mfosterftw
9/3/2008, 08:40 AM
The attitude of the former saxeT admin gave me a bit of a chuckle...
'Animal House' at 30: O Bluto, Where Art Thou? - By ERIC HOOVER
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00103.htm
From the issue dated September 5, 2008
A gentleman does not steal horses, spit food across the table, or pee on peoples' shoes. By that definition, John "Bluto" Blutarsky is not a gentleman, but something more extraordinary.
The fictional antihero of National Lampoon's Animal House, Bluto is a slovenly symbol of irreverence, a bloated personification of the id. Bored by the past and future, he lives to party in an endless now. Alas, even icons must turn 30.
Animal House, the most infamous movie ever made about college, first hit theaters in the summer of 1978. Since then it has inspired three decades of big-screen imitations soaked in booze, rebellion, and sophomoric gags. It remains a keg of cultural references.
Thirty, however, is always an ambiguous milestone. Although Animal House continues to shape popular understandings of fraternity life and student culture, the world it caricatured has been transformed.
The law has redefined the traditional relationship between students and colleges. Many administrators see themselves no longer as disciplinarians, but as partners in student "success" and "wellness." Customer care is the new campus creed. Today's students ambitious, competitive, diverse demand all the services they can imagine.
Nonetheless, Bluto abides. He still sways to "Louie, Louie" in higher education's collective unconscious. He still lives on dorm-room walls and on the ubiquitous replicas of his "COLLEGE" shirt, advertising not a place but a state of mind.
"He's a reminder not to take everything too seriously," says E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, who has a framed photograph of Bluto above the couch in his office.
As the patron saint of parties, the toga-wearing buffoon also represents the enduring appeal of raucous bashes in an era of alcohol prevention and risk management. Animal House still reflects a warped, but true, image of higher education's beer-drenched belly. Perhaps that's why people tend to love the movie or curse it.
Indifference is impossible when Bluto (John Belushi) first appears on the screen. We watch him stumble around, dazed and drunk, outside the Delta Tau Chi fraternity house. He relieves himself, then opens the front door for two wide-eyed freshmen.
Inside, mayhem rules. Bottles fly and windows break. A guy drives a motorcycle up the stairs. Goldfish swim inside the see-through breasts of a cut-out mermaid at the bar.
Should we laugh? Cringe? And wait is Bluto drinking from a goblet?
"Come on in," he says. "Grab a brew. Don't cost nothin'."
Out With In Loco Parentis
For anyone who's been locked in the library since 1978, Animal House, directed by John Landis, depicts life at fictional Faber College in 1962. The protagonists are Bluto and his Delta brothers, all misfits with bad grades. They must contend with Dean Vernon Wormer, who yearns to kick them off the campus.
Stern and scheming, Wormer (John Vernon) symbolizes the era of in loco parentis, when colleges and universities stood "in place of the parent," asserting control over students and their affairs. As legal scholars have noted, in loco parentis insulated colleges from litigation. Generally courts gave administrators, like parents, leeway to discipline their charges as they saw fit.
At Faber, Wormer is sheriff, judge, and jury. He boasts of putting the Delta House on "double-secret probation." He spouts off like a mad dictator. "The time has come for someone to put his foot down," he says, "and that foot is me."
In real life, the administrative heel was long free to stomp. Then, in 1961, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided Dixon v. Alabama, a landmark ruling that presaged a new definition of student rights.
The case arose after Alabama State College (now Alabama State University) expelled six black students who had participated in civil-rights demonstrations. In a letter to the students, the college's president wrote that Alabama State had the power to remove them for various offenses, such as "Conduct Prejudicial to the School" or "Insubordination and Insurrection." It was, more or less, double-secret expulsion.
The appellate court deemed such rules unconstitutional. A public college, it said, could not remove students without at least minimal due process, such as a hearing they could attend. "This was the first time a court had ever said anything remotely like that," says Peter F. Lake, a law professor at Stetson University.
