In all honesty, my first impression of the title given to Penn State in 2009, I wasn’t that surprised. I had heard about the school’s reputation for partying when I was applying and I can’t lie and say that it was a nice bonus to its academic standings. Penn State is infamously known for being a football-oriented school, being one of the largest in the nation, and displaying tremendous pride for being a Nittany Lion, and those are the values that I gravitated to the most. This American Life took it upon themselves to investigate what exactly qualifies a school to assume the role of the number one party school. It began with a “typical Friday night” with students stumbling, carrying on, pulling street signs out of the ground and waking up the Happy Valley residents; one in particular who used to be a part of NPR herself. She gave an inside look to the weekly encounters she experiences with Penn State partiers. My initial reaction to both Ira Glass and Sarah Koeing was considerably judgmental and pretentious. Within the first ten minutes it was concluded that the outrageous actions and crazy experiences could only be found in places like Penn State. Although this argument can be viewed in several different ways, Glass’ choice of words made it seem that his argument was exclusive to PSU, when in actuality any college in the country has the potential to be the number one ranked party school in America. It was said best by the University’s President himself that the voting is done by the students, and the students alone; there is no real adequate form of measurement taken into account, other than college students wanting the opportunity to say “hey, I go to the number one party school!” Despite some of my defensive points to NPR’s argument, I do believe there is a considerable amount of credibility in what they pointed out. Glass and Koeing approached their argument in gradual steps, beginning with silly little examples of the shenanigans that occur around campus, elevates to routy behavior among the fraternities and even some embarrassing drunk dialogue, and finally landing on the most important matter of safety. By doing this I believe they affectively made their point that there is a definite drinking problem on campus without appearing too overwhelming and aggressive. This then raised the question amongst the university leaders on which next step to take, whether it be to wage a war between the students and faculty or a new approach. I believe one of the smartest decisions made by Penn State was to focus on helping and looking after one another rather than pressing for a dry campus, because the statistics show that most of the trouble lies with those moderate drinkers who lack a watchful eye or someone to walk home with.
My overall consensus on the investigation of Penn State’s party school status was that in some respects it was at times very entertaining and hilarious, some situations appalling and embarrassing, but all in all not 100% surprising. It was said by the reporters themselves that when else will we have the time to experience these things, make mistakes and learn from them? I truly believe that improvements can be made in protecting and ensuring the safety of the students, however, this happens all over the country and is not exclusive to Penn State. I just hope that by making an example of our University, people learn a thing or two from it. I definitely know that I have.
