Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
The Five-Year Party (19 page)
What college officials knew but didn’t tell Jay Wren was that Jason was already in serious trouble. After getting caught up in the college’s binge drinking scene, he was thrown out of his dormitory, Oliver Hall, in the middle of the spring semester. He had been caught twice with alcohol in his room and had refused to participate in an online alcohol education program. When they threw him out of Oliver Hall, the college even prohibited him from visiting his old friends there. They considered him a bad influence and didn’t want him associating with the other students. Forced to find a new place to live, Jason talked with his friends at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, which like most fraternities had a well-earned reputation as a binge drinker’s paradise with parties nearly every night. Jason applied to become a member and was accepted.
A short time later, Jason called his father and admitted he had been kicked out of Oliver Hall but downplayed the violations, saying they amounted to trivial violations like finding a glass in his dorm room and holding a beer for a friend. He said he expected fewer complaints at the fraternity house where he would now live. After that phone call, Jay Wren thought about all he had heard about college fraternity houses and decided it was time to pull his son out of KU before it was too late. It turned out to be the last conversation Jay Wren ever had with his son.
The next week, on March 8, Jay Wren received a call from Kansas police telling him that Jason had been found dead in the fraternity house. Police told him that Jason had gone out to dinner with his new fraternity brothers and drank margaritas by the pitcher. When he returned to the fraternity house, he had ten to twelve beers and drank from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Walking around holding the bottle, Jason bragged that he never got sick when he drank. Shortly after that, he passed out and his brothers took him up to his room and put him to bed. He died sometime during the night, but his body was not discovered until the next afternoon because his brothers thought he was sleeping it off. An autopsy found that, at the time of his death, Jason’s blood alcohol level was 0.362, more than four times the state’s legal limit for intoxication.
“If they (KU) had let us know all of this, we could have sat down with him,” Jay Wren said. “I would have pulled him out of school to get him back here where we could keep an eye on him. We would have made him live at home. . . .”
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“One week of fraternity living killed him,” said Jay Wren. “I feel cheated that the college put up a barrier between my son and us as parents. These kids are not adults at nineteen. They’re not adults at twenty and in some cases they are not even adults at twenty-one. Parents are the ones that care most about them and somehow [college administrators] interpret a law where we’re excluded.”
Jay Wren finally got his son’s disciplinary records a few weeks after Jason’s death, but the college remained steadfast in maintaining that it had done nothing wrong. The death had occurred off campus, out of the college’s control, explained Marlesa Roney, KU’s vice provost for student success. “There is no evidence that parental notification makes any difference,” she told the Associated Press.
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Jay Wren thought that was total hogwash and started a national campaign to force colleges to release disciplinary records to parents.
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Jay Wren thought that was total hogwash and started a national campaign to force colleges to release disciplinary records to parents.
The story caught the attention of Jim Boyle, president of College Parents of America, an advocacy group, who said that although privacy rules differed from college to college, they should err on the side of providing more information, not less. “I believe they should use their interpretation to better inform parents about their son or daughter, and not use (privacy laws) as an excuse to withhold information.”
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But it took the death of another KU student a few weeks later before KU was finally forced to look into its policy of keeping parents in the dark about disciplinary rules. Dalton Eli Hawkins fell off a college building roof while he was drunk. Local newspapers began to question KU’s policy and began asking a lot of very embarrassing questions about how well party schools like KU take care of their students. Finally, in May, two months after Jason’s death, KU announced a new policy. Parents will now be notified about all drinking violations, including underage drinking. But it was too late for Jason Wren, Dalton Hawkins, and the other 1,698 college students who die each year while drunk. Hundreds of other party schools—along with many elite schools—around the country continue to abuse privacy laws by refusing to notify parents of even the most drastic disciplinary violations.
When parents drop their children off on campus at the beginning of freshman year, most don’t realize they are also giving up something else: the personal contact with teachers and administrators that they enjoyed when their children were in high school. Parents who had been encouraged to engage in friendly and helpful chats with teachers and counselors and to share information to help with their children’s problems are simply not ready when party schools slam the door in their faces and refuse to disclose any information about their children.
In high school, when something goes wrong at school, parents are called the same day and informed in detail about the problem and what can be done about it. Parents and teachers meet often to discuss children’s progress and come up with an individual education plan to make the best possible choices to ensure educational success. If Johnny doesn’t show up for school, the principal calls the parents to find out why. If Johnny is sent to detention for not doing his homework, the parents are informed. Working in tandem, parents and educators can keep pretty close tabs on children; although it doesn’t always cure the problems, it nearly always works in the students’ favor.
In college, particularly at party schools, however, the situation is the exact opposite. Parents are deliberately pushed out of the picture. Party school administrators argue that their students, nearly all of whom are over the age of eighteen, are legally adults and should be allowed to make their own decisions. The laws in most states also set eighteen as the age when adolescents become adults. In many cases, like that of Jason Wren, that turns out to be a disastrous assumption. Although a minority of college students are mature enough to make responsible decisions, most of them, left on their own, make incredibly poor and sometimes deadly decisions. They drink themselves into unconsciousness. They have unsafe sex with strangers. They stay up all night and sleep through their classes. They ignore their own safety by taking dangerous risks. They abuse drugs. They take out unnecessary loans or use credit cards to go on spring break in Cancun. Clearly, the majority of party school students still need the kind of direction and guidance they received in high school from parents, teachers, and counselors.