Dixon doomed in loco parentis, explains Mr. Lake, who directs the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson. Courts would recast students as adults, or "nonminors," with constitutional rights. Colleges, in turn, would no longer have near-limitless power to govern and punish them.
"Today the very concept of discipline is a relic," Mr. Lake says. "We're in a contractual relationship with students."
In Animal House, the unruly Deltas resist discipline, but their nemeses, in the Omega House, bow to the dean's authority. Privileged and proper, the Omegas cling to tradition. During an arcane initiation ceremony that consecrates "the bond of obedience," an Omega pledge gets on his hands and knees to accept a paddling on the rear. "Thank you, sir," he says after each whack, "may I have another?"
By contrast, the Deltas reject tradition and authority alike. Their own half-hearted initiation rite involves reciting an ad-libbed pledge, then getting a nickname and a beer shower. After Dean Wormer expels them from Faber, they refuse to surrender to the rules. Instead they plan a fantastic act of revenge. "Wormer," Bluto declares, "he's a dead man!"
An 'Uneasy Truce'
C. Arthur Sandeen witnessed the dean's figurative death firsthand. When he began his career in student affairs, at Michigan State University, in 1962, his role as a supervisor was clear. Discipline took much of his time. "It was the expectation for a dean," he says.
The civil-rights era, however, changed the profession just as it changed colleges. Protests flared. Enrollments grew, and campuses became more diverse. In 1971 the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lowered the voting age to 18.
When Animal House arrived, in loco parentis was already a fossil. Still, Mr. Sandeen, then vice president for student affairs at the University of Florida, laughed at Dean Wormer for a reason: "Unfortunately, he reminded some of us of ourselves."
After the fall of in loco parentis, courts repeatedly affirmed that students, as young adults with rights, were beyond the control of colleges. Although such rulings limited colleges' legal liability, they also left administrators unsure of their roles. Where, exactly, did their responsibilities end and student freedoms begin?
The uncertainty left students and college officials in an "uneasy truce," Ernest L. Boyer wrote.
Mr. Boyer, a former U.S. commissioner of education, described the evolution of campus culture in College: The Undergraduate Experience in America (Harper & Row, 1987). As the role of colleges had changed from that of "parent to clinician," he wrote, distance grew between students and administrators: "Students still have almost unlimited freedom in personal and social matters. And yet, administrators are troubled by the limits of their authority, and there is a growing feeling among students that more structure is required."
Mr. Sandeen and his contemporaries helped create a new kind of structure. By the time he retired from Florida, in 2004, student affairs had become a giant umbrella, covering a wide range of offerings academic advising, counseling, career planning, cultural programming, residence-life education, financial assistance, and help for students with disabilities.
"One of the healthiest changes was an increased recognition that there were students with different needs," Mr. Sandeen says. "Students used to fail out of school a lot more. Now there's a much bigger emphasis on retention."
Perhaps Dean Wormer has given way to Dean Coddler. Administrators from other countries, Mr. Sandeen says, now tease their American counterparts about "babying" their students. On the modern campus, Bluto's bad behavior and failing grades surely would cause administrators, staff members, and resident assistants to intervene long before his cumulative average fell anywhere close to the 0.0 he carries at Faber.
Mr. Sandeen believes Animal House, though "inaccurate," contains shreds of truth. He counts himself as a fan of the movie. "It's still funny," he says.
Margaret J. Barr has yet to laugh. In 1978 she was an assistant dean of students at the University of Texas at Austin. One night she and some colleagues went to see Animal House in a packed theater. Afterward they went for coffee. Ms. Barr was steaming.
"Incensed," she says. "I had paid good money to see this movie. I saw no humor in it at all."
The portrayal of Dean Wormer bothered her the most. After all, she believed in the ideals of her profession. Also, she liked students. And she certainly would never steal from their activities fund, as the dean does in the movie.
Years later, as vice president for student affairs at Northwestern University, Ms. Barr usually knew when Animal House had played on the campus toga parties inevitably followed. "It's the only film I ever thought about banning," she says. "It taught them how to misbehave."
