Reading For Treasure: Pick A College But Not Just Any College

Reading for Treasure is my list of articles that are worth your attention. Click here for an introduction! 

It’s that time of year again. High school seniors are being plagued (sorry) with the question, “What are you doing next year?” Here are some articles that might help them make those choices and prepare for next year. 

“Want to find an affordable college? There's a website for that” from NPR is a good overview of The College Scorecard website, which was just updated. It is an invaluable resource to any family sending a child to college. 

Also from NPR, “Georgetown study measures colleges' return on investment” describes a website that looks at how much college graduates earn and how different schools’ alumni perform after college. Oddly, the article does not provide you with the Georgetown study results – but I will! 

Although short and a little simple, “College and Alcohol: Sober in College (And Still Having Fun)” from yourteenmag.com is a good way to start the conversation about drinking in college. 

And while we are talking about drinking, let’s talk about sex. “At Northwestern, a Secret Society of Virgins” from the Chicago Tribune is a candid discussion about being a virgin at college. 

If there are issues, Consumer Reports addresses the question, “Will You Be Able to Help Your College-Age Child in a Medical Emergency?” It turns out that HIPAA privacy may make this challenging. This article lets you be prepared. 

From Grown and Flown, here is one parent’s experience when her son did have to go to the emergency room, “My College Freshman Went to The ER: What This Mom Learned.”

This is not my first blog post with a college focus. Here are a few posts from this blog that might come in handy as your child tries to decide what will come after high school: Avoiding mistakes and some good advice,  College Advice from Shakespeare (and me), Textbooks and Sex: A Reading List for College Students, Future College Students, and the People Who Love Them, College Readiness, and What does it mean to go to a “good school?” 

Finally, here is a powerfully candid piece from Slate that all students should read even more closely than they read (if they read) their actual college syllabuses, “My Fake College Syllabus” 

I am currently rereading This is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Homecoming Ghosts: The October 13th Crash Ten Years Later

I see ghosts in the halls of my high school. Most of the time, they are ghosts of the living. I look down the hall and say, “there’s Sarah!” And then I remember that Sarah graduated.  She is at college or medical school or married and living in Los Angeles. That isn’t Sarah at all, but a student who reminds me of her. I turn a corner and remember how Kevin made me laugh as he imitated a teacher’s walk down the hallway. Several times a day, I am reminded of students from two or twelve or twenty-five years ago. They may have graduated, but they are still with me.

Some will never come home. There is an area in the front of the school with plaques dedicated to students who have died. I pass it several times a day and, each time, I mourn them. Sometimes, if it has been a particularly difficult day, I avoid that hall.

Most of my time, of course, is devoted to the students in front of me. My memories are fleeting, but my classes are not. I silently wish for my students what I wish for my own two children. Even after my students have left my classroom, our school, and moved away from our community, I want to remind them that they matter: that I remember them, and I am waiting for them to come home and tell their stories. I don’t tell them that I will probably “see” them in the hall anyway.

Ten years ago, on homecoming weekend, a car carrying several students sped past my home. A roaring engine awakened me briefly. The kids had been to a party, left, and were returning. They were intoxicated and collided with a tree at high speed. The driver and the young man sitting behind him were killed.

I go past the site of this crash daily. There is no plaque or memorial. The sign used to say, “Dead End.” Now it reads, “No Outlet.”

Taking a different route or changing the sign doesn’t change the past. There was a great deal of blaming and finger pointing after the crash. Lawsuits, criminal charges, and media coverage diverted our attention for a while. New parent groups were created. New legislation was passed that held parents more accountable for parties in their homes.

Then everyone moved on. Too many other young people died in the intervening years, some shortly after and some only a few weeks ago. Some due to the awful randomness of medical misfortune, others as a result of drugs and alcohol.

They haunt me.

A recent survey suggests that we are making some progress in the prevention and treatment of teenage substance abuse. I am eager to believe that such surveys give us useful, albeit incomplete, information. We need to act on that information.  

