February 18, 2005
The Inequities of Academe: Part
The Inequities of Academe: Part the Second—Binge Drinking
A few days ago, dear reader, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” inaugurated what will be a series of lucubrations on the downsides of the life of a professor. As we noted previously, various media outlets are always criticizing academics as a bunch of tweed-soaked pin-heads who are busy brainwashing your children instead of educating them. Though that sounds pretty much dead-on to us, it's not particularly pleasant.We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” believe that our society treats the average college professor as slightly less suspicious than the average child molester.
As such, dear reader, we established our lofty “Inequities of Academe” series in order to discuss some of the difficulties that academics must face. Although no one asked us, we think it’s darn nice of us.
Anyway, today’s installment of “The Inequities of Academe” focuses on a perennial problem on the college campus: Binge drinking. And, no, we’re not talking about alcoholic tenured radicals. Rather, we mean the students.
Pretty much every college educated member of our civilization recognizes that the average American university student has the drinking habits of Dean Martin. In fact, as far as we’re concerned, Dean Martin is the most appreciated dean in the history of higher education.
To be honest, it makes a certain sense that college students are a passel of dipsomaniacs. After all, if you put a university in Allentown, Pennsylvania, what the heck do you expect students to do? Go play on a rusty forklift?
And yet, dear reader, there is something awfully disturbing about all this underage binge drinking. If kids can’t enjoy their relatively stress-free lives at universities without the requisite eight beers a day, how are they going to get through the rest of their drab, miserable lives?
Wow. We just depressed ourselves.
Perhaps what most irks us about students’ binge drinking, however, is universities’ responses to it. Every college administrator knows that most students can out-drink an Irish longshoreman. And yet they pretend that their school prohibits such activity.
Universities normally champion strict guidelines regarding the student consumption of alcoholic beverages. If college administrators were offering the truth, however, they would probably write a drinking policy that looked much like the following:
“STATE UNIVERSITY’S OFFICIAL DRINKING POLICY”
We, the administration of this god-awful school we would never have attended, realize that you, the libidinous pleasure-machines who inhabit these environs, would never have considered coming here in the first place if you could not drink more than an Irish longshoreman at a wedding. As such, we promise to look the other way as 18-year-old coeds guzzle Everclear until they end their evenings with a stomach pump. One student each year will ineluctably perish as the result of our administrative malfeasance, and this will inevitably lead us to sponsor an annual festival of self-flagellation, at which a few sexually frustrated feminists and teetotling Mohammedans carp on the evils of booze. This, naturally, will never compel us to alter our policy one iota. After all, you didn’t come to this miserable excuse for an intellectual environment for the Petrarch and Plato, now did you?
