Do we see the Queen Bees? Do we know they approved her bullying? I guess the fact the party dorm exists, that the greek scene dominates campus social life and receives university support, points to Queen Bees supporting bullying. The sororities are exclusionary. Even PG isn’t arguing that in the case of Indiana.
Does the exclusion of the non-sorority girls in the dorm just mirror the campus culture?
I agree with your assessment of Whitney and have been comparing her to a whipsmart middle class social climber in my sorority. Because she was one of ours, we all supported her. I never saw her behave in a nasty fashion. I wonder if she did? What would it have gained her? That is what I can’t comprehend about the Whitney’s of the world. The nastiness doesn’t even advantage them in the long run. Karma is a b***ch.
Whitney is the epitome of kiss up, kick down. Maybe it’s better (for the rest of us) that she didn’t go into the business world. I’d hate to work for Whitney.
Don’t you think one look from Hannah would have reined Whitney in? Or more, one raised eyebrow from perfect socialite Tara?
One thing noticeable is that Indiana’s fraternities and sororities appear to be highly segregated by race and ethnicity, based on chapter photos of members on pages linked from http://www.indiana.edu/~gogreek/ .
You’re right, PurpleTitan, it’s a case of wooing the OOS kids and their lovely tuition dollars. But Indiana University seemingly is failing its own residents. Those less privileged women had to leave IU to succeed. That’s a scandal; Indiana residents should be ashamed. Those kids worked hard to get to IU and they were treated like garbage.
@"Cardinal Fang", it should come as no surprise that big public universities aren’t known for hand-holding. That’s why one of the few groups that really benefit from attending an elite private are those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
And I hear calls by folks for “Big State U” to do more for their low SES kids, but where is the money for that coming from? States are cutting, not increasing expenditures on their public schools. Voters don’t seem to care as they’re voting for folks who cut spending for higher ed, so it seems that IN residents aren’t terribly ashamed.
An insightful comment from here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/01/colleges-party-emphasis-maintain-economic-social-inequality-new-research-suggests:
Bob at State U.:
“Absolutely straight-on description of good old State U. Let’s just say that, besides being on the faculty, I had an “inside view” of all this and arrived at most of these conclusions myself. State U. has done a masterful job of marketing itself to out of state students as a place to have fun, get a degree in a more (business, accounting) or less (communications, sociology, psychology) marketable major and then, having the credential, look for employment using family and friends for connections. At least that’s the theory. These are kids that generally are not the top students but can handle the work well enough, and most importantly, have the financial resources to pay. (That is what they call burying the lede, I think.) Having developed, with the help of the students, a magnificent town-gown party infrastructure, and making it possible for students to succeed without strain, have given State U. an enviable marketing reach and it has achieved financial stability. For the serious students, there are plenty of opportunities to learn, to interact with faculty, to engage in research. This exists in a kind of parallel system. Basically our job is to provide a path for students to succeed while having a good time, but also cultivating the top 15% of students that are serious about learning. Does it really work? Do the students understand what they are buying and what they are getting? It’s kind of questionable. But I give the administration credit for engineering the evolution from a fairly small state-focused university with a dwindling in-state financial base to a now-thriving institution that is 50% bigger with 50% out-of-state representation. At least we’ve survived.”
Another interesting comment from that article:
“Good news. There are universities that have put most of these suggestions into action (less investing in sports, more scholarships to lower income students, keep the classes hard to keep a tighter reign on the party scene, ect.) and have professors and school policies that actively fight grade inflation. I went to one, and am definitely what you’d call a ‘working class’ student. I graduated in four years with an okay GPA and found the school’s reputation helped me a lot after graduation. Did I always feel understood at my university? No, but there were ways to get through and make it work, and in more difficult majors, the number of students that follow the party pathway and manage to graduate will be very slim. Basically, if you’re working class, dear god, don’t go into business. Do economics or statistics instead if that’s the field you want to work in. They’re harder, but you have the chance to get recognition from your peers, and it’s not abnormal to be constantly working and studying.”
