Which is the point. Would any parent pay $50,000 a year to send their kid to a place where it was likely, or even possible, they’d pick up a criminal record for smoking pot? Particularly the affluent, powerful influential parents who send their kids to schools like Brown? I sure as hell wouldn’t.
That’s because elite four-year schools are understood by almost everyone involved in them—parents, students, faculty, administrators—as places where young adults act out, experiment, and violate rules in all kinds of ways. And that’s more or less okay, or even more than okay; sometimes it’s encouraged. Rebellion is part of the experience: Oh, the fun we had, the wild hijinks we were up to!
The modern American bourgeoisie has its own institutionalized version of the Rumspringa, which suspends the highly routinized and proscribed behavioral rules of affluent American life so that young adults can purge the wildness from their systems before becoming orderly, boring, and high-achieving professionals.
To borrow the framework of Kelling and Wilson, a fair amount of disorder prevails on a modern college campus. It is, by and large, well hidden, which means there aren’t any actual broken windows (at least not on campus; off-campus housing is another story). But walk into any dorm, and you will find absolute chaos and disorder. And the lives of the citizens of these mini-states are disordered as well, particularly as compared to the lives most of them will lead once they are members of the professional classes.
If you took a lot of this behavior out of the Nation and put it in the Colony—say, out of Harvard Yard and into a big city housing project—it would provide the material for dozens of articles on the pathologies of poverty that hold back poor people of color. People sleep all day; they engage in loud, frequent relationship dramas while having numerous different sexual partners; and they get into drunken arguments and brawls and consume ungodly amounts of controlled substances.
To be fair, these extremely liberal norms of tolerance can have their own negative consequences. In my time at Brown, numerous friends and people in my social circle fell victim to alcoholism and drug addiction, not to mention acute depression.
Booze and pot were omnipresent. But other harder drugs were also around, though they tended to lurk at the edges. Some kind of vague social taboo (combined with expense) kept people from busting out coke or heroin at a party, although at other schools where my friends attended (and which I visited), that taboo definitely did not obtain.
An acquaintance I’ll call E attended such a school, another elite private college in the Northeast, where the attitude toward drugs and alcohol was notoriously and famously lax. “My first year there, there was a new president being inaugurated on the same day as this kind of festival where everyone trips on acid. There was an outdoor space with four hundred kids tripping on acid. You could actually see the president’s inauguration, and the two existed side by side.”
E and his friends started doing more and harder drugs. “You had a lot of eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds with a lot of money. It was crazy the amount of drugs. Out of my group of friends, most of us ended up doing heroin, and one of my best friends died of an overdose a few years out.”
By junior year, E was doing heroin consistently, and after he graduated, he spent six months in New York as an addict with a hundred-dollar-a-day habit. Today he’s a successful father and husband working in education. E’s very clear not to blame anyone else for his addiction, but in retrospect he can’t bring himself to quite endorse his alma mater’s posture of extreme tolerance. “It’s like the worst of progressive education. It was an abdication of your responsibility. I never saw campus police do anything about drugs or the administration or anybody.”
If colleges and universities are relatively permissive on drugs (and obviously that level of tolerance varies widely), it’s because they are for all intents and purposes mini-states, with their very own internal justice systems. Alexandra Brodsky, who co-founded Know Your IX, a student-run anti-violence organization, says there’s a good reason for this. “I’m a big believer in schools handling discipline internally. . . . You have a self-selecting community with its own norms, some ways more permissive [drugs] and in some ways stricter [plagiarism]. . . . The big danger is things being referred to police automatically.”
It’s those community norms that Kelling and Wilson celebrate, but in the case of campuses, the in-groups and out-groups are far clearer than in high-crime neighborhoods. The same goes (to a certain extent) for what those community norms are. A certain amount of wildness is expected, and you might even find some drunkards breaking the occasional window.
WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FIVE, I spent a few months in Madison working for the League of Conservation Voters as a field organizer trying to get John Kerry elected.* I was kindly offered free lodging in the basement of a lovely home on Madison’s west side. I loved the town, with its combination of big university culture and state capital political intrigue. It was charming and livable in every respect, and as summer turned into fall, football season arrived, and the Badgers had a pretty good team that year.