Literature Review #3

Beer and Circus Cheap Beer: The Oxygen of the Greek System

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2. Sperber, Murrey. Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. N.p.: Holt Paperbacks, 2001. Web.
3. Beer and Circus researches the effects of student culture in university life, and argues that universities enable problematic behavior such as binge-drinking and partying in order to sustain money from tuition-paying students. Chapter 14: Cheap Beer focuses particularly on Greek life. Greek life enables binge-drinking through excess partying and shutting down Greek organizations or initiating an alcohol prohibition hurts the university more than it helps.
4. Murray Sperber has experience in universities. He taught in Indiana University in English/American studies, and is a visiting professor of the Cultural Studies of Sport in education program in UC Berkeley. He published seven books so far, with the latest being “Beer and Circus”
5. The Animal House: a famous classic movie that takes place in the 1960’s which glorifies fraternity and party life. This movie is referenced several times due to its influence on university culture and how people view it as the “ideal” life, which contains excessive drinking.

Binge drinking: “average-sized male consuming five or more drinks within a fairly short amount of time, and a female, four drinks” (157)

6. "Yet, radical reform is impossible because fraternities, which have no purpose outside themselves-beyond their own bonding-can survive only by reinforcing their own traditions... particularly their drinking ones" (157)

"Date rape is a nasty part of the school's cost of doing business. It's awful, it's obscene, but it will never end as long as students allow themselves to get drunk out of their heads and end up in locked bedrooms.... Binge drinking is wholly irrational and that's when date rape happens most often" (164)

7. Although this source does not talk about LGBT students, it provides an insight on why fraternities and sororities act the way they do: by explaining drinking culture and the need for acceptance by valuing social life over academics.