What has changed in the ten years since two boys died at the end of my street?  What must we do differently after students die from overdoses, are killed in parking lots, take their own lives, or die suspiciously?

Almost thirty years ago, it was funny when Julie Brown sang that the homecoming queen’s got a gun. The song is grotesque in a post-Columbine world. It is more that not funny; it feels horribly prophetic and wrong.

Seven years ago, I wrote that I was remembering but not surrendering. Times change, but the legacy of that horrible homecoming continues to haunt me. I remember students who struggled and succeeded. I remember students who graduated hoping for success later. Many found it. Some come home and talk about their journeys. The kids who never got a chance to grow up are still with me in the halls of our high school.

Some I can only hold in my heart and memories. They join my classes. I see them in the halls. They remind me that the important lessons go far beyond reading, writing, and preparing for college. They urge me to reach out to every student and make sure they know how much they mean to all of us: to do whatever I can to make sure that every child comes home.

Going to a Frat Party? Atlantic’s Article Says You May be Held Responsible if Things Go Wrong

The latest edition of The Atlantic should be required reading for all students in or entering college and the people who love them. It features a shocking and powerful article about college fraternities by writer Caitlin Flanagan.

The article opens with a story of a frat partygoer who decided to put a bottle rocket up his behind. Another partier falls off a deck while trying to record this moment. The lawsuit that results brings us to the main issue of the article.

The writer provides a description of college fraternities. They are “as old, almost, as the republic” and they, “emanated in part from the Freemasons.” She notes that many very successful men have been fraternity brothers, and that these organizations have done a great deal of community and charity work. However, they “ also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.”

She relays the history of fraternities from 1825 at Union College to a revival thanks to Animal House in the 80s. When the national drinking age was raised to 21, fraternities became a primary source of alcohol to college students.

Thus, there have been many lawsuits against fraternities for issues such as “manslaughter, rape, sexual torture, psychological trauma” as well as, hazing, and many forms of physical injuries. Ms. Flanagan states that since 2005, “more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses.”

The writer asks and answers the question, “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?” The answer is that fraternity alumni are good donors, fraternities are a source of housing, and fraternities have become so politically and legally powerful that they successfully fight regulation.

Are kids in jeopardy in frat houses? An eighth of college students live in fraternities or sororities. They generate billions of dollars. Lawsuits provide a public record of the problems. These usually involve one of four issues: binge drinking, sexual assault, hazing, or physical or emotional injury. Ms. Flanagan uses the graph below to demonstrate their frequency:

She spends a great deal of time discussing stories of frat party mishaps. She discovered that, “kids fall—disastrously—from the upper heights of fraternity houses with some regularity. They tumble from the open windows they are trying to urinate out of, slip off roofs, lose their grasp on drainpipes, misjudge the width of fire-escape landings.” Students fall from fraternities far more than they fall from dorms or other buildings.

The lawsuits against fraternities were a, “serious threat to their existence.” First, fraternities established their own self funded insurance system, the Fraternity Risk Management Trust. Then they created a risk-management policy called the Fraternal Information and Programming Group (FIPG). This group publishes “a risk-management manual—the current version is 50 pages—that lays out a wide range of (optional) best practices.” The writer states that, “I have read hundreds of fraternity incident reports, not one of which describes an event where massive amounts of alcohol weren’t part of the problem—and the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity.”

Here is a key idea that college students and their parents must understand: these “risk-management” policies are designed “to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat.” Thus they are no longer covered by the frat’s insurance. Instead of the frat or the university being liable, individual kids are held responsible.

Fraternities have lots of rules. If they are violated, the violator stands alone, “’I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,’ a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance. As for the exorbitant cost of providing the young man with a legal defense for the civil case (in which, of course, there are no public defenders), that is money he and his parents are going to have to scramble to come up with, perhaps transforming the family home into an ATM to do it. The financial consequences of fraternity membership can be devastating, and they devolve not on the 18-year-old ‘man’ but on his planning-for-retirement parents.”

There are clear procedures to be followed when something goes wrong. However, “the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed.” The plan is outlined in the article. However, the author notes that, “the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.”

The author does provide a counter point that outlines the benefits of fraternity participation. She speaks with a representative from a Greek organization who presents compelling and powerful reasons to join a fraternity. She quotes a mother who says that her son’s fraternity was critical to his success in college, “Her son had waited until sophomore year to rush, and freshman year he had been so lonely and unsure of himself that she had become deeply worried about him. But everything changed after he pledged. He had friends; he was happy.”

Here is the key question: should college students who make poor choices, usually under the influence of alcohol, be held personally responsible when there are terrible consequences? To what degree should the organization that facilitated that consumption be called to account? Right now, if you step into a fraternity, member or not, there is a chance that those consequences may be laid at your feet.

I have boiled down a detailed article to less than 20% of the whole. I urge you to read the entire piece.

Joining a fraternity in college can help a student make friends, do good work, and have an active social life. It could mean taking responsibility, both personally and financially, for the many ills and issues that plague Greek life.

Remembering But Not Surrendering

On the morning of October 14, 2006, my phone rang at 7 in the morning. It was my wife’s aunt, “Was that car crash on your street? It’s on the news.” I had a vague memory of hearing the Doppler sound of a car speeding past my bedroom window in the middle of the night. Soon our phone was ringing every four or five minutes.

An intoxicated graduate of Deerfield High School had sped down our street and hit a tree. He was killed as was the DHS senior sitting behind him. Three other young people survived.

For some in our community, the world changed that day. Unfortunately, it feels like there was a brief period of shock and sadness that passed all too quickly. There is the old truism that says a stoplight doesn’t get put up at an intersection until someone is killed; it cases like these, it takes much more than that.

I walked to end of my street on that October morning. The news crew was there and so were a few of my neighbors. There were no skid marks; the car never braked. The police had marked the pavement with colored paint. The mark on the tree was the only concrete indication that anything had happened. Unfortunately, this was a sign of things to come.

The next day, my eight-year-old son and twelve year old daughter had questions. They wanted to see what was going on at the end of their street, so the three of us took a short walk. The crash site had become a memorial and there was a small crowd. Signs, notes, pictures and tokens had been placed around the tree. Soon, one of the kids who was in the crash came out of a nearby house smoking a cigarette. My children were shocked to see him smoking. They thought that smoking at the site of a crash caused by substance abuse was disrespectful. I agreed. It was another sign of things to come – or rather, things not to come.

As the community grieved and looked for answers, it became clear that there was plenty of blame to go around. There was the pointing of fingers, filing of lawsuits, and forming of parent groups, but not enough progress. At one community meeting not long after the crash, some parents were far more concerned about their liability when hosting a party than their children’s well being.

Here we are three years later. It would be cliché to ask, “Has anything changed?” Are these deaths the price for teenage irresponsibility and recklessness? Do we have to sacrifice teenagers periodically in order to wake up the community? Is this unavoidable? Are there always going to be parents who enable and kids who misbehave?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, I will not surrender our children because some believe these events are inevitable. I will not give them up without one hell of a fight. When I ask kids, “what will it take to change behavior?” they do not have an answer. They don’t know. There are countless examples of how our attempts to stem the tide of teenage blood is ineffective. Yet, none of this excuses us and permits us to lay down and do nothing. No matter what our odds for success, we must not give up the struggle.

On the Friday before homecoming this year, my students and I talked about having a safe celebration. I woke up late on Homecoming Saturday. My phone didn’t ring. That doesn’t mean it won’t tomorrow or the next day. In fact, I know it eventually will, even while I am hoping it will not.

They are all our children and they are our responsibility. And while we cannot prevent every horror, we can try. We must try, and we must keep trying. Our children’s lives depend on it.