Finds: February 8, 2014

At the terrific New Books Network, which offers substantial audio interviews with the authors of new books of intellectual interest, a talk with Karen G. Weiss about her Party School: Crime, Campus, and Community:

http://newbooksinalcoholdrugsintoxicants.com/2014/02/08/karen-g-weiss-party-school-crime-campus-and-community-northeastern-up-2013/

This is such an inportant topic, and Professor Weiss speaks about it so engagingly, that one would hope that the book would come in for extensive media attention, but a Google search doesn't suggest that it has.

At Amazon, Craig Brandon offers an insightful comment:

http://www.amazon.com/Party-School-Campus-Community-Northeastern/product-reviews/1555538193/

Faculty, college administrators, students and people who live around these schools should do themselves a favor and read this well-researched, no holds barred account. Weiss teaches at West Virginia University and the school she writes about is called Party University. Is there a connection? Weiss lays the cards out on the table. Kids go to these schools to party and don't really care if they learn anything or not. And college administrators are aware of this and use it in their promotion materials. If you want to have the time of your life, they say, this is the place!

Students who come to the Party School to study are questioned by the 16 percent of students who are "extreme partiers" with the question: You knew this was a party school. If you didn't want to party, why did you come here? Good question. The non-partiers and residents who live near the party schools pay a heavy price. These 16 percent come to class as infrequently as possible.

Using quotes from student surveys, Weiss described the problem in the students' own words. Very revealing and actually pretty scary when you understand these students are signing for loans in the $28,000 for this party, an amount they will be paying for decades, mortgaging their future to pay for a few years of fun.

An important work, not to be missed!
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Matthew Walther, "Tory Nihilist," on the British historian Maurice Cowling (1926-2005), at The American Conservative:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/tory-nihilist/

I love profiles like this. Although Cowling sounds like an old fart, there is always something irresistibly appealing to me about figures who hold a minor place in intellectual history and who wrote huge books such as Cowling's three-volume Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England. Naturally I want to read those books, although there is always a question of finding the time to do it, and in some cases of getting one's hands on the texts. None of the three volumes of Cowlin's magnum opus is available through Amazon, new or used, for less than $49.44.