When she arrived at Northwestern, she urged fraternities to follow their own risk-management policies. If your policy requires you to have a guest list for parties, she told chapter leaders, then make sure you use a guest list.
At first they looked at her as if she were crazy. The student newspaper said she was trying to ruin social life on the campus. But over time, she says, students accepted more responsibility as they came to understand that she was looking out for them.
On many campuses, students now police their own parties and run their own judicial systems. Some colleges have phased out the title "dean of students." And fraternity leaders work closely with student-affairs staff members, who stand between them and high-ranking administrators.
Ms. Barr, now retired, credits the movie with affirming at least one crucial lesson. "It showed how administrations had to become much better at communicating with students," she says. "You don't just say, Do it because we say so."
Us vs. Them
Animal House presents a campus of absolutes, a conflict between good and evil. Not by accident, the only lecture we hear at Faber concerns Milton's Paradise Lost, the epic poem that recounts Satan's rebellion against Heaven and the Fall of Man an expulsion for the ages.
Professor Dave Jennings (Donald Sutherland) plays the desperate English instructor, who asks, "Was Milton trying to tell us that being bad was more fun than being good?"
For the Deltas, bad is always better. At three crucial moments in the movie, when Dean Wormer appears to have doomed them, they rebel by having fun. After learning about their double-secret probation, they throw the toga party. When the dean revokes their charter, they go on a road trip. After he expels them, they prepare to crash Faber's homecoming parade.
"They're going to nail us anyway," one Delta brother says. "We might as well have a good time."
The recurring premise captures a lingering tension between students and administrators. Nancy E. Tribbensee, general counsel at Arizona State University, believes that Animal House, while entertaining, continues to reinforce an us-versus-them mentality. "This polarization is now so ingrained in the campus culture," she says, "it is difficult to overcome in working together to find meaningful ways to improve the campus environment."
Some student groups have learned that sitting down with administrators can do more to influence campus policies than a dramatic protest can. "Especially with touchy issues, it's important to talk to administrators first," says Irina Alexander, a junior at the University of Maryland at College Park and chapter vice president of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. "You have to show them you that you actually know what you're talking about, and that you're not just partying and being crazy like in Animal House."
Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, recalls watching Animal House on the big screen as a young professor. A studious guy, he had never experienced anything like the movie's wild soirees. "It seemed like a gross exaggeration," he says. "But now I realize that for a lot of students, it's a mild exaggeration."
For instance, students may not have seen a friend chug a bottle of bourbon in seven seconds to cheer himself up, as Bluto does, but most would recognize the behavior.
Kyle A. Pendleton tells students not to just dismiss the movie. He shows the film in the course he teaches on fraternity and sorority leadership on Purdue University's main campus.
Students need to understand how the movie reinforces the stereotype that fraternities are only about "chicks, beer, and hazing," says Mr. Pendleton, Purdue's assistant dean of students and a past president of the Association of Fraternity Advisors. "We do still have problems shown in Animal House, but at least at this point we're admitting them and trying to address them."
He still encounters Blutos, those who join fraternities just to party. Despite their misconceptions, such students often bring enthusiasm to fraternities, he says, and with the right guidance can become mature, valuable members.
And if they resist?
"In today's world," he says, "you're not going to be Bluto for long."
But count Mr. Pendleton among those who see some good in the fictional Deltas. Viewers may remember Delta House as nothing more than a den of depravity, but it also embraces at least some form of diversity. Unlike the όber-exclusive Omegas, who exile minority students and other undesirable visitors to a couch in the corner, the Delta House accepts outcasts, including nerds and fat kids.
"They had issues," Mr. Pendleton says. "But if you boil down the core of the Delta chapter, it's about tight-knit brotherhood. They're a diamond in the rough."
Of the many outrageous moments in Animal House, few seem as far-fetched today as when Dean Wormer strolls, uninvited, through the Delta House front door and threatens to close down the chapter. A credible remake of the movie would omit that scene and replace it with a heated discussion between Faber's general counsel and the Deltas' lawyer.
