Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You [Hardcover]

Barrett Seaman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471491195 | ISBN-13: 978-0471491194 | Publication Date: July 14, 2005 | Edition: 1

In Binge, Barrett Seaman reveals what every parent, student, and educator needs to know about the college experience. Seaman spent time with students at twelve highly regarded and diverse colleges and universities across North America­. During his two years of research, he immersed himself in the lives of the students, often living in their dorms, dining with them, speaking with them on their own terms, and listening to them express their thoughts and feelings. Portraying a campus culture in which today’s best and brightest students grapple with far more than academic challenges, Binge conveys the unprecedented stresses on campus today. While sharing revealing interviews and the often dramatic stories, Seaman explores the complexities of romantic relationships and sexual relations, alcohol and drug use, anxiety and depression, class and racial boundaries, and more. Despite the disturbing trends, Seaman finds reasons for optimism and offers provocative and well-informed suggestions for improving the undergraduate experience. Sometimes alarming, always fascinating, and ultimately hopeful, Binge is an extraordinary investigative work that reveals the realities of higher education today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Seaman, a longtime reporter and editor at Time magazine, retired in 2001. A trustee at his alma mater, Hamilton College, since 1989, he became increasingly curious about how the residential college experience had changed since his student years in the 1960s. Choosing 12 colleges, among them Harvard, Berkeley, Duke and Stanford, Seaman spent two years living at colleges and investigating campus life. His findings will be utterly unsurprising to most parents, students, professors and administrators: today's students are overextended, isolated by technology, drink too much, study too little and engage in sexual experimentation that can lead—in combination with alcohol and other wrong choices—to depression, diseases and even date rape. How do today's residential campuses differ from those of Seaman's day? The author provides no comparisons, yet he seems highly alarmed by the changes he perceives. He is at his best detailing statistics, whether on campus drinking or emotional stresses placed on students; weakest when focusing on the influence of technology (he decries Instant Messaging and multitasking), the impact of sexuality and the conflicts caused by race. Seaman does recognize the need for college administrators and professors to be more engaged in student life/lives; this book is addressed primarily to them. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

After living in student housing, interviewing students and administrators, and driving around with campus security, Seaman, former Time magazine reporter and trustee at his alma mater, Hamilton College, offers a revealing look at life in the dorms. Seaman spent two years closely examining 12 residential colleges, private and public, with a range of size and geographic locations. He found a college life substantially different from his own experiences of the 1960s: binge drinking and drug abuse, rising suicide rates, casual relationships with students more likely to "hook up" than date, and tensions surrounding race and sexual orientation. Among the schools profiled are Hamilton, Harvard, University of Virginia, Indiana University, and University of Wisconsin at Madison. Seaman's book is not intended as a guide for parents and prospective students to use in choosing a college, but it offers thought-provoking commentary on student affairs, campus discipline, and reward systems for faculty. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (July 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471491195
• ISBN-13: 978-0471491194
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,340,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

87 of 96 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sincere but sadly unsatisfying, August 5, 2005

By 

Peter Lorenzi (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You (Hardcover)

As a college professor myself, with more than thirty-five years "at university," the super title caught my eye: "Campus life in an age of disconnection and excess." What will likely grab more people is the title, "Binge." And what will sell this book to some worried parents is the subtitle, "What your college student won't tell you." Good hooks, all three of them, but the book doesn't really do justice to any of them.

Seaman is a retired Time reporter, an alum of Hamilton, and a member of their Board of Trustees. His chapters, including "Hooking up," "Emotional troubles," "Is diversity working?" and "Fraternities and sororities under siege" offer some insight that comes together in the final chapter ("Improving the undergraduate experience"), but by then it is too late to make this book of real value or substance. The dust cover blurb from Hamilton's retired president should have offered me a hint of the superficial tone of the book, as Hamilton seems to be the real touch point for Seaman, not national college life. He briefly cites Indiana's Murray Sperber, who has done a much better job of illustrating the beer-and-circus mentality of rah-rah, big-name schools. As to a personal glimpse, while Seaman tried to live out the student role (tough to do when you're almost old enough to be their grandfather), Tom Wolfe's "I am Charlotte Simmons" covers much of the same ground - sex, frats, jocks, pressures - and brings it to life much better than does Seaman.

The first weakness if not outright bias of the book is the selection of great colleges (including Harvard, Dartmouth, Indiana, Wisconsin, California-Berkeley, and Virginia), but not representative of the nation's 15 million college students. Seaman slips into some mention of "second- and third-rate colleges" with little appreciation of the role they play in American university life. There is the smug conceit that Harvard is the leader for institutional change, but Seaman's work only reminded me of the adage, "You can always tell a Harvard man, you just can't tell him much."

