A unique answer to the perennial question--why do college students
drink so much?
Most American college campuses are home to a vibrant drinking scene
where students frequently get wasted, train-wrecked, obliterated,
hammered, destroyed, and decimated. The terms that university students
most commonly use to describe severe alcohol intoxication share a common
theme: destruction, and even after repeated embarrassing, physically
unpleasant, and even violent drinking episodes, students continue to go
out drinking together. In Getting Wasted, Thomas Vander Ven provides a
unique answer to the perennial question of why college students drink.
Vander Ven argues that college students rely on "drunk support: "
contrary to most accounts of alcohol abuse as being a solitary problem
of one person drinking to excess, the college drinking scene is very
much a social one where students support one another through nights of
drinking games, rituals and rites of passage. Drawing on over 400
student accounts, 25 intensive interviews, and one hundred hours of
field research, Vander Ven sheds light on the extremely social nature of
college drinking. Giving voice to college drinkers as they speak in
graphic and revealing terms about the complexity of the drinking scene,
Vander Ven argues that college students continue to drink heavily, even
after experiencing repeated bad experiences, because of the social
support that they give to one another and due to the creative ways in
which they reframe and recast violent, embarrassing, and regretful
drunken behaviors. Provocatively, Getting Wasted shows that college
itself, closed and seemingly secure, encourages these drinking patterns
and is one more example of the dark side of campus life.