Part 2 to follow...
'Animal House' at 30: O Bluto, Where Art Thou? - By ERIC HOOVER
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00103.htm
From the issue dated September 5, 2008
A gentleman does not steal horses, spit food across the table, or pee on peoples' shoes. By that definition, John "Bluto" Blutarsky is not a gentleman, but something more extraordinary.
The fictional antihero of National Lampoon's Animal House, Bluto is a slovenly symbol of irreverence, a bloated personification of the id. Bored by the past and future, he lives to party in an endless now. Alas, even icons must turn 30.
Animal House, the most infamous movie ever made about college, first hit theaters in the summer of 1978. Since then it has inspired three decades of big-screen imitations soaked in booze, rebellion, and sophomoric gags. It remains a keg of cultural references.
Thirty, however, is always an ambiguous milestone. Although Animal House continues to shape popular understandings of fraternity life and student culture, the world it caricatured has been transformed.
The law has redefined the traditional relationship between students and colleges. Many administrators see themselves no longer as disciplinarians, but as partners in student "success" and "wellness." Customer care is the new campus creed. Today's students ambitious, competitive, diverse demand all the services they can imagine.
Nonetheless, Bluto abides. He still sways to "Louie, Louie" in higher education's collective unconscious. He still lives on dorm-room walls and on the ubiquitous replicas of his "COLLEGE" shirt, advertising not a place but a state of mind.
"He's a reminder not to take everything too seriously," says E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, who has a framed photograph of Bluto above the couch in his office.
As the patron saint of parties, the toga-wearing buffoon also represents the enduring appeal of raucous bashes in an era of alcohol prevention and risk management. Animal House still reflects a warped, but true, image of higher education's beer-drenched belly. Perhaps that's why people tend to love the movie or curse it.
Indifference is impossible when Bluto (John Belushi) first appears on the screen. We watch him stumble around, dazed and drunk, outside the Delta Tau Chi fraternity house. He relieves himself, then opens the front door for two wide-eyed freshmen.
Inside, mayhem rules. Bottles fly and windows break. A guy drives a motorcycle up the stairs. Goldfish swim inside the see-through breasts of a cut-out mermaid at the bar.
Should we laugh? Cringe? And wait is Bluto drinking from a goblet?
"Come on in," he says. "Grab a brew. Don't cost nothin'."
Out With In Loco Parentis
For anyone who's been locked in the library since 1978, Animal House, directed by John Landis, depicts life at fictional Faber College in 1962. The protagonists are Bluto and his Delta brothers, all misfits with bad grades. They must contend with Dean Vernon Wormer, who yearns to kick them off the campus.
Stern and scheming, Wormer (John Vernon) symbolizes the era of in loco parentis, when colleges and universities stood "in place of the parent," asserting control over students and their affairs. As legal scholars have noted, in loco parentis insulated colleges from litigation. Generally courts gave administrators, like parents, leeway to discipline their charges as they saw fit.
At Faber, Wormer is sheriff, judge, and jury. He boasts of putting the Delta House on "double-secret probation." He spouts off like a mad dictator. "The time has come for someone to put his foot down," he says, "and that foot is me."
In real life, the administrative heel was long free to stomp. Then, in 1961, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided Dixon v. Alabama, a landmark ruling that presaged a new definition of student rights.
The case arose after Alabama State College (now Alabama State University) expelled six black students who had participated in civil-rights demonstrations. In a letter to the students, the college's president wrote that Alabama State had the power to remove them for various offenses, such as "Conduct Prejudicial to the School" or "Insubordination and Insurrection." It was, more or less, double-secret expulsion.
The appellate court deemed such rules unconstitutional. A public college, it said, could not remove students without at least minimal due process, such as a hearing they could attend. "This was the first time a court had ever said anything remotely like that," says Peter F. Lake, a law professor at Stetson University.
Dixon doomed in loco parentis, explains Mr. Lake, who directs the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson. Courts would recast students as adults, or "nonminors," with constitutional rights. Colleges, in turn, would no longer have near-limitless power to govern and punish them.