The second weakness stems from the selection of elite public and private schools. Seaman slips in a comment from a "third-rate" college president who notes that his students are too busy working part-time to get as drunk as the students at the elite schools. Seaman does apply some healthy skepticism to the Harvard "binge drinking" studies, but doesn't really offer useful analysis. What he seems to leave out of the equation is that these elite students have way too much time and money on their hands. The students he profiles come across as spoiled rich kids, chafing under the scourge of the twenty-one year old drinking age. Seaman does note that Hamilton's three-person student life staff from his day has been replaced by a twenty-person professional corps, but he fails to realize that these elite schools have become extended summer camp for some of these students, a pleasant four-year holiday en route to careers on Wall Street. Yes, he does show some evidence that we'd be better off with a lowered age for drinking legally, but that is not the entire solution.

Praising somewhat Middlebury's "quad" living arrangement plans only made me see that this has all been done before. What Middlebury seems to be considering is exactly what my alma mater did thirty-five years ago. Again, the problem is that Seaman and others look to and expect leadership and innovation to come from these elite schools, when there is an even better argument for the opposite: small, troubled, financially stretched schools are more likely to be the most creative.

In the end, there is little about binge drinking or other excessive lifestyles in this book, and there is little here that a student is likely to hide from his or her parents. And, in fact, this may be the most "connected" student cohort we've ever had, given the plethora of technology on campus (again, another topic given some but not much attention here), but connected to what is the real question. Or, perhaps a better question: What are these parents who pay $40,000 a year for this holiday camp really think that their sons and daughters are learning? And do they really care? "Helicopter" parents or not, there are still too many parents who cough up the cash and then act surprised when they find that students slouch sleepily in 2000-seat lecture hall classes, sleep until noon, get arrested for all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors, and never have a conversation with a professor. The disconnection appears to be between parents and well-publicized college realities.

"Binge" may bring back some memories for aging alums and startle some naïve parents, but, like Oakland, there is not much "there" there.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A little long at times but very important book to read, August 29, 2007

By 

Cody Kittle (Greenwich, CT USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You (Paperback)

Having read some of the reviews on this page I felt like I needed to give my take on the book. I'm currently a student at Northwestern and I can say that Seaman's coverage and description of American University life is very accurate and exposing. At times the book is a bit dry and slow moving but overall it flows fairly well.

This book is perfect for prospective college students, their parents, and anyone concerned about policy effecting America's youth. There are serious problems on college campuses especially with drinking.

I read a review titled "Sincere but sadly unsatisfying" saying that the students he covers are "elite students [who] have way too much time and money on their hands." In my experience (mainly from attending national meetings for my fraternity) it doesn't matter whether you are at Dartmouth or South Eastern Mississippi State, there is major binge drinking and excess. Perhaps being an "elite" student makes it worse, but it does not change the underlying reality.

The book is worth reading if you are interested in the subject of how college life functions now a days. It's the best book out on the subject and the most accurate. Pregaming and other social phenomena were not around 30 years ago, this is the kind of thing the book brings to light. But even if you are well aware of the "age of excess" that we live in, "Binge" is still an entertaining and informative read.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Elitist but informative, August 30, 2005

By 

Donna J. D. Duggan "juggan" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You (Hardcover)

My son is a senior at Linfield College this year, so I was interested as to whether the author's observations were in line with his experiences and those of his friends, or at least those I was aware of. On the whole they are. Be aware though that the author's observations were mainly at "top tier" colleges, which I feel really skews the information a bit. There are many kids at these "top tier" colleges, whose parents are footing that fancy tuition bill, who are less interested in the education of a college than the experience of a college. While my observations are that this holds true for most college students (both now and in the olden days) it is dramatically less true when the college kids are footing the bill themselves, or at least helping to foot the bill. My observation (and personal knowledge) is that the disconnections between faculty and students he speaks of, as well as the drinking and drug use, is also less true at smaller colleges, where the faculty frequently is still engaged in personal interactions with students, and where many kids don't have quite as much time on their hands to spend three days in school and four days partying every week. Also, there are a few inherent biases which really pop out at you - especially his references to the good old days of the 18 year old drinking age when the professors went to have a beer with their students, and the joys of fraternity life (Seaman admits to being a frat boy). Although I am well aware that every author has his or her personal biases, I really felt that a more balanced portrayal of these issues would have been helpful. Having said that, I would still recommend this book to parents of college students, and to the faculty and administrators of most colleges. As long as you read it with the author's biases and limitations in mind, it is an interesting account of some of the issues faced by today's colleges and their students.