You know what schools have even less money than IU? The regional schools that those lower class and working class colleges had to transfer to in order to succeed. Don’t say it’s just money.
On the other hand, the regional colleges hire teachers to teach. And they don’t have a Greek presence.
@"Cardinal Fang", the regional schools also don’t do much research that benefits humanity or provide nearly as many opportunities for a driven and disciplined student as a flagship research university like IU does. They also rely heavily on poorly-paid adjuncts.
So yes, it is about the money. Without the money (from OOS & internationals now that state funding is going down), the nature of major public research universities will have to change.
Of course, some folks (like Scott Walker) are perfectly fine with turning every public university in to a trade school staffed mostly by poorly-paid adjuncts. Is that the path that you propose for IU?
I take your point about Scott Walker, but Indiana seems to be doing fine at turning itself into a trade school without him, with those business-lite majors. I agree with “if you’re working class, dear god, don’t go into business as a major,” but the business major is about five steps up from the majors these working class kids were taking. Tourism, feh.
Do we know that the teachers that the working class kids had in their remedial classes at IU and their business-lite classes were NOT adjuncts?
If the Tourism, Hospitality, and Event Management major at Indiana is useless, should they instead have tried to get into Cornell’s Hotel Administration major?
My understanding is that Cornell places its grads in good jobs. So yeah, I think someone who wants to go into the hospitality industry would be better off at Cornell. But the thing is, those women didn’t have a burning desire to manage hotels. They wanted an easy major so they could party party four or more nights a week.
Guess this (hotel/hospitality major) example means that an academically motivated students should check whether their majors of interest are “fluff”/“lite”/“gut” majors at any of the colleges that they are considering.
The less privileged women in the book with the lite hospitality majors couldn’t get jobs. But looks like Cornell Hotel School graduates are in good demand.
@"Cardinal Fang", of course, the quality of the student body of the Hotel School and IU’s hospitality major are just a tad different as well.
But did you get the gist of what the prof I posted was saying? Essentially, IU is using “popular” majors like the tourism and apparel ones to pull in full-pay students in order to subsidize and support departments like Classics and Central Eurasian studies, who otherwise almost certainly don’t pull in enough majors to justify their existence…
So if you get rid of those easy popular majors and get rid of those rich OOS kids, how exactly do you plan to support those departments that get hardly any majors (which are generally the humanities) in a state school in an era of decreasing state funding?
I’m sorry, I had to go to bed. I can’t keep up with those of you on the west coast.
141 CF:
[quote]
Whitney is the epitome of kiss up, kick down. Maybe it's better (for the rest of us) that she didn't go into the business world. I'd hate to work for Whitney.
Don’t you think one look from Hannah would have reined Whitney in? Or more, one raised eyebrow from perfect socialite Tara?
[/quote]
Yes, I think that is true. Hannah doesn’t want to acknowledge everyone doesn’t have her privilege so maybe she just willfully ignores what is going on since it doesn’t fit her world view. It did surprise me Whitney wasn’t impacted by the fact she knew there was a study going on and the hall was being observed. Or maybe she was impacted and this is Whitney being careful how she behaves due to observation.
Al2simon has said he has difficulty believing the stories of sexual assault, because he doesn’t know men like this, but he has to believe the facts and figures and acknowledge sexual assault is a reality. (I hope I’m not mischaracterizing your posts, al2simon.)
I can say to myself that this is one story, but if I step back it is clear that isn’t true. All over the news are stories of girls cyber-bullying other girls. We know about some rapes because the rapists record them. We know about some bullying because the bullies are on the internet. In both cases there is under-reporting of a serious societal problem. We only know about Whitney because the authors were studying her hall. So you are absolutely correct there is no reason to believe Whitney is an aberration.
