assistant professor of history at the US Naval Academy, recently spoke with us about the book, and the concept of militarization:

  

Rodney King's Legacy

Last week, in advance of a march planned to protest NYC’s stop-and-frisk policy, we quoted Khalil Gibran Muhammad describing how the tactic casts all young men of color as potential criminals. You can see scenes from that march in this short video:

 

Just hours before the march, the body of Rodney King was discovered at the bottom of his LA swimming pool. King, whose videotaped 1991 beating at the hands of the LAPD led to days of uprising and heightened scrutiny of police brutality nationwide, was 47.

Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, explained to Tavis Smiley last year that the beating of Rodney King “crashed in” on his college days, diverting him from what had then been a path toward a career in business. “From that point forward,” he told Smiley, “I was fundamentally shaken by the position of being a young Black man in America and really had a lot of unanswered questions about where I fit in the world and what the future held for me.”

Yesterday, Muhammad reflected on Rodney King’s legacy, and how policies like stop-and-frisk can be traced to a “crisis of legitimacy” that arose after the treatment of King and others came to light:

Looking back over the past two decades through the lens of King’s life – including the acquittal and mistrial of the four officers (two were later convicted of civil rights violations in federal court) and the 1992 LA uprising that followed – reveals that police intimidation and/or violence has become a normal rite of passage for millions of black people in America today. Since 2006, in New York City alone, roughly a half million black and Latino people every year are treated as would-be criminals through a perfectly legal policy of racial profiling known as stop, question and frisk. Required to prove their right to pass freely in the financial and cultural capital of the free world, those stopped are almost all innocent of any criminal offence.

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The raw violence [of the King beating] did not match three decades of post-racial mythology, where the only racism supposedly left in America was affirmative action. King’s tape and others that followed, along with greater federal scrutiny of police agencies, compelled criminal justice officials and politicians to re-engineer or rig the system into a labyrinth of ostensibly race-neutral policies – such as stop, question, and frisk or stand your ground laws. It is now this system that legitimates the routine targeting of young black men for harassment or violence and that is now under attack as witnessed by yesterday's silent march in New York City.

You can read the rest of Muhammad’s piece at the Guardian.

The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1932 that “Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.” Last year we asked Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness and Director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, whether the statement still characterizes life in America:

Do I think that a statement like that holds true, even to this day? Yes. If I were to give the glib, short answer: yes. And it comes in many forms. One form is the case of New York, where we know explicitly about a policy like stop-and-frisk. A policy like that exists on the rationale that, in black and brown communities, you’ll find the most street level crime, mostly revolving around drugs or contraband guns, and so those communities should be subjected to extreme forms of surveillance, like stopping and searching people, frisking them. That is a form of accusation, the very form of surveillance and policing in those communities is, in effect, taking individual black and brown young men, and accusing them of potential criminality. There is something about the ability and the willingness for us as a society to accept that kind of treatment of young black men whose innocence should be presumed, and not in question, when they are encountered on the streets.

The statistics on the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy are staggering, with the New York Times reporting that in 2011 the NYPD stopped people 685,724 times, and that 88% of those stopped were not arrested or even ticketed. And 87% of those stopped were Black or Latino.

Scrutiny of the policy is at a high, with the NAACP organizing a silent march to protest stop-and-frisk in NYC this Sunday, June 17th. As the NAACP explains, silent marches have a tradition that dates back to 1917, when Du Bois led the organization’s first major public protest and demonstrated the power of thousands of people marching silently through the streets:

Silence is a powerful force that, like other forms of non-violent protest, holds a mirror to the brutality of one's opponents. On June 17, we will hold up a mirror to New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy. It is not only discriminatory, it actively seeks to humiliate innocent citizens—particularly African American and Latino men—and criminalize otherwise legal behavior.
 
