Universities are the Great Defenders of Libertine Values

“In practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

Ross Douthat recently reviewed a new book entitled Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. He explains the general thesis of the book, which is that campus social life is structured in a way that advantages the already elite. The partying, the fraternity culture, and everything else the “cool kids” do are all luxuries that working class students, many of whom are still working through college, can’t afford.
Ross explains,

“Much of this treatment is meted out through the power of the campus party scene, the boozy, hook-up-happy world of Greek life. This “party pathway,” the authors write, is “a main artery through the university,” and its allure is the reason many affluent out-of-state enrollees choose the university in question in the first place.

“Such party-pathway students aren’t particularly motivated academically, but because they have well-off parents and clear-enough career goals they don’t necessarily need to be, and because they don’t require much financial aid they’re crucial to the university’s bottom line. (Their college careers, the authors write, depend on ‘an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other.’)”

Those who arrive University without extra cash quickly find themselves excluded from the elite social scene. Frequent alcohol consumption is not a cheap habit, and taking part of the Greek lifestyle is expensive not only in itself, but also in the time commitment it requires that could otherwise be spent working for supplemental income. Furthermore, in my own experience, the elite hubs, like Student Government Associations and other student organizations, require a time commitment that poorer students could devote to working elsewhere for a larger financial return.

This is a real problem and I’m glad someone is shedding light on the issue. I only have limited experience being on the short end of this stick, and it is mostly due to moral rather than financial concerns. I never joined a fraternity because the Greek culture on my campus reeked of a bourgeois aristocracy that I found repulsive.

Ross closes by noting that the “winners” in campus culture “are living proof of how a certain kind of libertinism can be not only an expression of class privilege, but even a weapon of class warfare.” Or as I can imagine my grandfather saying, “If they are staying out that late on Friday they sure didn’t work hard enough the week before.”

The author apologizes for the “No Duh” nature of this article’s title. All variations of the theme “Universities Hostile to Old Fashioned Values” had the same effect. Who Knew?