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another book in the same genre?
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Topic Started: Mar 13 2014, 08:00 AM (238 Views)
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Quasimodo
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Mar 13 2014, 08:00 AM
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Don't know whether or not this book will be accurate or merely sensational, or a combination of both.
But the overall narrative of "bad boys at college" may be getting a bit of emphasis this year.
- Quote:
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http://www.dartblog.com/
Lohse Frat Book Out in September BY JOSEPH ASCH '79 ON MARCH 13, 2014
Lohse Book.jpgAndrew Lohse ‘12’s long-awaited memoir will come out on September 16. The 288-page book is already available for pre-order on Amazon. Here is the blurb:

An account of sordidness and redemption by the former Dartmouth Sigma Alpha Epsilon member who blew the whistle on the frat’s inhumane hazing practices in a Rolling Stone profile.
Before attending Dartmouth, the worst thing Andrew Lohse had ever done was skip school to attend a John McCain rally. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, he was the typical American honor student: straight-As, on the lacrosse team, president of the Model U.N. He dreamed of following in his grandfather’s footsteps and graduating from the Ivy League. When he arrived at Dartmouth, however, he found not the prestigious college of years past, but a wasteland of privilege and moral entropy. And when he rushed Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the fraternity that inspired the rival house in Animal House, Lohse’s once-perfect life, as well as his goals, began to crumble around him.
Lured by free booze and friendly brothers, Andrew pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and soon his life became a dangerous cycle of binge drinking and public humiliation. From chugging vinegar to swimming in a pool of human waste, Lohse’s pledge class endured cruelty and psychological coercion in the hopes of obtaining a bid. Although Andrew succeeded in joining the fraternity, the pattern of abuse continued—except over time, he became the abuser.
Told by a contemporary Holden Caulfield, this is a shocking exposé of America’s most exclusive institutions and a cautionary tale for modern times.
Dartblog has learned that the book will not include the real names of Dartmouth students or alumni — only pseudonyms will be used. I bet that more than a few SAE alumni are relieved by that fact.
[I wonder if that will also be true of another forthcoming book?]
(snip)
Addendum: Lohse has established himself as the go-to guy for media needing a comment on the Greek system. Here is his quote regarding SAE’s ban on pledge activity on a recent edition of the radio show Marketplace:
“I really think that this pledge ban is semantics and public relations,” says Andrew Lohse, who pledged SAE at Dartmouth in 2009 and is writing a book called Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy. “Before this, this organization said they didn’t allow hazing, and there was a hazing hotline, and all these things… This policy change probably won’t accomplish a lot to actually curb the on-the-ground hazing events.”
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Quasimodo
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Mar 13 2014, 08:11 AM
Post #2
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For a skeptical view of the affair:
- Quote:
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http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Hazing-Dartmouth-and-Animal-House-Part-II
Hazing, Dartmouth, and Animal House, Part II Emily Esfahani Smith · March 30, 2012
So Rolling Stone seriously overbid on this article that they just published about Dartmouth College and hazing, which covers the fratty shenanigans of the serial-complainer and bro-turned-whistle-blower Andrew Lohse (who I wrote about here). To give you a sense of the kind of kid Lohse is, all you have to know is that he is working on a "generational tale" about the "secret violence at the heart of the baptismal rites of the new elite" and that, in a fit of drunken rage, he threw a chair at a female security officer on campus.
As a refresher, Lohse wrote an op-ed condemning his frat--and frats in general--for hazing abuses. Moments after it was published, or something, Rolling Stone must have concluded that there was something like the Duke lacrosse team rape scandal here because they dispatched the same journalist, Janet Reitman, who covered the scandal in Durham up north to Hanover to cover Animal House.
I've known about this article for a few weeks and was actually looking forward to reading about it. Dartmouth makes for good journalism--which is why it was so frustrating to eventually read Reitman's piece, a poorly sourced, dishonest, and flaccid screed. The picture that Reitman paints of Dartmouth is so wildly off the mark that it's actually bewildering. For example, when she's talking about the camping trips all freshman take--an orientation of sorts--before arriving to Dartmouth, she quotes someone who berates them as experiences in which people are "hazed into happiness." If you know anything about Dartmouth at all, you know that these trips and the organization that puts them together--the Dartmouth Outing Club--are about as antithetical to frat and hazing life as you could be.
Another example:
"The fraternities here have a tremendous sense of entitlement – a different entitlement than you find at Harvard or other Ivy League schools," says Michael Bronski, a Dartmouth professor of women's and gender studies.
I'd be curious to know how many Dartmouth fraternity parties Bronski has attended, or for that matter, how many Reitman went to? Considering that he is a professor in the "women's and gender studies" department, oy, and that she never once gave a first-hand account of being inside a frat in her piece, I'm going to venture a guess: exactly none.
Another source Reitman quotes is a female student who claims that "it's depressing coming of age here" at Dartmouth. An alum mentioned in the piece is even more melodramatic: "No one has physically died at Dartmouth, yet, but the system destroys the souls of hundreds of students every year." Oh, please.
What bothers me about this article is not that it paints a fratty picture of Dartmouth College--Animal House did that in a much better way 30 years ago--but that the Dartmouth people quoted in the article come across as so unhappy, which is a far, far cry from the reality on the ground.
Along these lines, Reitman quotes another professor who says: "No matter what your actual 'Dartmouth Experience' is, everyone usually falls in line and says, 'Yes, we all love Dartmouth. It's really a very corporate way of thinking."