Party school administrators, more than anyone else, are aware of all this immature student behavior, so why don’t they invite parents to help? Although they use the privacy laws as an excuse, the real reason is that party school administrators think of parents as troublemakers who should simply pay the bills and stay out of the way. If parents were more involved in their children’s lives in college, it would create lots of problems for administrators, who often speak of them derogatorily as “helicopter parents,” reluctant to let their children go. Parents would likely question the wisdom of inflating grades, dumbing down classes, moving back the class drop date, and reducing the number of classes required for graduation. Parents would insist the college protect their children from the hazards of campus life, out-of-control binge drinking, and the lax enforcement of rape laws.
When parents call the college to talk with a teacher or a counselor, they are turned away with the same dismissive explanation that Jay Wren received. My faculty handbook warned that it was a “serious violation of federal law” to say anything at all to parents. All calls were to be forwarded to the administration. Parents are never informed of anything that happens to their children on campus, no matter how dangerous it is.
The results have been tragic. College students can be arrested for felonies like assault, arson, or robbery, or be treated for depression and suicide attempts; they can flunk multiple classes, fail to show up for classes for months, and go through the college disciplinary process over and over without a single word being said to parents. Students can be raped, assaulted, or stalked and the parents are never informed. When students exhibit suicidal behaviors, for example, or when they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, elaborate procedures are in place to deal with these problems. Often, multiple counselors and health-care workers are aware of the problems over a period of years. For parents, however, the first notice that anything is wrong is delayed until the college president calls to let them know that their son or daughter is dead.
Colleges use the same process when news reporters show up and request information about campus crimes, average grades, mental health statistics, and other information that the public has a right to know. The excuse that party school administrators use is the same one that Jay Wren received over and over. It’s all because of a federal privacy law called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which administrators call FERPA (pronounced FUR-pa).
What was Congress thinking when it passed such an outrageously irresponsible law as FERPA? The answer, surprisingly, is that the original law was intended to protect parents’ access to student records, not restrict it. The law as originally drawn didn’t apply to college students at all. The intent was to protect parents’ rights to examine all their children’s elementary and secondary school records (including grades, disciplinary records, and assessment tests) so they could be more involved in their children’s educations.
Just before the law was passed in 1974, however, someone noticed that the law could be interpreted to include college students as well, so a last-minute amendment was added specifying that the law applied only to students under the age of eighteen. Once the child became eighteen, the amendment said, access to educational records was limited to the student. This was supposed to protect the privacy of college students from examination by anyone outside the college; no one thought that they might be locking out parental access to the records. It was this last-minute, poorly-thought-out change that caused trouble then and is still causing trouble today.
Because it was so hastily written, the law began causing no end of confusion about what should and should not be made public and to whom even before it went into effect in 1975. The Health, Education, and Welfare Department, which was supposed to enforce the law, had not been able to draw up regulations for the law’s enforcement and there were reports of arguments within the department about how to interpret the law. Those disputes have continued for more than forty years and resulted in a number of battles in federal court over what the law actually means. It was no small matter because the law required HEW to cut federal funding for schools that violated the laws.
During the late 1970s, however, college administrators gradually discovered what a fantastic gift Congress had bestowed upon them. It allowed them to draw a cloak of secrecy over nearly every aspect of their operations. Those annoying parents and those nosy journalists could be safety locked out so the education professionals could do their work in private with no one looking over their shoulders and second-guessing them. Party schools expanded the scope of the law beyond anything anyone had ever imagined by declaring that all of the college’s records were “education records,” not just grades, and access to any of them was denied by the law. Administrators used the law to protect themselves from every kind of inquiry, even requests made under the federal and state freedom of information laws. They stopped sending grade reports to parents. They stopped notifying parents of disciplinary actions, including arrests for felonies. Party schools found they could chase annoying parents like Jay Wren away and not have to deal with their complaints and questions about school policies.
The college judicial boards, some of which were once open to the public, were tightly locked down so no one could find out how many students were disciplined or expelled or even the charges against them. This locked out the press, which used to ask embarrassing questions about what went on inside the college walls. Now, party schools could dismiss reporters’ questions with the catch-all excuse, “Sorry, federal law prevents us from talking about that.” The only time outsiders got a look behind the cloak of invisibility was when students did things that were impossible to cover up, like murder, arson, and suicide.
Over the past forty years, federal courts have ruled repeatedly that party school administrators’ broad interpretation of FERPA was incorrect. It went way beyond what Congress intended, and Congress itself modified the law twice, beginning in the 1990s, to make its intentions more clear. The law, Congress said, did not apply to disciplinary records but to a narrowly defined group of “education records” like grades. To this day, however, colleges continue to use their own, and clearly incorrect, interpretation of the law that nearly everything the college does is secret.
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