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As we noted earlier, yesterday’s edition of USA Today reported the results of a study that claimed to show that — the paper’s words — “College Freshmen Study Booze More Than Books.” In this post we take a look at where that study came from.
USA Today described the study as having been conducted by “William DeJong, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health,” and as having been “sponsored” by Outside the Classroom, “a Boston-based company that offers alcohol-prevention programs to colleges.” It said the study had been presented at the annual meeting of NASPA, a student personnel administrators’ association, and quoted NASPA’s executive director, Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, as expressing “surprise” at the study’s results.
The paper was being less than forthcoming with its readers, however, as the corporate press release from which it took Dungy’s quote demonstrates.
William DeJong is a professor at Boston University, as USA Today reported, but he’s also Director of Program Research and Development for Outside the Classroom (OTC), and it was in that capacity — as an employee of a privately held, for-profit company, that he conducted his “study.”
So where does NASPA come in? Well, OTC has been a sponsor of NASPA since 2001, and NASPA has been touting OTC’s products in press releases since at least 2003. The company is listed as one of NASPA’s six Strategic Partners on the NASPA website — depending on the partnership level OTC has purchased, that status may represent an annual contribution of as much as $100,000 or more.
OTC is paying NASPA to promote its products … and it paid for the chance to present the findings of its study at their conference as well.
The NASPA website lists OTC as one of eight Gold Level Sponsors of its 2009 national conference, with Gold Sponsorship defined as reflecting a donation of $15,000 or more. A partnership benefits chart lists the privileges associated with Gold Sponsorship as including a “brief speaking opportunity at national conference” and an “opportunity to co-present a workshop.”
As it turns out, OTC received far more than just a “brief speaking opportunity” at this year’s conference. It was granted two separate 75-minute workshops: one promoting its Alcohol Prevention Coalition (APC) and another promoting its AlcoholEdu web service. It was given space and time for a four-hour “Meeting of Founding Partners” of the APC, and an OTC employee was one of three panelists on a workshop entitled “Alcohol Prevention Excellence: Successful Strategies from Award-Winning Campuses.” In all, OTC representatives participated in four of NASPA’s ten sessions on campus alcohol issues, and ran at least three of those four. NASPA identified two of OTC’s four sessions as corporate events — as infomercials, in essence.
OTC has an obvious interest in promoting the idea that American college students are drinking to excess — the more the public can be convinced that student drinking is a crisis, the more demand there will be for OTC’s products. And given OTC’s support for NASPA, OTC’s interests in this arena are NASPA’s interests as well.
In the full version of the press release quote that USA Today excerpted, NASPA’s Dungy was quite forthright in linking the study’s findings to a pitch for OTC:
“As student affairs professionals, we view the issue of college drinking as one of the biggest threats to our effectiveness as educators. Our hope is that this new finding will motivate all those within the academy, and even the larger community, to join us as we redouble our efforts to de-emphasize the role of alcohol in college life. Indeed, while comprehensive prevention programming has always been an imperative, it is clearly now more important than ever.“
(Emphasis added.)
There’s nothing illegitimate in Dungy providing this sort of support for a funder, by the way. NASPA is forthright about its relationship with Outside the Classroom, and OTC’s press release — distributed on NASPA letterhead — makes no secret of the ties between the two groups. If journalists (and bloggers) fail to make those connections clear, that’s mostly their failure, not NASPA’s or OTC’s.
As we noted this morning, however, USA Today’s headline (“College Freshmen Study Booze More Than Books”) seriously misrepresented the findings of OTC’s research, and OTC and NASPA do have to take some responsibility for that — their press release was entitled “College Students Spend More Time Drinking Than Studying.” And if OTC’s study was itself flawed, as the evidence suggests it was, NASPA has to take some responsibility for that as well.
More on those two issues in our next post.
The flawed study of college students’ drinking habits that got such an ugly writeup in yesterday’s USA Today was produced in conjunction with NASPA, a professional association of campus student affairs administrators.
The USA Today article described Outside the Classroom, “a Boston-based company that offers alcohol-prevention programs to colleges,” as the study’s sponsor. It said the study’s lead researcher had been “William DeJong, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health.” The study’s findings, it reported, had been presented that day at NASPA’s annual meeting.
The article prominently quoted Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, NASPA’s executive director, as hoping that the study would prompt others to work with her group “as we redouble our efforts to de-emphasize the role of alcohol in college life.”
Here’s what the article didn’t say: Outside the Classroom is a major donor to NASPA. NASPA grants its donors time to make infomercial-style presentations at its conferences. DeJong is an employee of Outside the Classroom, and his “study” is a glorified press release for the company’s products.