I don't know if Reitman just didn't talk to any happy, mainstream Dartmouth students, or if she was selective in the quotes that she used for the piece, because 95 percent of the people I knew on campus loved Dartmouth. The people who didn't love Dartmouth were usually the ones who, like Lohse, self-destructed socially.
(snip)
I wonder why Andrew never depledged during any of this, if he was as haunted by his experiences, as he claims? I guess it's because he wanted to fit in and feared the social backlash from leaving his frat:
His goal, he says, was to raise his station in life as much as his grandfather, a man of humble stock who became a wealthy banker, had done by forging powerful connections. "I read a lot of Fitzgerald before I came to college," Lohse says, "and I guess I wanted to be like that, like a character. I took the idea of creating an identity really seriously. But it wasn't really me. I'm just a regular kid from Nowhere, New Jersey."
In some ways, Dartmouth's own history centers on the concept of identity. Founded in 1769 by a Congregational minister, Eleazar Wheelock, its initial mission was to educate the local Abenaki Indians, a dream that was never realized. Instead, Dartmouth became a college for wealthy white boys who adopted the Indian as their mascot and "Wah-hoo-wah!" as their war cry. They also drank heavily: One cherished facet of the Wheelock myth is that he "tamed" the Indians with New England rum. "It's all a false sense of history," says Lohse. "But it's also very tied into this idea that by going to Dartmouth you're being 'tamed' and civilized and ultimately made into a member of the upper class."
[How many of the same generalizations would be made about Duke? Is the narrative about privilege, entitlement, and wealthy spoiled rich kids just too good to let go of? If one did this much stereotyping about black people eighty years ago, people might have believed anything said about them--even if they were falsely accused of rape.]
(snip)
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Quasimodo
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Mar 13 2014, 08:23 AM
Post #3
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That darn narrative is just sooo... entertaining.
Why give up a good story when it's what the public wants to read?
- Quote:
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http://www.janetreitman.com/articles/sex-and-scandal-at-duke/
Sex and Scandal at Duke
by Janet Reitman
Lacrosse players, sorority and the booze-fueled culture of the never-ending hookup on the nation’s most embattled college campus
On A night in late April, barely a month after the rape allegations that have rocked the campus of Duke University, the brothers of Delta Tau Delta, one of the school’s top fraternities, are having a party at Shooters, a Durham, North Carolina, dive just south of the Duke campus. It’s a Saturday evening, and the men are celebrating spring: a new class of freshly initiated brothers, the imminent end of the school year, warm weather, girls in halter tops. It’s 1.A.M., and everyone’s covered in bubbles.
This is not just any fraternity party it’s a "foam party," a sweaty, alcohol soaked bacchanalia that’s a little like taking an enormous bubble bath with hundreds of strangers. At Duke, where crackdowns on the previously party-hearty on-campus social environment have forced much of the scene off-campus, foam parties are promoted by frats as large, open-to-everyone events, and can either be totally fun or totally gross, depending on how drunk you are.
Tonight, just about everyone is drunk. Tiny soap bubbles that have been shot through a thick rubber hose into a mesh tent outside the bar cling to dozens of dancing kids. For Duke students, Shooters is usually the last stop on the bar-hopping circuit – the place you go when you’re almost too wasted to walk. It’s a grimy spot with an L-shaped bar, some dance platforms, video screens, a few picnic tables and a white alabaster horse that rears on its hind legs under a sign that reads WILD, WILD WEST.
Foam parties are events that beg for people to show up in clothes they don’t care about, and at Shooters everyone has come prepared: The girls, dressed in miniskirts, whip off their shirts to reveal bikini tops; the boys, who’ve come in ratty shorts, remove their shirts and leave them off. Thus attired, they fall into one another, spilling drinks. They make out. A few of them dry hump while doing the grind. There is a metal go-go cage in which a group of Duke girls clad in tiny denim skirts and halters perform a modified pole dance, but no one seems to be watching. Bad techno-rap music pulses, the dance floor throbs. Tom Wolfe, whose novel I Am Charlotte Simmons is set in an orgiastic, booze-drenched version of Duke (given the fictional name Dupont University), couldn’t have thought up a better scene.
(snip)
"Laxers," shrugs my new friend Sarah, a Duke junior who’s taken me to this party. We’re standing a bit away from the action, on a sweltering balcony overlooking the bar. A pretty, tomboyish twenty-one year-old wearing jeans and a T-shirt, Sarah smiles, knowingly. She’s spotted two of her friends, dressed in a shimmery halter top and a white tube dress, respectively, who have made it into the lacrosse team’s inner circle. They beam, throwing their heads back in laughter, and glom onto the players, -whose focus is largely on one another.
This is a coup. "Laxers," as lacrosse players are universally known, tend to be the most desired and most confident guys on campus. They’re fun. And they’re hot. It’s something that frustrates and often baffles other young men, particularly those who’ve had girlfriends stolen by these guys. But women understand. "It’s a BMOC thing," Sarah says. She’s undecided about the rape charges but is much more certain about the boys. "They have it all – you want a part of that," she says.
(snip)
[Compare with the profile of the lax team in the Oct. 2005 issue of Duke Magazine:
Despite their success, Danowski and his fellow lacrosse players are largely unheard of and unheralded on a campus where high-profile sports such as basketball and football dominate the collective sports consciousness. A low recognition factor has its pluses, Danowski says. Small-sport collegiate athletes tend to be grounded by their relative anonymity and more focused on academics and life after the game. "You look at all the good lacrosse schools and you see they're also very good schools. Duke, Georgetown, Princeton. I think the kids who play lacrosse have more of a balance between academics and athletics."]
But why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
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