"Today the very concept of discipline is a relic," Mr. Lake says. "We're in a contractual relationship with students."
In Animal House, the unruly Deltas resist discipline, but their nemeses, in the Omega House, bow to the dean's authority. Privileged and proper, the Omegas cling to tradition. During an arcane initiation ceremony that consecrates "the bond of obedience," an Omega pledge gets on his hands and knees to accept a paddling on the rear. "Thank you, sir," he says after each whack, "may I have another?"
By contrast, the Deltas reject tradition and authority alike. Their own half-hearted initiation rite involves reciting an ad-libbed pledge, then getting a nickname and a beer shower. After Dean Wormer expels them from Faber, they refuse to surrender to the rules. Instead they plan a fantastic act of revenge. "Wormer," Bluto declares, "he's a dead man!"
An 'Uneasy Truce'
C. Arthur Sandeen witnessed the dean's figurative death firsthand. When he began his career in student affairs, at Michigan State University, in 1962, his role as a supervisor was clear. Discipline took much of his time. "It was the expectation for a dean," he says.
The civil-rights era, however, changed the profession just as it changed colleges. Protests flared. Enrollments grew, and campuses became more diverse. In 1971 the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lowered the voting age to 18.
When Animal House arrived, in loco parentis was already a fossil. Still, Mr. Sandeen, then vice president for student affairs at the University of Florida, laughed at Dean Wormer for a reason: "Unfortunately, he reminded some of us of ourselves."
After the fall of in loco parentis, courts repeatedly affirmed that students, as young adults with rights, were beyond the control of colleges. Although such rulings limited colleges' legal liability, they also left administrators unsure of their roles. Where, exactly, did their responsibilities end and student freedoms begin?
The uncertainty left students and college officials in an "uneasy truce," Ernest L. Boyer wrote.
Mr. Boyer, a former U.S. commissioner of education, described the evolution of campus culture in College: The Undergraduate Experience in America (Harper & Row, 1987). As the role of colleges had changed from that of "parent to clinician," he wrote, distance grew between students and administrators: "Students still have almost unlimited freedom in personal and social matters. And yet, administrators are troubled by the limits of their authority, and there is a growing feeling among students that more structure is required."
Mr. Sandeen and his contemporaries helped create a new kind of structure. By the time he retired from Florida, in 2004, student affairs had become a giant umbrella, covering a wide range of offerings academic advising, counseling, career planning, cultural programming, residence-life education, financial assistance, and help for students with disabilities.
"One of the healthiest changes was an increased recognition that there were students with different needs," Mr. Sandeen says. "Students used to fail out of school a lot more. Now there's a much bigger emphasis on retention."
Perhaps Dean Wormer has given way to Dean Coddler. Administrators from other countries, Mr. Sandeen says, now tease their American counterparts about "babying" their students. On the modern campus, Bluto's bad behavior and failing grades surely would cause administrators, staff members, and resident assistants to intervene long before his cumulative average fell anywhere close to the 0.0 he carries at Faber.
Mr. Sandeen believes Animal House, though "inaccurate," contains shreds of truth. He counts himself as a fan of the movie. "It's still funny," he says.
Margaret J. Barr has yet to laugh. In 1978 she was an assistant dean of students at the University of Texas at Austin. One night she and some colleagues went to see Animal House in a packed theater. Afterward they went for coffee. Ms. Barr was steaming.
"Incensed," she says. "I had paid good money to see this movie. I saw no humor in it at all."
The portrayal of Dean Wormer bothered her the most. After all, she believed in the ideals of her profession. Also, she liked students. And she certainly would never steal from their activities fund, as the dean does in the movie.
Years later, as vice president for student affairs at Northwestern University, Ms. Barr usually knew when Animal House had played on the campus toga parties inevitably followed. "It's the only film I ever thought about banning," she says. "It taught them how to misbehave."
