Going Native - Books

By CHARLES MCGRATH - New York Times: "My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student
By Rebekah Nathan
Cornell University Press; hardcover

Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You
By Barrett Seaman
Wiley; hardcover

A MINOR brush fire flared through academe earlier this semester over a slim little volume called "My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student." It's a sort of field report by a professor of anthropology who enrolled undercover at her own university to study the customs and folkways of college students.

The book was published under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan. But even before the first copies came out, reporters got on the story: the author was outed as Cathy A. Small, and what the text calls "AnyU" was revealed to be Northern Arizona University, where most of Ms. Small's dorm-mates were unaware they were being spied upon. Many of the author's colleagues, meanwhile, questioned the ethics of her research, citing what is apparently the first law of ethnography: the anthropologist must never go native. Not that the 52-year-old Ms. Small really succeeded. She was frequently assumed to be some student's mom, and seems to have spent most of her evenings alone in her room - a single - typing her notes.

For a layperson, it's hard to understand the fuss, because "My Freshman Year" is a surprisingly bland book, encumbered by a lot of handwringing over niceties of procedure. It says next to nothing, for example, about sex and drinking among college students, which is a little like writing about the Tongan Islanders (Ms. Small's academic specialty) and neglecting to mention that they hunt and gather. For the most part the book confirms the conclusions of Michael Moffatt, who in 1989 published a study, now famous, of undergraduate life at Rutgers: students don't study very much, sleep more than we imagine and spend most of their waking hours in pursuit of fun - or to use Mr. Moffatt's more rigorous term, "friendly fun." If Ms. Small is right, though, they now cheat more than they used to, and they're more pressed for time, because at her university, at least, so many of them are holding down the equivalent of full-time jobs.

For parents eager for a sense of what their college-age children's lives are really like, this is likely to seem pretty thin stuff, and to confirm their worst fears they may as well turn to "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Tom Wolfe's 2004 campus novel, newly out in paperback, which does not skimp on either the sex or the drinking. Or they could look at "Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You," by Barrett Seaman, a former editor and bureau chief at Time magazine, who employed the old-fashioned journalist's technique of showing up at a campus, notebook in hand, and interviewing people. He's a much livelier writer than Ms. Small, and in many cases he came away with much more information than she did skulking around in disguise. His book has the additional virtue of covering not just one school but 12, ranging from small liberal arts colleges to big state universities.

As it happens, all the schools Mr. Seaman visited were much more selective than Northern Arizona University, so it's instructive that his students don't appear to study any more than hers do. What are they doing instead? Having friendly fun, of course - which these days consists of consuming stupefying amounts of alcohol and then "hooking up" with a member of the opposite sex. But was it ever very different? Looking back on his Harvard class of 1858 in "The Education of Henry Adams," Adams wrote that the amount of drinking that went on was so "fantastic" as to make him doubt the veracity of his recollections. And in his new biography of Edmund Wilson, Lewis Dabney says that Wilson had much the same complaint about Princeton in the years before World War I - "days," Wilson wrote, "of prevalent drunkenness, cheating in examinations, intellectual cowardice and repression, indiscriminate mockery, general ignorance, and the branding as a 'sad bird' of anyone who tried to rise above it." At any point in America's long collegiate history, it seems safe to say, only a tiny percentage of students have been serious scholars, many of them in the hard sciences, which both Ms. Small and Mr. Seaman tend to neglect.

What has changed, both authors suggest, is the way that the faculty no longer exerts much of an influence on most campuses, which seem increasingly to be run by the marketers, the people busily erecting resort-style dorms and state-of-the-art student centers, with climbing walls, batting cages, hot tubs, kayak pools and indoor water slides, to better attract choosy students and their tuition dollars.

But if college in America has never really been about studying, college life nevertheless used to constitute a kind of distinct subculture: there was, for example, the culture of "manliness" and physical prowess that Teddy Roosevelt urged upon universities at the end of the 19th century, which was succeeded by a more general ethos of "character" and character building in the early part of the last century, which was replaced in turn, in the 50's and 60's, with an ideal of insouciant gentility. In one of her shrewder insights, though, Ms. Small points out that college nowadays is simply an extension, a celebration even, of pop culture in general. College is about being young in a very particular way.

And the main subject that college students now master, it turns out, is simply the art of going to college - how to socialize, how to instant-message, how to manage one's time, meet deadlines and sign up for the easiest classes, how to shake mom and dad down for some extra cash and how to "game" the professors, giving them what they want in turn for inflated grades and those all-important recommendations.

Both Ms. Small and Mr. Seaman, who remain stubbornly optimistic about college in America, suggest that there is a certain practical value in all this; it's preparation for life. What they're too polite to say is that most of us who think we had another kind of college experience, who believe that we actually learned something, would if we were honest admit that most of the actual intellectual content of our undergraduate years has long since vanished, leaving only a few half-remembered facts and impressions. What we, too, learned was mostly a code of conduct - how to behave as if we really were educated. "