Educational Goals
Thomas C. Reeves, The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

For 14 years, The Princeton Review has been polling students throughout the country to rate, among other things, the top party schools. This year, the winner was the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A perpetual front-runner, the major University of Wisconsin System campus now holds the title.

Madison has been a party town for decades. I have had a few personal experiences with the exuberance of the more-than-40,000-member student body and am aware of how wild things can get. On one occasion, having delivered a paper at the Wisconsin Historical Society, I was kept awake all night by whoops, shouts, and screams from within and outside the hotel. It was February, but the cold weather deterred no one, even the girls out in the street shrieking so loudly they could be heard on the fifth floor.

Madison is a Midwest center for drugs, binge drinking, recreational sex, homosexual pride, and abortion, and therefore it is a leftist favorite. The local newspaper has long been a bastion of the Far Left; the local Congresswoman, who grew up in Madison, is a left-wing lesbian. Leftist Senator and presidential aspirant Russ Feingold is a hit in Madison. The city is routinely rated in fashionable magazines as one of the truly wonderful places to live. Parties are part of the glamour. As in Las Vegas, one may live in Madison as a perpetual adolescent.

Of course, students are officially supposed to be in Madison to study and learn. (The campus offers 8,714 separate courses, and in 2003-04 granted 9,382 diplomas.) This makes the new award awkward for top administrators. Chancellor John Wiley, not daring to deny what goes on, merely criticized “high-risk drinking” and condemned the Princeton pollsters for employing “junk science.” Susan Crowley, director of prevention services at UW-Madison Health Services, said that conditions were actually improving on campus: binge drinking (defined as getting drunk at least one time within a two-week period) had dropped from 67 percent in 1999 to 59 percent in 2004.

The most honest response came from student Jackie Borrelli, a 19-year-old sophomore. She thought the award was well-deserved, exclaiming, “I think people will be proud that we’re number one.” No doubt. Why not a “John Belushi Hell-Raiser of the Year” cup bestowed annually at graduation? Do you think the student body would disapprove? Indeed, the competition would be severe, perhaps especially among the Mass Communications and Sociology majors.

When John Adams went to Harvard in the mid-eighteenth century, he fell in love with books and ideas. He cherished the “gift of an inquiring mind” and “the liberty to think for myself.” Biographer David McCullough writes, “’I read forever,’ [Adams] would remember happily, and as years passed, in an age when educated men took particular pride in the breadth of their reading, he became one of the most voracious readers of any. Having discovered books at Harvard, he was seldom ever to be without one for the rest of his days.” Adams was always a rigorous student, becoming a successful lawyer, widely praised gentleman, and the most important single figure in the creation of American independence. He also became, of course, President of the United States, as did his highly educated son, John Quincy Adams.

Such men of learning and good character neither desired nor earned “party time” reputations and would have been appalled at U.W.-Madison’s new award. But they lived in an earlier, simpler age. We have since progressed.

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