Right now in our nation’s most diverse city, NYPD officials are legally empowered to stop and pat down any individual based on nothing more than their own suspicion. In 2009, the most common justification for a stop was a vague category called “furtive movements.”

The result? Blacks and Latinos are nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by police, and the searches overwhelmingly target young men of color. In one eight-block area of an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, the police made 52,000 stops over a four-year period—an average of nearly one stop per resident each year.

And the vast majority of those stopped are innocent. In 2011, the NYPD stopped and questioned 685,000 New Yorkers. Of those, 605,000 walked away with no charges—only a feeling of humiliation and anger.

 People of color should not be afraid to walk down the street in their own city. On June 17th, we will proudly walk with them to assert that right. Like thousands of activists before us, we will channel the power of our silence to bring public attention to the use of racial profiling by the New York Police Department.

Also this week, the Times released a short documentary, The Scars of Stop-and-Frisk, focused on a young man in Brooklyn who says he was stopped more than 60 times before age 18. It’s a powerful story:

 

Closing the Civic Empowerment Gap

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a landmark call for the remaking of civic education in America’s schools. In presenting her challenge to the status quo, Levinson documents a number of organizations that demonstrate the progress to be wrung from her prescriptions. We invited friend of the Press and incoming Harvard Graduate School of Education student Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold to describe her experience as a youth council director with Chicago’s Mikva Challenge, one of the programs that Levinson highlights.

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In No Citizen Left Behind Meira Levinson puts some fire into the often dull argument that the United States needs to get serious about civic education, calling for reform for a system that today largely excludes poor and minority students from democratic participation. She begins the book by describing the experience of teaching on 9/11, and shares a remarkable story about her middle school students predicting the Iraq War. Despite their evident understanding, though, she laments that what she calls a “civic empowerment gap” made it unlikely that her students would become participants in the course charted that day:

Whether my students were misguided or prescient, whether their life experiences blinded or exposed them to the true character of our political leaders, there is ample evidence that they are unlikely to become active participants in American civic and political life. As a result, they are unlikely to influence civic and political deliberation or decision-making. This is because there is a profound civic empowerment gap—as large and as disturbing as the reading and math achievement gaps that have received significant national attention in recent years—between ethnoracial minority, naturalized, and especially poor citizens, on the one hand, and White, native-born, and especially middle-class and wealthy citizens, on the other.

Levinson explores the causes of and potential solutions to this gap through many lenses. As a political philosopher, she considers the political, sociological and historical context of the United States and of our education system, closely examining the meanings of citizenship and democracy. She asks hard questions about how we teach civics in a diverse country where our ethnoracial identities invariably dictate our experiences of citizenship. She grapples with how these theories trickle down into practice by sharing personal stories from her years of inner-city teaching. In addressing these questions and others, she doesn’t fantasize about an unreachable Shangri-La of civic education. Instead, she clearly outlines the qualities of her gold standard curriculum, Action Civics, and highlights schools and organizations that have begun to actualize it.

Action Civics is designed to create “an engaged citizenry capable of effective participation in the political process, in their communities, and in the larger society.” It is founded on the principle that young people have authentic civic experiences that matter and that should be part of their civic educational experiences. “I recommend a constructivist approach that helps students construct their own empowering means of engaging in this work,” Levinson writes, “rather than telling them how to do it. As important as it is for students to learn to take multiple perspectives, educators, too, need to be open to students’ diverse perspectives and experiences.” One of the founding organizations of the National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) is Mikva Challenge, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to create the next generation of civic leaders. Mikva Challenge is one of many organizations that Levinson highlights in her book, and, having been a member of its staff for over two years, I personally witnessed the efficacy of her prescriptions for closing the civic empowerment gap.

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

From the Protestant Reformation to the Failure of Modernity

Brad S. Gregory’s new book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, is very much in the tradition of and in conversation with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Both are large, sweeping books that change the way we understand modernity and the world in which we live. For Gregory, that new understanding comes from looking all the way back to the Protestant Reformation, and connecting all that’s come since in ways that scholars have thus far resisted.

