Barrett Seaman The Garden City PTA invites the community to hear Barrett Seaman, the author of BINGE: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You on

Wednesday, March 24th

7:00 pm

Garden City HS Library

Mr. Seaman’s talk is geared primarily towards 11th and 12th graders and, parents of high school and college students. Please note that the event is free but reservations are required. To reserve your space, email Liz Menges at emenges430@verizon.net.

What’s It Like to Be a College Student Today?

After 30 years as a correspondent and editor for Time Magazine, Barrett Seaman turned his keen journalist’s eye on the culture of America’s residential college campuses. The result of two and a half years of living among students at 12 leading colleges and universities is Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You, an unvarnished look at a generation of young Americans plagued by anxieties, living in a culture steeped in alcohol and disconnected from the adult world around them, yet a generation that is intellectually gifted, ambitious and idealistic.

A long-time trustee of his own alma mater and father of three college-educated daughters, Seaman brings a deep understanding of higher education and a compassion for the young to his analysis of how profoundly college life has changed over the last half century-and of what might be done to improve it. Since the publication of Binge in the summer of 2005, he has been invited to speak to parents’ organizations, high school and college students, student affairs staffs and professional organizations, college boards and industry groups.

Among the specific topics he addresses:

• Binge drinking as the centerpiece of campus social life, how it got that way and how the 21-year-old minimum drinking age has hurt, not helped, the efforts of college administrators to teach responsible use of alcohol

• Date rape as an increasingly likely outcome of the “hanging out and hooking up” practice that has replaced one-on-one dating among young people-especially when alcohol plays such a prominent role

• The disengagement of faculty from students’ lives outside the classroom at our best colleges and universities, the impact of grade inflation and cheating;

• The expanding role of student affairs professionals as the principle connection most students have with adults on campuses, and how it can contribute to the retardation of maturity among 18-to-21-year-olds

• The current status of fraternities and sororities on college campuses

• The widening gap between recruited athletes and other students-even in Ivy League and academically elite small colleges

• What administrators, faculty, students and their parents can do to make the residential college experience better