When she arrived at Northwestern, she urged fraternities to follow their own risk-management policies. If your policy requires you to have a guest list for parties, she told chapter leaders, then make sure you use a guest list.
At first they looked at her as if she were crazy. The student newspaper said she was trying to ruin social life on the campus. But over time, she says, students accepted more responsibility as they came to understand that she was looking out for them.
On many campuses, students now police their own parties and run their own judicial systems. Some colleges have phased out the title "dean of students." And fraternity leaders work closely with student-affairs staff members, who stand between them and high-ranking administrators.
Ms. Barr, now retired, credits the movie with affirming at least one crucial lesson. "It showed how administrations had to become much better at communicating with students," she says. "You don't just say, Do it because we say so."
Us vs. Them
Animal House presents a campus of absolutes, a conflict between good and evil. Not by accident, the only lecture we hear at Faber concerns Milton's Paradise Lost, the epic poem that recounts Satan's rebellion against Heaven and the Fall of Man an expulsion for the ages.
Professor Dave Jennings (Donald Sutherland) plays the desperate English instructor, who asks, "Was Milton trying to tell us that being bad was more fun than being good?"
For the Deltas, bad is always better. At three crucial moments in the movie, when Dean Wormer appears to have doomed them, they rebel by having fun. After learning about their double-secret probation, they throw the toga party. When the dean revokes their charter, they go on a road trip. After he expels them, they prepare to crash Faber's homecoming parade.
"They're going to nail us anyway," one Delta brother says. "We might as well have a good time."
The recurring premise captures a lingering tension between students and administrators. Nancy E. Tribbensee, general counsel at Arizona State University, believes that Animal House, while entertaining, continues to reinforce an us-versus-them mentality. "This polarization is now so ingrained in the campus culture," she says, "it is difficult to overcome in working together to find meaningful ways to improve the campus environment."
Some student groups have learned that sitting down with administrators can do more to influence campus policies than a dramatic protest can. "Especially with touchy issues, it's important to talk to administrators first," says Irina Alexander, a junior at the University of Maryland at College Park and chapter vice president of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. "You have to show them you that you actually know what you're talking about, and that you're not just partying and being crazy like in Animal House."
Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, recalls watching Animal House on the big screen as a young professor. A studious guy, he had never experienced anything like the movie's wild soirees. "It seemed like a gross exaggeration," he says. "But now I realize that for a lot of students, it's a mild exaggeration."
For instance, students may not have seen a friend chug a bottle of bourbon in seven seconds to cheer himself up, as Bluto does, but most would recognize the behavior.
Kyle A. Pendleton tells students not to just dismiss the movie. He shows the film in the course he teaches on fraternity and sorority leadership on Purdue University's main campus.
Students need to understand how the movie reinforces the stereotype that fraternities are only about "chicks, beer, and hazing," says Mr. Pendleton, Purdue's assistant dean of students and a past president of the Association of Fraternity Advisors. "We do still have problems shown in Animal House, but at least at this point we're admitting them and trying to address them."
He still encounters Blutos, those who join fraternities just to party. Despite their misconceptions, such students often bring enthusiasm to fraternities, he says, and with the right guidance can become mature, valuable members.
And if they resist?
"In today's world," he says, "you're not going to be Bluto for long."
But count Mr. Pendleton among those who see some good in the fictional Deltas. Viewers may remember Delta House as nothing more than a den of depravity, but it also embraces at least some form of diversity. Unlike the όber-exclusive Omegas, who exile minority students and other undesirable visitors to a couch in the corner, the Delta House accepts outcasts, including nerds and fat kids.
"They had issues," Mr. Pendleton says. "But if you boil down the core of the Delta chapter, it's about tight-knit brotherhood. They're a diamond in the rough."
Of the many outrageous moments in Animal House, few seem as far-fetched today as when Dean Wormer strolls, uninvited, through the Delta House front door and threatens to close down the chapter. A credible remake of the movie would omit that scene and replace it with a heated discussion between Faber's general counsel and the Deltas' lawyer.
Part 2 to follow...