Maybe PG’s sorority doesn’t judge on looks and maybe my sorority doesn’t pledge mean girls. Maybe our sororities are the exceptions to the rule. However, sororities are exclusionary and that is a problem if we want inclusive universities. In the case of Indiana they are seriously disadvantaging some women who don’t participate. They are enabling, if not encouraging, mean girl behavior.
I agree with you, they need to be shut down. The university is just wrong to partner with the greek system. It benefits a few at the expense of many.
I didn’t read the book and only read the first two pages of this thread but I would like to comment.
I gather that one of the underlying premises of the book is that being on a “party floor” is somehow detrimental to one’s career. That certainly was not the case on my floor. We had the all-time number one party floor in the history of college dorms. It was loud at all hours of the night. We went out partying most nights of the week, and then after the bars closed came back and were loud and crazy until the wee hours of the morning. You simply could not find a rowdier floor if you tried. Not only that, but most everyone on the floor stayed multiple years. I stayed 4 years.
I have not kept in touch with every person from our floor but I still keep in touch decades later with the core group, and without exception every single one of us is either successful, or very successful.
Our majors included: EE (3 of us), business (3), poly sci, natural sciences (2), accounting, computer science.
If, indeed, that party floor premise is one of the main themes of the book, then I have to strongly disagree.
Purple Titan has some thought provoking posts. Given current reality, I am okay with supporting the parallel system so that state schools survive. I am okay with the lite majors as long as there is advising adequate to ensure the less privileged students don’t fall through the cracks. A couple of less privileged girls in the book figured out for themselves, about two years in, that they didn’t need college degrees for the jobs they imagined pursuing. Tuition was a huge stretch for them. They weren’t at college to party, but to position themselves for jobs assuring upward mobility. They deserve help attaining that goal. They face obstacles my generation did not.
I am not okay with overlooking rape, sexual assault, and bullying in order for state schools to survive.
Seems there are a couple of issues the book and discussion have brought out. the Inside Higher Ed link in #146 provides an excellent summary of the book for those of us not inclined to spend $25 on it. It also brings in some other studies, that focus on college being too easy and letting kids slide by. The tourism major at IU (in the School of Public Health) requires only a 2.0 GPA.
Are these majors useless? Would the lower SES girls have better luck finding jobs if they had been Philosophy or American Studies majors? Or is the argument that at least they would be better educated?
In my NYC middle to upper middle class suburb, there are people with occupations that range from plumbers, teachers, wall street brokers, doctors, lawyers through everything in between. One occupation in which folks seem to do quite well is sales. Whether it is selling computer equipment or sports stuff, many of these families have stay at home moms and very nice homes. In some cases, sales requires special knowledge, but in many cases it seems to be more dependent on personality and product knowledge acquired on the job.
Not all jobs would seem to require a college degree. However, most employers will pick a kid with a college degree over one with a high school degree for most of those jobs - even if the pay is quite low. And many event planning, marketing, communications, PR type companies hire unpaid interns where they may have previously hired entry level kids.
I also know college-educated , knowledgeable parents who have advised their kids to take on more challenging majors. In some cases, the kids flamed out of the harder major and finished the easier one just to get a degree. In others, the kids were not interested and studied what they wanted to. These parents do not have the contacts to get their child a cushy job or to give them money to pay rent in the city. These are the kids that live at home and get whatever job they can, until they have enough money to move out.
The issues seem to be:
Is college too easy? Shouldn't there be higher standards and harder grading? Shouldn't there be classes on Fridays?
Would banning sororities and fraternities help in any real way? Or, as happens at many non-Greek colleges, the "cool" kids or athletes would all live together and continue to be exclusive.
Seems like adjuncts are common in business majors. Is that good (they are in the field so have real world experience and have contacts)? Or bad (they are poorly paid and teaching is not their primary goal)?
Do college have the responsibility to advise kids that their major is pretty useless? How is that defined? Do we tell theater kids that almost none of them will have a career? Do advisers even know whether the kid in front of them is high or low SES and should they? Where is the line drawn on useless majors?