He discussed the book with us in a recent episode of the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear or download via the player below.

During that conversation, he explained the ways in which he understands modern Western life as stemming from developments of the 16th and 17th centuries:

I don’t think anyone who’s self-reflective about it would deny the rather banal claim that the world that we’re living in today is the product of the past. The issue is what aspects of the past help us to understand and to explain the character of the situation in which we find ourselves. What’s unusual about my book is that it parts ways from the normal methods and the normal assumptions by which even professional historians tend to explain the present. That is, it tends to be assumed that we can account for the world in which we’re living today in the West—North America and Europe—this side, as it were, of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the French and American revolutions in the late eighteenth century. And, one of the central arguments I’m making in The Unintended Reformation is that that is not the case, and that all of those developments indeed are critical to understanding where we are today, but what we really need to understand are the religious disagreements of the Reformation era, and the unintended processes that they set in motion, without which we will not understand the character of the problems that we’re facing in the early twenty-first century.

It’s Gregory’s claim that the Western world today is “an extraordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Western Christianity.” Our failure to understand that lineage, he argues, prevents us from fully recognizing the disaggregation that our society has experienced. From The Unintended Reformation:

On the eve of the Reformation, Latin Christianity comprised for good or ill the far from homogeneous yet institutionalized worldview within which the overwhelming majority of Europeans lived and made sense of their lives. Diversely, early twenty-first-century Westerners live in and think with and even feel through the historical results of its variegated rejections and appropriations in such knotted ways that it is difficult even to see, much less to analyze, them. In getting from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century, this study develops the claim from my first book that “incompatible, deeply held, concretely expressed religious convictions paved a path to a secular society.”

Someday All This Will Be Yours

In a piece published this weekend, Hendrik Hartog, author of Someday All This Will Be Yours, explained that the predominant view of the history of elder care in America isn’t actually very accurate. When thinking of the time before social security, senior homes, and assisted living, people too often imagine families in which children cared for aging parents out of familial love and filial duty, routinely piling three generations into houses together.

But, as Hartog writes, “this portrait is too rosy”:

If we confront what old-age support once looked like — what actually happened when care was almost fully privatized, when the old depended on their families, without the bureaucratic structures and the (under)paid caregivers we take for granted — a different picture emerges.

For the past decade I have been researching cases of family conflict over old-age care in the decades before Social Security. I have found extraordinary testimony about the intimate management of family care: how the old negotiated with the young for what they called retirement, and the exertions of caregiving at a time when support by relatives was the only sustenance available for the old.

In that world, older people could not rely on habit or culture or nature if they wanted their children to support them when they became frail. In an America strongly identified with economic and physical mobility, parents had to offer inducements. Usually, the bait they used was the promise of an inheritance: stay and take care of me and your mother, and someday you will get the house and the farm or the store or the bank account.

But of course what was at stake was never just an economic bargain between rational actors. Older people negotiated with the young to receive love, to be cared for with affection, not just self-interest.

Someday All This Will Be Yours presents the decade of research Hartog conducted, a project he first undertook during an extended stay near his own elderly mother. He eventually assembled a database of more than 200 cases in which a caretaker brought suit, alleging that the deceased had failed to make good on a promise of quid pro quo. In each case, the plaintiff claimed to have been promised, either implicitly or explicitly, that, in exchange for late-life care of their relative, employer, neighbor, or friend, they’d been promised some later recompense such as money or land. As Hartog explains, in order to win the case the aggrieved would have to prove both that a bargain existed and that they’d upheld their half. More often than not, they were unable to do so and were left with nothing.

Such cases, Hartog found, were essentially standard legal business; run-of-the-mill trials evidencing a social dynamic that we’ve somehow largely forgotten in our age of social services. Hartog’s goal for the project was to better understand this history of intimate transaction: