Binge
What Your College Student Won't Tell You
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In Binge, Barrett Seaman reveals what every parent, student, and educator needs to know about the college experience. Seaman spent time with students at twelve highly regarded and diverse colleges and universities across North America. During his two years of research, he immersed himself in the lives of the students, often living in their dorms, dining with them, speaking with them on their own terms, and listening to them express their thoughts and feelings. Portraying a campus culture in which today’s best and brightest students grapple with far more than academic challenges, Binge conveys the unprecedented stresses on campus today. While sharing revealing interviews and the often dramatic stories, Seaman explores the complexities of romantic relationships and sexual relations, alcohol and drug use, anxiety and depression, class and racial boundaries, and more. Despite the disturbing trends, Seaman finds reasons for optimism and offers provocative and well-informed suggestions for improving the undergraduate experience. Sometimes alarming, always fascinating, and ultimately hopeful, Binge is an extraordinary investigative work that reveals the realities of higher education today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seaman, a longtime reporter and editor at Time magazine, retired in 2001. A trustee at his alma mater, Hamilton College, since 1989, he became increasingly curious about how the residential college experience had changed since his student years in the 1960s. Choosing 12 colleges, among them Harvard, Berkeley, Duke and Stanford, Seaman spent two years living at colleges and investigating campus life. His findings will be utterly unsurprising to most parents, students, professors and administrators: today's students are overextended, isolated by technology, drink too much, study too little and engage in sexual experimentation that can lead in combination with alcohol and other wrong choices to depression, diseases and even date rape. How do today's residential campuses differ from those of Seaman's day? The author provides no comparisons, yet he seems highly alarmed by the changes he perceives. He is at his best detailing statistics, whether on campus drinking or emotional stresses placed on students; weakest when focusing on the influence of technology (he decries Instant Messaging and multitasking), the impact of sexuality and the conflicts caused by race. Seaman does recognize the need for college administrators and professors to be more engaged in student life/lives; this book is addressed primarily to them.