USA Today and NASPA are promoting a for-profit educational services company, and they’re arguably doing it by mischaracterizing student culture. In two upcoming posts we’ll explore the relationship between NASPA and Outside the Classroom, and the ways that their partnership may be compromising the interests of America’s students.
Update: Follow-up posts:
Kristen Juras, an assistant professor of law at the University of Montana, doesn’t approve of a sex column that runs in the school’s student newspaper, the Montana Kaimin.
The column, Juras says, is “embarrassingly unprofessional,” and “affects my reputation as a member of the faculty.” She wants the student government’s publications board to create written content guidelines that would ban such material. If they don’t, she intends to take her case to the university’s board of trustees — and, if necessary, the state legislature.
Juras, whose son attends UM, has also sent a letter to the university’s president and the dean of its journalism school asking them to meet with the Kaimin editorial board and ask them to drop the column.
Kaimin editor Bill Oram has no intention of backing down. “We welcome the fight,” he says. “We feel we have a right and a duty to publish potentially controversial material.”
“The Bess Sex Column” has appeared weekly since late January. Its five installments to date can be found here.
March 17 Update: Follow-up post here.
Saturday’s edition of the Eugene, Oregon Register Guard had a great, lengthy editorial on the Oregon Daily Emerald student newspaper strike. Here’s a taste:
Members of the Emerald’s news staff are student journalists, but they’re more than that — they’re journalists, period. The Emerald is not a practice field or a plaything. It’s a real newspaper where people gather, edit and report the news under daily deadline stress and intensifying economic pressures.
[…]
The Emerald still must find a way to break even or better financially. In that respect it faces the same challenges as other newspapers, large and small. The Emerald must find a way to survive, but its long-term prospects have been improved. They’ve improved because the newspaper’s editors, reporters and photographers have ensured that survival will be worth fighting for.
Ron Charles, a senior editor at the Washington Post, has an op-ed in today’s paper (“On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats“) about how much the current generation of college students … well, sucks.
They don’t read great literature, apparently. They don’t read Richard Brautigan. (Really? Richard Brautigan?) They’re not interested enough in books of poetry, or in artsy smutty (published) diaries. And this lack of interest in the printed-and-bound word is the source of their lack of interest in politics.
Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s not clear. The piece is a mess, frankly. Examples:
- Charles doesn’t see any contradiction in quoting a prof who sniffs that today’s college students “do not have any shame about reading inferior texts” and complaining that this generation hasn’t produced its own Jerry Rubin.
- When he wants to know whether there’s any activism on the campus of today, he asks the co-editor of the Kent State literary magazine.
- He grounds his claim that students are politically disengaged by linking to a web essay whose first line is “College freshmen are more politically engaged today than at any point during the last 40 years.”
Charles says this generation isn’t reading, or producing, radical novels or poetry — but most of the radical writers he cites are polemicists. Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, and Malcolm X weren’t writing novels, and Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, and Richard Brautigan weren’t leading revolutions. (If a great political novel emerged from the ferment of the late 1960s, Charles doesn’t mention it.)
The moment that Charles is lamenting is not a moment of radicalism’s ascendance in culture, it’s a moment of counterculture’s ascendance in mass media, and of publishing’s dominance in the media mix. Is Soul On Ice a more incisive critique of American racial politics than The Wire? Was Soul On Ice more read in its heyday than The Wire was watched when it came out a few years ago? Charles doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.
Charles is eager to juxtapose books with the internet, as if books and Twitter are the only two media in existence. But The Autobiography of Malcolm X wasn’t published until after Malcolm’s assassination — Malcolm didn’t get his word out through writing books, he got it out through newspapers and speeches. Abbie Hoffman did write books, but he did it for a simple reason: television and radio didn’t have a place for him, and the internet hadn’t been invented yet.
This is a core truth that passes Charles by — college students read Soul On Ice in the late 1960s because it was their only way to find out what Eldridge Cleaver was all about. They read Anais Nin because she, and writers like her, were their only source of smut. They read Jerry Rubin’s Do It! for the cartoons, and the grainy black-and-white photos of naked hippies, and because there was no way in hell that Rubin was ever going to get a chance to do his schtick on television.
Jon Stewart doesn’t exist in Charles’ conception of today’s college student’s intellectual universe. The millions of hits that political rants past and present are getting on YouTube don’t exist. Barack Obama exists — Charles mentions in passing that he’s a top selling author on American campuses — but as Meredith Sires notes, that fact seems to have left no impression on him.
We are living in an age when political discourse is more open — and more open-ended — than it’s ever been before. We are living in an age of sharply rising youth political engagement, of the production and consumption of tremendous new cultural artifacts, of the redefining of what culture is and who it’s for. But Charles can’t — or won’t — see any of it.
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